We’re Launching STRV.design, What Does That Mean for You?
Well, in a nutshell, more work for us and less roadblocks in the design process for you. But let me explain why we think it's worth it.
STRV.design
/ STRV(dot)design /
a collection of design resources, articles, tutorials and videos created and curated by the design team at STRV.
Why STRV.design?
You've probably noticed we're sharing our work in progress or finished projects more than ever, and we found a pleasing side effect in all of this.
We saw a significant increase in people interested in knowing how we work or what's the secret behind pushing so hard. We've already shared some tips in our Design Insights article series YouTube videos and live during our Designer Meetups. But it seems like it’s still not enough.
People keep reaching out to us. Replying to our articles, asking for more information and advice or even asking us to share some of our internal resources or source files.
So here you go! We're going to give it to you. 😘
Well-organized. Updated. Everything in one place.
You'll be able to learn more from our experience, grow with us and use the same tools we do on a daily basis.
We’re definitely not the first team who does something like this. I bet most of you already know what the design team at Facebook is doing or are familiar with InVision's blog. We’re a big fan of these and want to join the game.
We believe different perspectives and options can even increase the community know-how and give everyone more sources to learn from.
Made by Ourselves
Doing a project like this definitely requires human resources and a little bit of management to keep us in the right direction. However, hiring extra help or dedicated content creators to produce “something interesting” at any cost doesn’t seem like a good idea to us.
Our designers themselves should be in charge of the platform’s destiny. We see this as an internal design team side project where everyone is involved.
Here’s how we can guarantee to keep the site updated:
1. Providing Resources We Already Use
Some of our resources or materials are widely used across our team already. The only thing we need to do is to switch sharing options from private to public. Those files are just laying on our team's cloud drive. But it’s not just that. Since we use those files ourselves, it only proves they are tested in real projects and fit into our general design process.We won’t share some random things created just to catch your attention.
2. Leveraging Our Designers’ Free Time
We all have experienced this situation when working in a team. Sometimes you find yourself without a project for a few hours or a day. Or are waiting for feedback to come. We have a special rule in our team that allows designers to work on side projects in their downtime, including working on new updates for STRV.design. We have a few selected topics we want to focus on, allowing designers to create anything they think others may find useful.
3. Building an Open Platform
We’re starting with an internal approach for now, meaning we’ll only provide content created by our own team. But an idea of having an open platform sounds really interesting to us. We may get to a point of asking other creators to post their own files or materials on our platform. We have only one rule we want to maintain: These files or methods have to be used by our team in order to keep the label: “curated by the STRV Design team”. But calm down; it’s too soon for something like this.
Oh, by the Way, It’s Completely Free!
Selling stuff to fellow designers is definitely not going to be a new revenue stream for our company. Our vision of connecting with the community is different. We don’t want to charge money for a “basic” level of resources, which should be seen as standard in our industry. It’s like creating a starting line for everyone to follow and build upon.
We also want to offer an alternative to buying beautiful, but useless, UI kits which just look pretty but don’t provide any value in the long-term. That’s why we, for example, offer Sketch or XD source files with no visual layer or styling. We want you to use the “industry standard base” but let your creativity take the lead.
To Sum Up
We've already stole about 3 minutes of your day talking about a new one-page website, let’s make it faster and wrap up with a few important things:
- No email sign up required to download files
- No “Pay with a Tweet” or any similar crap
Make sure to…
- Send us a preview of our files in action
- Send us a bug report if you find something broken
- Send us a suggestion about what would you like to see next
