I’m Pablo Stanley, a product designer based in San Francisco, originally from México. I’m currently Head of Design at Carbon Health–where we’re making healthcare simple, I write a comic series called The Design Team, and I have a workshop series on prototyping and UI animation called Sketch Together. Oh, yeah, and check out my design crash courses on YouTube.

I’m not a celebrity or anything, so it’s an honour to be invited by the staff at DN to do this AMA. Who knows? I might have some knowledge that you find useful. You can ask me anything. It could be about technical stuff, the startup world, my favorite type of burrito, life, or other designer-related things.

Hey Pablo! I’m wondering if you could talk a little about your experience as a latino designer in Silicon Valley, specially in the current political climate. Does that make it into your work at all? If so, how? (Alex V)

I love this question. Thank you, Alex.

A bit of story about me first. I’m from a small town in the North of México, in the border of the US. Living so close to the US and so far from the center of Mexico I grew up feeling like I was just in the middle, lacking a sense of belonging. Not accepted as an American, but also not a “real” Mexican. I felt like a “malinchista”, a word we use to call those tempted by the attractive things other cultures offer. It comes from La Malinche, a Nahua woman that fell in love with Hernan Cortés and helped him conquer and destroy the natives… her own people.

So you might imagine the inferiority complex and self-hatred one has for themselves when feeling like the ultimate traitor. But, in a way, you can use this to push yourself. For me, lacking a sense of acceptance, feeling like an outsider that constantly has to prove himself, has in a way aid me. I’m constantly trying to learn new things, venturing on different approaches, and never conforming.

I think all of this is just in my head, though. I have only experienced some mild racism on rare occasions, and I always brush it off and don’t let it affect me. San Francisco has such a diverse and welcoming environment that slowly I’ve been able to call it “home”.

I hope I answered your question; Did I just go on an emotional rollercoaster there? Ha.

What’s a skill that you’d like to develop? (Adam Ruf)

I’m currently learning VR and 3D modeling. VR/AR is such an exciting field, I can’t wait to start doing stuff on it!

But, of course, you start with something simple. So I’m working with a friend to develop a VR app that helps people relieve phantom limb pain. If we can do something that helps even just one person, it would be a tremendous success!

Are the Design Team characters inspired by people you know? (Adam R)

The short answer is yes. Most of the characters and events have been inspired by the past two years living in San Francisco, working for different startups. A lot of the characters are based directly on the team at Udemy, where I used to work. I won’t mention names, because the characters already have the same names, ha! (Not very imaginative, I know).
The main character, Petunia, is a mix of a lot of things. She’s based in my experience, when I had just moved to SF, feeling lost and lonely, and she also takes a lot of traits from people and friends I admire. I’m still developing her story, and hopefully, I’ll get to tell more about her in the coming comics, since until this point, she has been a passive character.

Pablo, what’s one thing you’ve done that’s had a disproportionate impact on your design career?

Writing comics. It’s funny, but it’s because of my stories that I got an opportunity to work in a startup in San Francisco in the first place. Right now I’m working as a product designer, but putting my comics out there opened the doors for me. The lesson I take from this is that you will find opportunities from the most unexpected places. When you do something you love, and you’re diligent, and share it with others… the right people will notice and try to collaborate with you.

As a designer who is also passionate about healthcare, my question is: When designing for healthcare how do you make sure you prevent any potential harm? (Jonathan Shariat)

One of the great advantages of designing for screens/software is that we can reiterate as much as we want. The idea is to put your product out ASAP as to fail early, learn from it and refine your design. The problem is that in areas like healthcare or finance, where a flawed design can have great consequences, you’re not able to afford that kind of failure. So, what do you do? You test in-house–staging as much as you can before releasing anything. I have the luxury of working on primary care mostly, so my designs don’t have disastrous consequences (at least not yet). But yeah, you have to be extra careful when planning for healthcare, since there are many details you can’t afford to miss.

What mouse and setup do you use for working? (Dusam T)

I actually don’t use a mouse. I just use the trackpad and keyboard from my MacBook Pro. I do use a Cintiq for drawing on Photoshop:

This is just a taste of Pablo’s AMA. Check out the full conversation ⚡️here!⚡

Designer News is where the design community meets. Join us!

Hey there, we’re the founders and creative directors at This Also, a boutique design studio in Brooklyn, New York.

Brian and myself have been working together for about six or seven years. We first started working together on HBO GO, designing for their iOS, Android, and Playstation products.

Later, we both moved over to Google Creative Lab. Brian was heavily involved in shaping the logo you now see for Google Assistant, and I worked on the first generation of apps for Google Glass.

Together, we left Google to create a design studio that is focused on creating the next generation of products for mobile & beyond. You can see some of our work here.

