D&T Issue 4 [03-June-2020]
Remote remuneration, Laws of Design, AI products
Hey there! Hope you are doing well this week. I hope you didn’t miss the launch of the Crew Dragon last weekend. Here are some of the interesting links in Design and Technology to go through for the week:
Launch day highlights of the Crew Dragon
The first private launch of astronauts was successful and historically so. They also carried a cute dinosaur along the way.
How remuneration works at Automattic, the legend in Remote Work
Automattic the parent company of Wordpress has been regarded as a highly successful proponent of Remote Working practices for some years now. As of 2019, the company had around 700 employees spread across 62 countries. Here is another piece on an employee’s account of Automattic’s practices and principles. Automattic has always advocated the need for frequent in-person catch-ups as a secret sauce for successful remote work.
8 rule handbook for Mobile Interface Design
Mobile interface design standards keeping getting updated however these 8 principles are a timeless guide with regards to how to set up your fundamentals of mobile design.
Draw objects as designers do and try to win this game : [It’s not easy :| ]
Seen those path lines that bend unmanageable while drawing? Those are Bezier curves are how vector paths are modelled which can be scaled indefinitely. The “Bezier Game” based on the pen tool from illustrator will take you from the basics all the way to proficiency with this essential designer tool.
Laws of UX
A slick product with an absolutely unavoidable list of rules and heuristics around User Experience design.
Colour theory and how it’s implemented
First impressions do matter, and colour has a lot to do with that. This guide on colour theory helps breakdown why and how certain colours work and how some just fall flat.
Oldie but goodie:
Why innovators are off by 9x of the perceived value of their product: HBR
Here’s a piece on some psychological reasonings around the perceived value of a new product, the inherent inertia towards change and why innovators often face disappointment when they launch new stuff. Read about the endowment effect, the bias against change and how the propagates in consumer behavior.
Mayhem, the bug finder employed by the Pentagon
Mayhem is an artificially intelligent cyber defence system that originated out of the 2016 DARPA Cyber Grand Challenge from a team out of Carnegie Mellon University. Mayhem also became a part of Cloudfare’s standard security protocols after it demonstrated a tiny flaw in their otherwise robust systems.
Video calls but without the noise
Co-built by Reddit Cofounder Alexis Ohanian, Around is a neat new way to do video calls. It erases background noise, balances your frame with your head movement and is actually easy to use. The product seems to take video conferencing to a different standard.
You’ll hear again from me next week!
