Design Details

By Brian Lovin, Marshall BockTechnology Arts Design

Design Details episodes

February 19, 2020334: Keylines and Scannable Designs
This week, we discuss key lines, design tokens, and how to make your designs look consistent across all devices. We also discuss a compelling new design tool, add some listener follow-up to last week's discussion on self reviews, and discuss the pros and cons of using Sign in with Apple. As always, we share our cool things of the week, this time featuring a retroactive cooking show and a delightful way to enjoy movies a second time through.
Golden Ratio Patrons:
Sisu is looking for a thoughtful and data-savvy designer to help build the next generation of analytics software. You can find out more at sisu.ai. (You might recognize Sisu from our interview with Michie Cao)
Pathrise is an online mentorship program that you land a great UX job. Previous fellows have been placed at Google, IBM, Atlassian and other exciting companies. You can learn more at pathrise.com/details
Latest VIP Patrons:
Huge shoutouts to our latest Very Important Pixels!
Elias
Peter Reaper-Reynolds
Will Vaughan
Sean Kushi
Robert Weisbecker
Dan Wu
Chen Li
Follow-up:
Michael Knepprath left us a new edit on his iTunes review. We love it.
Cody Iddings mentioned the importance of being transparent in self reviews.
Emma Gilbert reminded us that listing your accomplishments is not the same as bragging!
Emma also disagrees about whether or not you can call yourself funny – what's your take?
Tweets:
Ankur Parihar discovered a usability no-no in Apple's podcasts app for iOS.
Lily confirmed our theory that creating a meetup in your area is a great way to meet designers! If you're in SF, check out this meetup for product designers.
Long Long, (a VIP), has been listening for a long time. Thank you!
News:
Play is a new kind of design tool, in beta, that helps you to design iOS apps on your phone. Nuts.
Read the Medium post that describes more of the features and principles behind the tool.
Listener Question:
Sanketh asks "In the recent Design Details episode, you had answered a question about how to make sure a design looks the same on all screen sizes. You mentioned about having a uniform padding from the screen ends. Can you elaborate on this a bit?"
What are design tokens?
"Design tokens are an agnostic way to store variables such as typography, color, and spacing so that your design system can be shared across platforms like iOS, Android, and regular ol’ websites."
Alec Sukoski asks "What are your thoughts on #SigninwithApple? Specifically the fact that users can mask their email address."
Developer page for Sign in with Apple
How to use Sign in with Apple
Cool Things:
After watching Knives Out with Marshall, Brian shared the concept of director commentaries. Yes.
Rian Johnson creates Theater Commentaries so that you can re-watch a movie in theaters and get his insider notes.
Marshall shared Good Eats: Reloaded, a show in which its original creator, Alton Brown, revises and updates old episodes in the series.
Alton was also on Hot Ones and holds his own.
Design Details on the Web:
📻 We are @designdetailsfm
🎙 Brian is @brian_lovin and [email protected]
🎙 Marshall is @marshallbock and [email protected]
🙌 Support us on Patreon - your support literally makes this show possible. Thank you ❤️
❓ Got a question? Ask it on our Listener Questions Hub, and we'll do our best to answer it on the show :)
⭐️ Enjoying the show? Leave us a review on iTunes
BYEEEEEE! (The Classic)
40 min
February 12, 2020333: Writing an Effective Self Review
This week, we discuss the ins-and-outs of writing an effective self review: What should you talk about? How important is it? What does a bad self review look like? As always, we share our cool things of the week, this time including a new provider for Marshall's favorite esport, and a movie that is "cool" or...something.
Golden Ratio Patrons:
Sisu is looking for a thoughtful and data-savvy designer to help build the next generation of analytics software. You can find out more at sisu.ai. (You might recognize Sisu from our interview with Michie Cao)
Pathrise is an online mentorship program that you land a great UX job. Previous fellows have been placed at Google, IBM, Atlassian and other exciting companies. You can learn more at pathrise.com/details
Latest VIP Patrons:
Huge shoutouts to our latest Very Important Pixels!
Loukas Papantoniou
Wan Jung Hung
Ryan Koble
Billy Purdy
Michael Fitzgerald
Follow-up:
We don't hate XD, we just don't know how to use it!
Cal Rowston shared a very bad side effect of using the internet: every tiny thing you do has the potential to turn up in a background check.