We’ve been a studio for exactly three years, and we’ve been busy working on major projects for Google, Xbox, Spotify, and startups in New York City.

• People sometimes talk about their surroundings / physical location influencing their design, how has being in Brooklyn affected your projects?
• We take a lot of inspiration from the city. New York, and Brooklyn especially, is a melting pot of people from every possible social and cultural background. Every inch of the city is covered in commerce, from stores to advertising to people busking for change. Where there is commerce, there is design, so there is an endless amount of inspiration. Also, we’re working on a sticker pack that will take this inspiration to heart in a big way ;)

• You point out This Also being a “boutique” design studio… talk a bit about the difference in your eyes between a typical agency and a boutique agency of your size. Also talk a bit about what it means in the eyes of your clients.
• Our approach has been to avoid all marketing work completely and focus entirely on being a creative partner for product and engineering teams. This lets us offer clients a tremendous amount of speed and flexibility, allowing us to work as a more immediate part of their process. The clients we’ve seen drawn most to this approach are in the technology sector, especially teams focused on launching large scale products.
  The economics of a big digital agency force them to take on large marketing projects to support their immense scale. This gives them the ability to handle big productions, but they often struggle with highly creative or conceptual projects. The greater scale attracts a lot of marketing clients, but can be slow and cumbersome for fast moving product teams.
• How has the shift from working in-house with a massive company like Google to creating your own design studio changed your outlook on projects, design process, etc.
• First, I loved working at Google. I was in a great team, working as hard as I could every day, and I felt intellectually challenged in every way possible. Unfortunately, Google is a place designed to make the most of your individual talents. It is not designed to foster talent in any way, and the longer I was there the more I began to miss the process of coaching and leading junior designers the way I could in a studio setting.
  Leaving to start our own studio was instantly terrifying in the sense that we had total responsibility, but it was also equally exciting. We had the freedom to hire people that inspired us just as much as we wanted to inspire them, and this process taught us more than I think we could have ever learned without our own business.
• Looks like you’re hiring for a Design Director and Product Designer, beyond specifics in a portfolio, what types of things are you looking for in candidates?
• We’re definitely trying to hire the right people for a few roles. The hardest thing is finding someone that we believe will bring something to the team that we don’t already have. Everyone here is an expert at graphic design and interaction design, but everyone also has some incredible extra talent that makes them unique. We’d like to find some new folks that bring a skill we don’t have already, whatever it might be. The other thing we look for are people that can inspire the rest of the team. People who have an interesting skill set or a really friendly, motivated spirit will make a project great even when the brief starts out reading like a nightmare.

• What does the This Also toolset look like? (design tools, project management, resource calendar, time tracking, etc.)
• We are tool and process agnostic, and we change both to fit each and every project. The common theme is being creative about problem solving, then finding tools that will express our ideas as quickly and efficiently as possible. This lets the ideas emerge naturally from anyone in the team, then we all pitch in to figure it out together.
  To hint at some secret sauce a little bit, I will say that we’ve found that prototypes are a great starting point for video production, and we’ve been making more and more videos that tell big stories about what products could be. Tools for this are Photoshop, After Effects, Final Cut, and good old fashioned footage with a voiceover and some sort of cool soundtrack.

As a small studio (how many people, by the way?), how do you ensure a steady stream of projects for your team? And I’m talking about both ends of the spectrum — i.e. ensuring your studio has enough work, but also making sure your team can hit deadlines, avoid burnout, etc. (Eric Blattberg)

A big part of getting new business is doing a great job for your current business. We are extremely devoted to making each of our projects very successful. This helps build a good reputation for referrals, references, and general word of mouth.

When new clients come in, they usually do so with very small projects to start. Working hard on anything we take aboard, no matter the size or budget, helps build trust around the table, and eventually get bigger and tougher projects. This is a really big part of being a new studio. Just doing your best every day no matter what.

Another small part of bringing in clients is being able to show case studies. We have a few that we’re getting ready to launch shortly!

Thanks for taking questions! It would be awesome to hear you elaborate on creating the “next generation of products for mobile & beyond”. What is your vision or prediction for the future of Interface and User Experience? Can you talk about what kind of projects your studio is taking on to explore innovation. (David Schnorr)

Mobile and beyond has been our mission statement since day one. In part, it began as a promise to ourselves that we would focus on products and not get distracted by web and marketing projects. Reflecting on the web, it’s a wonderfully powerful medium for communication, but a lot of web design is derivative of common design patterns.

Seeing beyond mobile began as just a challenge for us, to see if we could find ways to apply design to increasingly new and unique problems. New technologies, devices, and operating systems take us beyond what is “known” and open the door to solving very challenging, original problems. This is a great place to create new design patterns and have a lasting effect on the relationship between people and technology.

