Velvet Roundup №1
Welcome to our first probably-not-weekly roundup of all the cool stuff that has grabbed our attention. You’ll find interesting articles, links and ideas, and also little updates about what we’ve been up to.
Material of the web
Lets start with a great one. User experience designer Matthias Ott published a well-written and beautifully designed essay about designing for the modern web and being honest to the medium. He convincingly argues that we need to move away from static processes. Rather than making pictures of websites with tools like Photoshop or Sketch, we need to use prototyping — use the web as a material not as a blank canvas.
A prototyping mindset means cultivating transparency and showing your work early to your team, to users — and to clients as well, which can spark excited conversations. A prototyping mindset also means valuing learning over fast results. And it means involving everyone from the beginning and closely working together as a team to dissolve the separation of linear workflows. — Matthias Ott
Read more at Matthias website: Saving Your Web Workflows with Prototyping
How not to design an interface
An analysis about the erroneous Hawaiian missile alert by Nielsen Norman Group.
The takeaway that human error was to blame and the user was at fault for having selected the incorrect option is wrong. Altogether a poorly designed system is to blame. A good UI makes it hard for people to err, and easier to recover from any remaining errors. — Kim Flaherty
Laws of UX
Designer and developer Jon Yablonski put together a beautifully designed small website about different user experience maxims to consider when designing interfaces.
Visit Laws of UX
Design systems
HubSpot (software for marketers) product team wrote an extensive article about their new design language HubSpot Canvas. Describing How, why and what problems they solved with it. Read more about it on their site.
That’s the beauty of building a design system. By deciding on a detail once, you free up your entire product development team to focus on solving actual customer problems.
Movie night
Every once in a while we do a movie night at our place. Previously we have watched Design Disruptors and Charles & Ray Eames: The Architect and the Painter. This Wednesday we watched how Gerhard Steidl makes the best books in the world in How to Make a Book with Steidl. Great stuff 🍿.
Internship that changed the world 😏 🎉 🖖
And finally a humble and beautiful story about how an intern at Apple got the chance to change how our culture communicates by designing the first, original batch of ~500 Apple emojis with her mentor and future friend.
Raymond reused his happy poop swirl as the top of the ice cream cone. Now that you know, bet you’ll never forget. No one else who discovered this little detail did either.
Read more: The Making of Apple’s Emoji: How designing these tiny icons changed my life
Velvet does…
Tartu
- Product + Design Meetup @ Spark Hub where our own Pärtel Vurma, Janno Siimar and Amid Moradganjeh discussed about “Past, present and future of designing for startups”
- Janno did a talk: “Honestly About Internships” to Tartu area Companies and Students. Great internships mean better worker bees in the future. Got to get with the program. Next week, almost the same thing in Tallinn, stay tuned.
Radio
Janno also spoke about how to make charity work beneficial to the company on the radio. Listen the Turundusraadio episode on their website (Estonian).
Education
“Design is way too important to be left to a bunch of designers”
Applying for our internship program Velvet Run has officially ended, but if you hurry up then you can still enter. Go!
Our 4 week crash course on design thinking — Velvet Academy is open for new applicants. Apply before 30.01.2018 on the academy website because design is way too important to be left to a bunch of designers.