Tweets:
Mukul Agarwal asked about how to specify responsiveness during developer handoff.
Big Al(ison) uses Design Details to keep company - that makes our day!
Samuel Bernhardt expects some juicy followup about the latest Figma Auto Layout updates. Tl;dr: things are better, but not perfect.
Sahil Chaturvedi can't stop thinking about how good Parasite is. Us too!
Krishan has a theory about why we're seeing more tweets to @designdetailsfm, and it makes a lot of sense 🤔 It might have something to do with what we said in our 2020 resolutions episode.
News:
Figma Auto Layout added certain constraint support. It's a big win, but still not perfect. Either way, we're happy!
Marshall also has a challenge for you!
Figma's first conference, Config (aka figCon Copyright© 2020 Marshall Bock) was a lot of fun. If you have a chance to go in the future, we recommend it.
Listener Question:
Kevin Gutowski asks: "What do you think of self assessments? Do you do them at your current job? How often do you do them? What do they look like? What are some of the questions that you answer? Are they a part of how you can get a raise? What makes a good assessment experience or a bad one? I wanna know the deets so I can compare notes."
We talked about performance reviews in episode 279 over one year ago.
Brian has also tweeted about self reviews with his framework for writing them.
Cool Things:
Brian shared 6 Underground, a not-that-great movie that he lasted 20 minutes watching. How far will you make it?
Joel Califa + replies felt similar.
Marshall shared that Overwatch League is headed to YouTube Gaming! The new season has started, and YouTube's live features allow for DVR-like rewind and pause, making it much easier to keep up with the games.
Design Details on the Web:
📻 We are @designdetailsfm
🎙 Brian is @brian_lovin and [email protected]
🎙 Marshall is @marshallbock and [email protected]
🙌 Support us on Patreon - your support literally makes this show possible. Thank you ❤️
❓ Got a question? Ask it on our Listener Questions Hub, and we'll do our best to answer it on the show :)
⭐️ Enjoying the show? Leave us a review on iTunes
BYE BYE, BRIAN
37 min
February 05, 2020332: Creating layouts: Design vs Implementation
This week, we get deep into the weeds on creating layouts with Sketch's Smart Layout and Figma's Auto Layout, and compare the experience with implementing layouts in CSS and SwiftUI. This is a detailed exploration at the pros and cons of each toolset, and we try to find takeaways that can help us reconcile the wildly different mental models for each. As always, we share our cool things of this week including a content-blocking Safari extension and a novel about a cyberpunk future in which a trailer park girl and her cat decide the fate of humankind.
Golden Ratio Patrons:
Sisu is looking for a thoughtful and data-savvy designer to help build the next generation of analytics software. You can find out more at sisu.ai. (You might recognize Sisu from our interview with Michie Cao)
Pathrise is an online mentorship program that you land a great UX job. Previous fellows have been placed at Google, IBM, Atlassian and other exciting companies.You can learn more at pathrise.com/details
Latest VIP Patrons:
Huge shoutouts to our latest Very Important Pixels!
Kati Presley
Jan Früchtl
Ying Yao
Ruby Chen
Kevin Haag
Austin Robinson
Scott Foltz
Elise Alix
Danielle Shepherd
Mike Jongbloet
Joseph Flynn
Priscilla Then
Follow-up:
We reached our Patreon milestone of 128 supporters! This means we're kicking off the process of making Design Details merchandise. We need to figure out what we should make first, but we're leaning towards a torso-covering device of some kind, or perhaps a mug.
Ya'll helped us discover a great solitaire app, Solitaere. It's about 95% of what Marshall needs, but still might not be enough to stop Marshall from building his own.
Something seems to have happened recently where we suddenly feel inundated with tweets and DMs from everyone – it's so fun! We are reading everything, and will do our best to reply to as much as possible.
Tweets:
Kayla Brianne mentioned that our intros and followup sections can drag on a bit. We're going to be splitting up our chapters so that Tweets and Followup are discrete chapters.
Austin Robinson is baffled at how natural the show sounds, despite how much editing we do.
Andrew Mason recommend that we use Descript for future editing – we've both given it a brief try, but will continue exploring if it can make our editing process better.
Michael MacLeod also knows what an "um" looks like.