We originally thought it would take years before a “beyond” project was brought to our studio. Fortunately, we were doing pretty wild stuff right away. The biggest down-side of doing super rad, hard projects is the level of secrecy ;)

This is just a taste of Brett and Brian’s AMA. Check out the full conversation ⚡️here!⚡

Designer News is where the design community meets. Join us!

Marc is the Founder and CEO of Design Inc. His career in design began more than 20 years ago and has spanned well known startups and public companies including YouTube, Google, Oakley, Digg and TeeFury. Prior to Design Inc. Marc co-founded incubator North Technologies with Kevin Rose, which merged with popular watch site Hodinkee.

Prior to North, Marc co-founded fflick.com, which was acquired by YouTube. While at YouTube, he held roles including leading design on the YouTube Player, YouTube Live, YouTube TV, was key in the first broad redesign of YouTube in 2012 and then again in 2013. While at Google, Marc continued in his product designer role and contributed to Google Analytics and occasionally collaborated with other teams on special projects.

Previously, Marc was the Director of UX for Oakley, under Luxottica. He and his team designed and created the e-commerce platforms and digital marketing for a variety of Luxottica brands including Oakley, Ray-Ban, Arnette and Revo. Prior to Oakley, Marc worked as a lead product designer at Digg and then going even further back, he co-founded TeeFury and DesignByHumans, two popular art driven crowd sourced t-shirt sites.

(switching to first person)

I tweet at @hemeon, write at Medium, and post photos of surfing and life in the OC on Instagram and occasionally paint paintings. I recently started doing a weekly YouTube show at Design Inc. with Joel Beukelman called UNDO, alsoavailable as a podcast.

What are the three most important things you learned in all of your jobs? (Julian Dorn)

Really great question Julian — here are a few things:

1. Never burn a bridge — like ever — even if someone super pisses you off and you hate them and they want to sue you and all the bad things — just walk away — don’t go to twitter, don’t talk any crap — just walk away.
2. If you have a problem with someone, go to them directly one-on-one and address it — be kind and courteous, but direct — don’t try to adjust or sugar coat, but be kind.
3. You can’t build anything without others — so be a good friend. Say yes a lot, don’t expect to always get paid or make a ton of money from your efforts, everything will work out in the end.

Hey Marc! Thanks for joining us.

• How does the pairing work on Design Inc? If a company wanted a designer who’s previously worked on projects involved with X, can they specify that in the “checkout” process?
• How many designers are currently on the platform? (not sure if it’s something you can share :)
• Do you envision the you’ll expand the Design Inc categories beyond Logo, Brand & Visual Identity and Design Critique?
• What’s been the feedback thus far from both designers using the system, and clients receiving work?
• UNDO is two episodes in (kudos!)… keep up the good work! (maxlind)

Pairing right now is still fairly simple, we try to ensure variety in price and location. We currently give 5 designers on pairing — we will certainly be doing much more work here to make this smarter.

We have had thousands apply and we are adding more designers everyday.

We are plan to be regularly launching new design services as we develop out our platform. For us each design service has to be clear, actionable and understandable — so we are very careful in choosing our services — but very excited for the next two!

The biggest feedback we keep getting over and over from the designers and users is frankly how painless and easy booking a design service is on Design Inc. — like, both designers and users traditionally have a lot of friction in working with each other, have to have a meeting, then do a proposal, then haggle over a contract and price — where we have truly tried to just simplify all of this — and make the experience of working with a designer and users very nice and simple.

How do you feel about the design culture being so centered in big cities like SF and NY? Sometimes it feels like to get a solid job, you must move there, regardless of how you personally feel about living in a metropolitan area vs the mountains or by the beach. (Ray Sensenbach)

I think about this question a lot actually — currently there is NO place in the world for tech quite like San Francisco and the Peninsula (Palo Alto, Mountain View, Cupertino etc.) LA, NYC and others have amazing communities — but still nothing quite like the SF area.

Moving and working for the companies in SF will jump start your career unlike anything else I have seen — I have lived in SF twice (moved up and back from Orange County) — building Design Inc. down here in Orange County has been much harder than if we built up in the bay area — the networks are just not nearly as mature — for example I have been looking for PR and Marketing folks and down here I am finding a real lack in basic tech knowledge — I was in SF yesterday, had a meeting with someone who is great at marketing and we could dive right in talking about the best strategies to move forward because of the base of knowledge they had.

What the most effective method to improve ones design skills? (Adam Rasheed)

If you want to learn to paint, every painting school in the world has you copy the paintings of the old masters and learn their techniques. I believe this is the best way to improve your design skills — to literally see UI you like and then recreate it for yourself.

