Penny For Your Design Thoughts
Should Designers Think?
In this issue
Collection: UX Agenda
Color: Picular
Inspiration: Animated Verbs
Resource: Fake Clients
Tool: Smart Layout in Sketch 58
Typeface: Leon Sans
Thoughts: Social Desirability Bias
This newsletter was originally sent on 09/02/2019.
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UX Agenda — Collection
A collection of UX conferences, meetups, and workshops from all over the world. You can even add your event for others to find. There’s also this Google Sheet with all the conferences of 2019 that Nuno Cohelo put together some time ago. Pretty nifty — hopefully, he updates it for 2020!
Picular — Color
This tool is like Google, but for colors. It generates primary colors using Google’s image search. If you ever needed the perfect yellow hex code from a banana (apparently #FCCC04), this is the tool for you!
Animated Verbs — Inspiration
This codepen by Ryan Mulligan has verbs animated in CSS to represent what they mean.
Fake Clients — Resource
Practice logo design, graphic design, and other assignments using randomly generated client briefs. The generator gives you short, straightforward summaries that include color, direction, type of business, and even the name of the client. Great for someone looking to practice their visual design skills.
Smart Layout in Sketch 58 — Tool
Sketch is introducing Smart Layout; a feature that allows you to set a direction for Symbols to resize when you change their overrides. This is while keeping the spacing between different layers in that symbol consistent. You can set different layout settings for nested symbols and even groups within symbols. It’s available in Beta, in case you want to start testing it!
Leon Sans — Typeface
Leon Sans is a geometric sans-serif typeface made with code by Jongmin Kim. The font has coordinate values of the drawing points for each type. With the coordinate values, you can create custom shapes, effects, or animations. It allows to change font-weight dynamically and to create custom animations, effects, or shapes in the Canvas element of HTML5. Is this what the future of typography is?
Social Desirability Bias — Thoughts
This bias refers to people’s tendency to answer surveys in a way that they think will reflect positively on them. In self-reports, individuals will often report wrongly on touchy questions to show themselves in the best possible way and to avoid embarrassment. It can take the form of over-reporting good behavior or under-reporting lousy behavior.
Social desirability can also affect user research. It can influence the validity of experimental and survey research findings. Methods such as the use of forced-choice items and proxy subjects can help prevent or decrease social desirability bias.
Research has found that using indirect questions can help reduce the effect of this bias. Direct questions are framed in terms of someone’s own beliefs and opinions, while indirect questions are framed in terms of a third party. So, instead of asking, “What do you think about this product?” it’s better to ask, “How do you predict other people would go about this product?”
It ain’t about how hard ya hit. It’s about how hard you can get hit and keep moving forward. — Rocky Balboa
Hola, I’m Pablo Stanley, a designer who also writes comics. Every week I send this newsletter in an email. I share a list of design-related gems, including inspiring work, cool typefaces, people to follow, articles to read, tools to try, and job opportunities. If you give me your email address, I’ll spam you every Monday with this stuff.