Udie Chima agreed about the anxiety that can often come up when last minute changes come in while building a problem. It's not just you!
Kevin Haag came in hot as our 128th Patreon supporter. Ruby Chen was 127! Jason Jun was number 100 – a round number for normal people, but not for us!
Industry Talk:
Sketch and Figma
Sketch Smart Layout is powerful and flexible, but comes with tradeoffs of high setup time, and requires the use of symbols to add smart layout.
Figma Auto Layout feels underpowered, but is a step in the right direction. The biggest miss is the lack of constraints support, but the flexibility of being able to add auto layout to any frame, not just components, makes it very fast to create lockups.
Both tools are relatively new, and have come a long way. We're ultimately happy with the few sets of use cases where Smart Layout and Auto Layout can save a designer a lot of time creating mocks. But we're concerned that both tools are built with entirely different mental models than code, making it challenging to move between design and development.
CSS and SwiftUI
CSS is ridiculously flexible. This flexibility, unfortunately, means that developers get very few things for free. It takes a lot of built-up knowledge to understand the many ways to wrangle CSS into making something that is visually pleasing, accessible, and fast.
SwiftUI is brand new and unfinished, leaving a lot of gaps in the toolset and documentation. That said, the primitives and opinionated defaults are incredibly simple, but allow for the creation of wildly complex application layouts.
Ultimately, both SwiftUI and CSS are designed to provide designers and developers with a structured set of primitives that will allow for the creation of complex and dynamic user interfaces. These primitives come with a mental model is is dramatically different from what is given to designers in Figma and Sketch.
Cool Things:
Marshall shared Futuristic Violence and Fancy Suits by David Wong (who also wrote John Dies at the End), is a book about a girl who lives in a trailer park gets caught up in a whirlwind of trouble when her billionaire relative dies and leaves her with all of the money.
Brian shared Better, a content blocker for Safari that works on both Mac and iOS. It's a browser extension that prevents ads and malicious tracking from being active on the websites you visit.
Design Details on the Web:
📻 We are @designdetailsfm
🎙 Brian is @brian_lovin and [email protected]
🎙 Marshall is @marshallbock and [email protected]
🙌 Support us on Patreon - your support literally makes this show possible. Thank you ❤️
❓ Got a question? Ask it on our Listener Questions Hub, and we'll do our best to answer it on the show :)
⭐️ Enjoying the show? Leave us a review on iTunes
BYE BYE.
1 hr 18 min
January 29, 2020331: The Designer-Developer Handoff
This week, we answer two listener questions about designer-developer handoff. We dig into questions like: What does a good developer handoff look like? What information should it contain? What are systems to make the handoff more efficient for everyone involved? As always, we share our cool finds of the week, this time including a return of the 6-second video format and a useful language learning app.
Golden Ratio Patrons:
Sisu is looking for a thoughtful and data-savvy designer to help build the next generation of analytics software. You can find out more at sisu.ai. (You might recognize Sisu from our interview with Michie Cao)
Flywheel is a delightfully designed managed WordPress hosting platform, thoughtfully built for busy creatives. Streamline your workflow with their slick platform and sweet set of workflow tools perfectly made for designers! Get started at getflywheel.com/designdetails
Pathrise is an online mentorship program that you land a great UX job. Previous fellows have been placed at Google, IBM, Atlassian and other exciting companies.You can learn more at pathrise.com/details
Latest VIP Patrons:
Huge shoutouts to our latest Very Important Pixels!
Rex Shi
Joe Thomas
Seth Richardson, with a tweet, too!
James Morgan
Alisa B
Sergio Rovira
Geetha Kardahally
Follow-up:
We are very close to 128 patrons on our Patreon, the milestone needed for us to start making march!
Evangeline Ng shared that our last episode on Twitter Tips was useful, and has been surprised at how welcoming the community is. We agree!
Craig Van Wiechen tweeted about the Twitter Tips episode, noting the importance of positivity as well.
Michael Woodruff is holding our chapter marker naming standards to the highest level.
We heard back from Carly Batson, the question asker from episode 330: "I'm still trying to get comfortable with contributing, as I'm more of an observer... but your tips about positivity and consistency were great. Thanks again!"
Marshall shared some behind the scenes of just how much work goes into editing this podcast. Spoiler: it's a lot!
