D&T Issue 2 [20-May-2020]

Remote work, Paper Wireframes, Netflix and The Kawaii style

It’s Wednesday and I am here with the second issue of D&T (and I hope you are holding up well!). I’d love to know how you feel about the content of this weekly piece so we can tweak it further to your advantage. Again, much like with most unsolicited advice in life, you have a choice of opting out of the weekly letter as well.

Here are a few pieces I think you might like to spend some time on!

Remote work and how to go about it: Kyoorius Design

I forgot telling you about our recent piece on Kyoorius about remote work. Canvs has been running fully remote Design teams for the last 4 odd years. Kyoorius decided to do a piece with us to understand what are the nuances of that. Have a look!

News: Fb Opens Shops.

Just out today, Fb opened up Shops for its users. While Shopify initially seemed to be a competitor for this, turns out they are actually working with Fb on this. Shops has however been around in beta for around a year now having garnered mixed responses. Anyhoo, above is Casey Newton from Verge writing about the release for you. Also, here’s Fb’ official note about it.

Tool : Real Life Paper Wireframes

Have you found yourself sketching out UI ideas on paper? Drawing that excuse of a rectangle which we pass off as an android screen, scribbling our way to glory, just to relay a thought? We are all guilty, but hey, as long as you can communicate, right? Well here’s something that’s massively helpful. Lifesize screens on a grid that you can print out!

Insight: Dyson tried making an Electric Car. It didn’t work out.

Dyson, the legendary maker of vacuum cleaners and appliances led by eponymous founder James Dyson, had big plans of launching its own Electric car but that dream wrapped up with a £500m dent to Mr Dyson’s armoury. Above is the original piece which shows the car and the coverage. By the way here is also a super related piece on Wired mag about what really went wrong.

Insight: Soundscapes and the 4 ways sound affects us.

Here’s an old but a gem of a Ted piece by communications expert, Julian Treasure on the 4 ways in which sound affects us and how brands can leverage sound design to build lasting perceptions. We have known the legendary Intel, Nokia, iPhone etc sounds (recently the GPay sound as well). Do you know a sound congruent to your brand’s visual communication can actually amplify the effect by 1100%?

Cute Illustrations that make all our Designs look the same. The Kawaii style.

You know this. You’ve seen this. Do you know we kind-of have a term for this? A huge number of new UIs built today incorporate some version or the other of cute, happy, abstract illustration styles. Is this more minimalism or is this a reflection of larger societal problems that have surfaced in recent times?

Machine intelligence and Design: How Netflix goes through millions of images to customize even a thumbnail for you to click.

This one’s an old favourite of ours. Netflix engineers describe how subtle changes in aspect ratios, contrast, hues, text placement etc on very similar images have massive implications on clickability of show previews.

60 Years of Soviet Design: An almanac

Dive into the beauty of Soviet Design and see the evolution of their products unfold on this super slick website. This is best viewed on Web! Trust me, you’ll bookmark this.

Understanding Contact Tracing: MIT White Paper

We have heard quite a bit in recent times about apps employing Contact Tracing to track the spread of Corona, and we’ve had our doubts about it. Here in this white paper, MIT Media Labs has laid out the landscape of Contact tracing and the various compromises to consider while building new tech in it.

Also:

0 days since doubting carousels.

This is one of those things that feels like a personal attack on everyone. Carousels seem odd. Why should a user keep scrolling to see what you have to offer? Why assume a user’s interest? Well, the short answer is you shouldn’t.

Alright, so that’s that. We typically tend to talk a lot about topics that circle Design, Tech, Artificial Intelligence and Business in their general periphery. If you would want to add to this tell me what more you’d want to know about!