The vanishing designer, Prototyper for Figma, understanding service models

Weekly curated resources for designers — thinkers and?makers.

Look around us. Every business is an app and every app feels the same, because every designer has the same resume, follows the same process, graduates from the same program, uses the same tool, scrolls the same Dribbble feed, reads the same Medium articles, expects the same career outcome, lives in the same ideology bubble.

The Silicon Valley giants, testifying with their runaway success, claimed to have “solved” design as an engineering problem. The solution substituted the human essence of design — intuition, ingenuity — with the tangibles, measurable, and deliverables. Companies say they are “design-driven”, but designers are actually driven by dashboards filled with metrics like CSAT, NPS, CES, DAU, MAU.

The vanishing designer →

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Editors’ picks

• I’m not a robot (are you?) . The case for defending against the coming swarm of bots.
• Service models . What are the service typologies designers need to know?
• User vulnerabilities . And how UX designers can help mitigate them.

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The making of 17th-century watercolors : an essay.

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Jobs

• UX Designer @ Gartner . If you are excited about growing business-critical product lines while achieving a high bar for ease of use for our customers then you are at the right place.

Submit a job opening or get your portfolio seen by hiring managers

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Make me?think

• The power of product thinking . “If you’re a builder aspiring to create something new and valuable (or someone who invests in such builders), having well-honed product thinking will help you — and the products you work on — stand out from the crowd.”
• How websites die . “A depressingly small number seemed to have planned out their deaths, with landing pages announcing the shutdown. A couple of the websites were simply frozen in time — no longer allowing signups, but with no obvious indication that they’d closed down other than a copyright date a few years old.”

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Little gems this?week

How to make your Figma components easier to use →

A beginner’s guide to inclusive UX design →

Design systems; the great connector →

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Tools and resources

• Prototyper for Figma . Bringing powerful prototyping with code.
• Tables in Figma . How to easily build and support tables in your designs.
• dApps UX . How to make decentralized apps (dApps) more user-friendly.

We believe designers are thinkers as much as they are makers. So we created the design newsletter we have always wanted to receive. Feel free to forward this to your friends.