Listener Questions:
Michelle Lamond asks: Could you go over the details of design documentation and developer hand-off?
Eric Gendreau asks, similarly: "What are some best practices for handing off interaction design specs to developers?"
Our notes on developer handoff:
We're both over manual redlining. Instead, we give our teams access to source files (usually Figma), and teach engineers the right ways to measure distances, get variable names, and navigate the file.
Educating engineers about the underlying design systems and its core rules (measurement system, color naming patterns, etc.) is a high-leverage use of your time as a designer.
Have thorough specs for individual components, covering all of their variants and states. With the individual building blocks implemented properly, composed UIs will be much faster to communicate and build.
Don't be afraid to say "I don't know, but I'll find out" when posed with a question from your cross functional peers.
Do your best to meet your engineering team halfway: learn the tools, vocabulary, and constraints.
Cool Things:
Marshall is very excited about Vine 2.0, aka byte. This is the reincarnation of the 6-second looping video mechanic, with a wonderful design and clear interface.
Brian has been ramping up on learning Chinese with Hello Chinese, as part of his 2020 goals. The app has been super intuitive, and provides several useful exercise types to make learning easier.
Design Details on the Web:
📻 We are @designdetailsfm
🎙 Brian is @brian_lovin and [email protected]
🎙 Marshall is @marshallbock and [email protected]
🙌 Support us on Patreon - your support literally makes this show possible. Thank you ❤️
❓ Got a question? Ask it on our Listener Questions Hub, and we'll do our best to answer it on the show :)
⭐️ Enjoying the show? Leave us a review on iTunes
BYEEEEE!
36 min
January 22, 2020330: Twitter Tips for Designers
This week, we talk about how to be meaningfully involved with the design community on Twitter. We share tips for finding people to follow, what to tweet about, and we dig into the value of building online connections with other designers. As always, we share our cool things for the week, including some futuristic-yet-spooky technology emerging in China, and a top-notch film production company.
Golden Ratio Patrons:
Sisu is looking for a thoughtful and data-savvy designer to help build the next generation of analytics software. You can find out more at sisu.ai. (You might recognize Sisu from our interview with Michie Cao)
Flywheel is a delightfully designed managed WordPress hosting platform, thoughtfully built for busy creatives. Streamline your workflow with their slick platform and sweet set of workflow tools perfectly made for designers! Get started at getflywheel.com/designdetails
Pathrise is an online mentorship program that you land a great UX job. Previous fellows have been placed at Google, IBM, Atlassian and other exciting companies.You can learn more at pathrise.com/details
Latest VIP Patrons:
Huge shoutouts to our latest Very Important Pixels!
Arjun Mahesh
Ankur Priyadarshi Chauhan
Martin M.
Thiago Valadares Noleto Damasceno
Julius
Guilherme Nogales
Carly Batson
Grace Lee
Dániel Góré
George Thayamkery
Shogo Tsuruda
Claire Jardin
Follow-up:
We are getting close to 128 Patreon supporters, at which point we'll start getting back into the Design Details merch game!
Ladies That UX ATL gave us a shoutout as one of their favorite things from 2019 ❤️
Michael Woodruff gave us some feedback about chapter markers on the show, inspired by the great organization on the Layout podcast.
Manny has a pro-tip for staying on top of your goals: spend that $$$.
Adam Carroll is also a huge fan of Mr. Robot. This is the correct opinion.
Sam Mason is excited for Design Details crewnecks! So are we 🙃
Listener Questions:
Carly Batson asks:
Hi Marshall & Brian! I love the podcast and finally today after listening to one of the episodes I caved and set up a Twitter. Two questions I’d love for you to answer:
How is the best way to get involved with the UX community on Twitter and
I’m a remote designer and have a hard time leveraging connections because I don’t have any designers nearby. How can I use social media to connect with other designers?
Some of our notes:
Reply earnestly and engage in conversations consistently
Don't automate your tweets – stay authentic
Stay positive – the negative conversations and hot takes are so fun, but are ultimately counter-productive
Use a consistent and friendly profile photo
Learn in public, share openly, ask questions
Organize a community in your city
Juan Arreguin helped do this with Marshall in Chicago
Cool Things:
Brian shared a travel update (following up on episode 265, Travel Edition, with tech notes from China:
Embedded illuminated crossing signals in south China
Face payments for the metro
The Secretive Company That Might End Privacy as We Know It
Your Apps Know Where You Were Last Night, and They’re Not Keeping It Secret
AliPay "smile to pay"
Marshall shared the filmography of A24, including: Springbreakers, Under the Skin, Amy, A Most Violent Year, Green Room, Ex Machina, The Lobster, Room, Swiss Army Man, The Vvitch, The Disaster Artist, The Florida Project, The Last Black Man in San Francisco, Moonlight, A Ghost Story, Killing of a Sacred Deer, It Comes at Night, Mid90s, Eighth Grade, Midsommar, The Lighthouse
Brian also mentioned Letterboxd, a helpful app to track movies you've seen or maintain a watchlist.
Patrick H. Willems is a nice person to start following for good reviews and recommendations.
Design Details on the Web:
📻 We are @designdetailsfm
🎙 Brian is @brian_lovin and [email protected]
🎙 Marshall is @marshallbock and [email protected]
🙌 Support us on Patreon - your support literally makes this show possible. Thank you ❤️
❓ Got a question? Ask it on our Listener Questions Hub, and we'll do our best to answer it on the show :)
⭐️ Enjoying the show? Leave us a review on iTunes
BYEEEEE!
47 min
January 15, 2020329: Web vs Product Design
This week, we dig into a three-part listener question about the difference between web and product design, collaborating with print designers, and what it takes to become a unicorn in 2020. As always, we share our cool things of the week, like a subreddit that will make you cry and a website that lets you edit its design.
Golden Ratio Patrons:
Flywheel is a delightfully designed managed WordPress hosting platform, thoughtfully built for busy creatives. Streamline your workflow with their slick platform and sweet set of workflow tools perfectly made for designers! Get started at getflywheel.com/designdetails
Sisu is looking for a thoughtful and data-savvy designer to help build the next generation of analytics software. You can find out more at sisu.ai. (You might recognize Sisu from our interview with Michie Cao)
Pathrise is an online mentorship program that you land a great UX job. Previous fellows have been placed at Google, IBM, Atlassian and other exciting companies.You can learn more at pathrise.com/details
Latest VIP Patrons:
Huge shoutouts to our latest members!
Kevin Gutowski
Michael Powers
Ollie Taylor
Jason Jun
Gunnar Gray
Damien Menard-Oxman
Jonathan Prozzi
Patrick Marx
Follow-up:
We are moving all show production in-house, meaning Marshall and Brian will be mastering, editing, and publishing all episodes going forward. Thank you so much to Drew Luper and Sarah Marie for making us sound smarter than we are for so many years of collaboration!
Last week we neglected to mention any 2020 goals for Design Details. Here are a few key goals:
Cross 128 patrons on Patreon and make custom merch.
Experiment with written posts as a companion to the podcast.
Release a monthly Bonusland episode.
Continue to move more content and show infrastructure to https://designdetails.fm.
Brian announced his plans to learn Chinese in 2020, and some of you recommend the following resources:
The Pimsleur Method
Hello Chinese
Michelle Lu shouted out Inter and Copilot!
Brian and Marshall each have an early access code for Copilot! DM us on Twitter, and the first person will get the code.
Just a reminder, if you have any questions or feedback for us to discuss in future episodes, open an issue on our Design Details repository!
Listener Question:
Drew Clements asks:
I’ve been working as a designer for a few years. I’ve done some web design projects but never any true product design. Is there a separation between a web and product designer and if so, what are those separations and what would I need to study up on to transition to product design?
I work with a team of traditionally print designers and, while they’re good at what they’re trained in, their ideas don’t always transfer to the web very well. What’s the best way to have them drop some of their print antics for web projects?
I’m a designer first whose learning to code. How competent do I have to be at each before I become the coveted unicorn? 🦄 Or, should I just pick one and stick to it?
Cool Things:
Marshall shared /r/happycryingdads, a subreddit sharing wholesome videos of dads happy-crying. Seeing dads cry makes Marshall cry, so this is a goldmine of tear-jerkers.
Brian shared cloudflare.design, a neat website that allows you to customize the layout and design, and then publish those changes back to the live website for the rest of the world to see.
Design Details on the Web:
📻 We are @designdetailsfm
🎙 Brian is @brian_lovin and [email protected]
🎙 Marshall is @marshallbock and [email protected]
🙌 Support us on Patreon - your support literally makes this show possible. Thank you ❤️
❓ Got a question? Ask it on our Listener Questions Hub, and we'll do our best to answer it on the show :)
⭐️ Enjoying the show? Leave us a review on iTunes
GOODBYEEEEE!
45 min
January 08, 2020328: Thinking About 2020
In this first episode of the new decade, we look ahead to 2020 and enumerate some personal and professional goals for the year to come. And as always, we share some cool things (this week, with the help of a listener!), including an IRL magazine, a couple grumpy websites, and the final season of a show.
Golden Ratio Patrons:
Flywheel is a delightfully designed managed WordPress hosting platform, thoughtfully built for busy creatives. Streamline your workflow with their slick platform and sweet set of workflow tools perfectly made for designers! Get started at getflywheel.com/designdetails
Sisu is looking for a thoughtful and data-savvy designer to help build the next generation of analytics software. You can find out more at sisu.ai. (You might recognize Sisu from our interview with Michie Cao)
Pathrise is an online mentorship program that you land a great UX job. Previous fellows have been placed at Google, IBM, Atlassian and other exciting companies.You can learn more at pathrise.com/details
Latest VIP Patrons:
Huge shoutouts to our latest members!
Simon Madsen
Daniel Maniés
Sam Chang
Julia Purcell
Kyle Kochanek
Isa Simó
Richard Sison
Jack Reis
Follow-up:
Marshall chilled this break, and watched a bunch of shows and read some books:
[Watchmen](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Watchmen_(TV_series)
[The Boys](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Boys_(2019_TV_series)
Mr. Robot
[Unbelievable](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unbelievable_(miniseries)
[Alone](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alone_(TV_series)
Once Upon a Time... in Hollywood
[Mission Impossible series](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mission:Impossible(film_series)
Expeditionary Force
PocketCasts shipped some great new features, highlighting the deletion of Design Details – oop!
The Mishalorian is a vacuum cleaner for design files. Us, too!
Paweł Ludwiczak asked about keeping design systems separated by platform.
Listener Question:
Zack Aronson asks: "Thinking about my 2020:Q1 career goals and not sure where to start. I have 9 years of professional experience as a product designer and currently an IC at Venmo. Any thoughts? Inspiration? Words of wisdom? I thought you gents could help!"
Marshall set some goals for this year:
Ship an app with SwiftUI
Update my personal site
Make good progress on my screenplay
Get a promotion at work
Return to Tokyo
Overhaul my wardrobe and shoes
Stop biting my nails
Work out more
Brian also set some goals (and also wrote more details about them, here):
Visit new country
Learn conversational Chinese
Software side project that generates revenue
Learn a new programming language - Brian already started with a small personal utility app for bookmarking favorite links! See the thread of the app getting built.
Write monthly on the new https://brianlovin.com/overthought
Gain 14lbs
Cool Things:
Cameron Campbell shared Offscreen Magazine, an independent print magazine that examines how we shape technology and how technology shapes us.
Brian shared MacOS Design Review and grumpy.website, two mini-series websites cataloging the annoying and buggy parts of modern software design. It's like Little Big Details, but for bad things. grumpy.website is maintained by Nikita, who also blogs about the current state of software design
Marshall shared Mr. Robot Season 4: "the ending is fucking perfect." What more could you ask for? Don't do too much research, go in blind, and enjoy.
Design Details on the Web:
📻 We are @designdetailsfm
🎙 Brian is @brian_lovin and [email protected]
🎙 Marshall is @marshallbock and [email protected]
🎚@Sarahberus and @Luperdev make us sound smarter than we are
🙌 Support us on Patreon - your support literally makes this show possible. Thank you ❤️
❓ Got a question? Ask it on our Listener Questions Hub, and we'll do our best to answer it on the show :)
⭐️ Enjoying the show? Leave us a review on iTunes
HAPPY NEW YEAR!
47 min
December 18, 2019327: Organizing Component Systems
In this week's episode, we follow up on a bunch of your tweets, and then we get super semantic about naming conventions and component organization. And as always, we share a couple cool things like a vehicle upgrade and a feed reader.
Golden Ratio Patrons:
Flywheel is a delightfully designed managed WordPress hosting platform, thoughtfully built for busy creatives. Streamline your workflow with their slick platform and sweet set of workflow tools perfectly made for designers! Get started at getflywheel.com/designdetails
Sisu is looking for a thoughtful and data-savvy designer to help build the next generation of analytics software. You can find out more at sisu.ai. (You might recognize Sisu from our interview with Michie Cao)
Latest VIP Patrons:
Huge shoutouts to our latest members!
Aaron Heine
Chris Martin
Greg Wilkinson
Lauren Chilcote
Lauren Mosenthal
Tt_55
Follow-up:
Mukul Agarwal sent in a fantastic recommendation for a podcast episode: Rock the Voter from Your Undivided Attention.
Danny Haagen asked about the difference between a design system and a design language, we took a stab at answering.
Stuart Favretto solved last week's challenge about building a table cell with a dynamic inset bottom separator using Figma's Auto Layout!
Greg Wilkinson joins team #FuckShelledPistachios
Will Vaughan was surprised that we didn't mention Axure in last week's episode about design tools. We had no idea! But: that typo on the homepage 😬. We also discuss whether design tools should have aspirational marketing pages.
We wooed Morgan VanDerLeest back into the fold - welcome back!
Friend of the pod Gabriel Valdivia pointed out additional benefits of skeumorphism: it connects your app's UI elements to each other creating a "universe" of rules, logic, and patterns. Agreed!
Matteo Gratton pinged us about two tools neither of us have used yet: MINTDATA and Amino. We also note how crazy it is that we're using AI to design ultra-aerodynamic bikes.
Michael Knepprath was shocked - SHOCKED! - that the boys are getting Cybertrucks. Or are we...? Find out in Bonusland!
Denny brings up the idea of conveyance, and how it's used in video games. Related: Mega Man Classic vs. Mega Man X.
Industry Talk:
We get deep in the weeds talking about naming conventions and component organization for your design files.
Using slashes in names, or nested frames, is a common way to organize hierarchies of components. See Figma's best practices and a video on how to do this in Sketch.
Sketch Runner is an indispensable plugin for all you Sketch users out there!
Cool Things:
Marshall shared an after-market CarPlay setup that has made his commuting experience all the better. Check out the top-rated CarPlay stereos on Wirecutter.
Brian shared NetNewsWire, a free and open-source RSS reader for the Mac. Brian also gathered a bunch of self-hosted blogs that you can check out on the Twitters.
Design Details on the Web:
📻 We are @designdetailsfm
🎙 Brian is @brian_lovin and [email protected]
🎙 Marshall is @marshallbock and [email protected]
🎚@Sarahberus and @Luperdev make us sound smarter than we are
🙌 Support us on Patreon - your support literally makes this show possible. Thank you ❤️
❓ Got a question? Ask it on our Listener Questions Hub, and we'll do our best to answer it on the show :)
⭐️ Enjoying the show? Leave us a review on iTunes
BUH-BYEEEEE!
50 min
December 11, 2019326: Design Tools Today
In this week's episode, we discuss the state of our industry's current design tools—especially in comparison to the tools available to other disciplines—and we speculate about what those tools could look like in the years to come. In News, we compare notes on Figma's newly released Auto Layout feature. And as always, we share a couple cool things like a flashcard app and a peek behind the park.
Golden Ratio Patrons:
Flywheel is a delightfully designed managed WordPress hosting platform, thoughtfully built for busy creatives. Streamline your workflow with their slick platform and sweet set of workflow tools perfectly made for designers! Get started at getflywheel.com/designdetails
Sisu is looking for a thoughtful and data-savvy designer to help build the next generation of analytics software. You can find out more at sisu.ai. (You might recognize Sisu from our interview with Michie Cao)
Latest VIP Patrons:
Huge shoutouts to our latest members!
Filipa Amado
George Tsolpakis
Luke Seeley
Paweł Sysiak
Cal Rowston
Callum Cussen
David Afolayan
News:
Sketch previewed some of their plans for features in 2020, including many already present in Figma
When Sketch announced Smart Layout, Figma assured users that their own Auto Layout would be coming soon
Industry Talk:
Mike Rundle lamented the state of our UI tools compared to the tools of other design professions
Kelly Sutton replied that our tools aren't part of the critical path to finished software
Framer X touts itself as "the best tool for interactive design"
Webflow allows you to "build better business websites, faster. Without coding."
React Podcast - "75: Sunil Pai on The Future of UI Frameworks"
One Cool Thing:
Brian shared Mouseless, is a flashcard-style app for keyboard shortcuts that helps you "unleash your keyboard’s superpower"
Marshall shared The Imagineering Story on Disney+, a "journey behind the curtains... to discover what it takes to create and build Disney theme parks around the world"
General Magic is a documentary about "the untold tale of how a great vision and epic failure changed the world"
Design Details on the Web:
📻 We are @designdetailsfm
🎙 Brian is @brian_lovin and [email protected]
🎙 Marshall is @marshallbock and [email protected]
🎚@Sarahberus and @Luperdev make us sound smarter than we are
🙌 Support us on Patreon - your support literally makes this show possible. Thank you ❤️
❓ Got a question? Ask it on our Listener Questions Hub, and we'll do our best to answer it on the show :)
⭐️ Enjoying the show? Leave us a review on iTunes
BUH-BYEEEEE!
42 min
December 04, 2019325: Changing Roles in a Growing Company
In this week's episode, we go to our patrons for a couple listener questions: one about adapting to shifting roles as a company rapidly grows, and one about the balance between creativity and meeting business needs. And as always, we share a couple cool things like a Star Wars series and privacy-based analytics.
Golden Ratio Patrons:
Sisu is looking for a thoughtful and data-savvy designer to help build the next generation of analytics software. You can find out more at sisu.ai. (You might recognize Sisu from our interview with Michie Cao)
Flywheel is a delightfully designed managed WordPress hosting platform, thoughtfully built for busy creatives. Streamline your workflow with their slick platform and sweet set of workflow tools perfectly made for designers! Get started at getflywheel.com/designdetails
Latest VIP Patrons:
Huge shoutouts to our latest members!
Amy Geddes
Amy G (?)
Tt_55
Breno Baldrati
Follow-up:
Last episode, we talked about skeuomorphism
Haptics have been a thing in video games for decades
In iOS 13, page sheets are the new default modal presentation
And we got some tweets:
Joshua Taylor saved a bunch of highlights from our episode on Social Proof using his podcast-clipping product Parrot
Sahil Chaturvedi is stealing Marshall's "Slow flow vs Pro flow" idea, and that's totally okay :)
Listener Questions:
We asked our patrons if they had any questions for us, and we got a few:
Will Newton asks, "Can you talk about the ways in which the role of a product designer can change at a rapidly growing company, and some strategies for navigating those changes?"
Michael Knepprath asks, "At large companies, are designers and subject matter experts typically different people? Does it depend on the project? How does one effectively work with a subject matter expert and glean the info needed to create a good design for a domain that one wasn’t previously familiar with?"
And Kevin Bennett adds, "How do designers and design leads have to be more aware and sympathetic to the business needs when in a larger organisation? And do people stop that from effecting their creativity?"
Facebook Paper was "a standalone mobile app created by Facebook, only for iOS, that intended to serve as a phone-based equivalent of a newspaper or magazine"
Mike Matas is "a user interface designer and icon artist," currently working on Lobe.ai
Brian documented the design details of Paper on the original Design Details blog
One Cool Thing:
Marshall shared The Mandalorian, a new series on Disney+ that follows "the travails of a lone gunfighter in the outer reaches of the galaxy, far from the authority of the New Republic"
Nando v Movies is one of our favorite YouTubers and a frequent reference on the show
Brian shared Fathom (affiliate link that saves you $10), a "simple and private website analytics platform that lets you focus on what's important: your business"
Security Checklist is "an open-source checklist of resources designed to improve your online privacy and security"
Design Details on the Web:
📻 We are @designdetailsfm
🎙 Brian is @brian_lovin and [email protected]
🎙 Marshall is @marshallbock and [email protected]
🎚@Sarahberus and @Luperdev make us sound smarter than we are
🙌 Support us on Patreon - your support literally makes this show possible. Thank you ❤️
❓ Got a question? Ask it on our Listener Questions Hub, and we'll do our best to answer it on the show :)
⭐️ Enjoying the show? Leave us a review on iTunes
BUH-BYEEEEE!
44 min