Ira Glass talks about The Gap — a void of experience you just have to grind through — check it out here.

In your opinion, who are some designers that are doing incredible stuff? (Aaron Davis)

I really love the Gif, Looping Video revolution happening right now — Allison House is crushing that world hard right now.

This is just a taste of Marc’s AMA. Check out the full conversation ⚡️here!⚡

Designer News is where the design community meets. Join us!

We are Jared McDaniel, Sean Halpin and Stephen Murrill, the visual design and brand team behind Help Scout, the customer support solution that helps companies deliver outstanding customer service. Together with the product team, we create what you see on our marketing site and blog, and the experience in the web and iOS apps (Android coming soon!). From brand architecture and landing pages to UI design, product icons and illustrations, our focus is developing and maintaining consistency across all touchpoints.

Recently we announced a major update to our brand, including a new logo and an overhaul of our product UI. See our process, including early sketches and tossed designs here.

Jared McDaniel is the Co-founder + Design Director. As creator of Help Scout’s visual style, Jared remains hands-on in charge of brand and customer experience.

Seán Halpin is a Designer specializing in UI design and front end code, but works on a little bit of everything from visual design to implementation.

Stephen Murrill is the Visual Designer and Illustrator, focusing on marketing content, blog and product illustrations, and icon design.

Hey guys! Thanks for joining us.

1. What did the process look like internally to ensure the new branding/logo was replaced accordingly across all mediums? (Related, what tools does your remote team use to manage projects of this scale?)
2. You mention presenting the progress of the logo at your company retreat, was it more or less finished at that point?… or did you continually get feedback and make revisions?
3. What was the process like working with Focus Labs to take the logo from a static visual to custom animations?
4. With the new branding, do you envision the product design will evolve next?
5. The blog detailing the process is really, really great… did you also create a brand guidelines for internal or external use? (maxlind)

1. Trello all the things! Initially we just created a huge checklist of what needed updating internally (marketing, app, mobile, etc) as well as offsite logos that would need to be refreshed on launch day. From there it was just a matter of getting it all organized in Trello and making sure everything was queued up and ready. Either on separate github branches or clearly marked dropbox files. Here’s a quick rundown of how it went:

• Day before launch: assigned each checklist item to their individual “owners” in each department (marketing, product, customer support, etc)
• We created an asset folder in Dropbox with all the versions of the logo/mark for each platform or service
• On launch day, we used Slack to notify everyone on the Trello card when they could start updating, and from there it was just about checking boxes.

2. The exploratory work was behind us, so we came to the retreat with 2–3 directions we liked; we felt like the most valuable discussions would happen if we focused on 2–3 versions vs 50–100. We knew which direction we wanted to go in by then, but it was important to us not to advocate for any specific direction before we got a response from the team. Most everyone resonated with the same mark we did, so that set us on the path to refinements and polish from there.

3. I’ve been a huge fan of FocusLab for years, and had a blast working with them. In terms of process, we had to condense it into a little more than two weeks, so it was a lot of rapid back and forth and they were extremely collaborative throughout. We appreciated that they were open to hearing our ideas, while also coaching us on areas where we weren’t familiar. Custom animation isn’t something we have a ton of experience with in-house, so we weren’t familiar with that design process. They did a great job of walking us through the early concepts (I love this clip they shared of their process behind the scenes), and were open to all of our feedback. As an example, we took one of their mocks and slowed it down to dissect it and fine-tune the details. All of this back-and-forth led to where we are now, and we couldn’t be more pleased with the results.

4. The product is always evolving, sometimes in more noticeable ways than others (like our recent rebrand). With the brand update, we introduced standards around illustrations, icons, color palettes which helped bridge the gap between our products, our marketing site and content. The visual update was something the entire design team rallied around, creatively speaking, so I think we’re all excited to see where it takes the product next!

5. That’s a big project for us right now, getting not only the brand guidelines refined, but also marketing and app patterns, mobile, voice and tone, located into one place for everyone to access. We’re working on a new css framework, which has updated our code structure and standards. Some of the critical thinking behind the framework has worked its way into how we approach and maintain our design files, so it’s been a major refinement across the board. It’s been exciting to put it all together!

Your use of illustration on the site is great. I’m curious as to how you decided on the fixed stroke width, no gradient style that you’re using. Were there any other styles that you explored? (Matt Baxter)

Shortly before we began the rebrand process, we did consider various styles for our illustrations. At the time, most of the illustration was happening on our blog, so when I joined the team, I used the twice-weekly posts as an experiment to see what felt right. (I wrote about that process here) After trying flat styles, thicker strokes, thinner strokes, the four pixel stroke felt the most versatile. When we began adding icons to the site, we created all of them with the same fixed stroke width for visual consistency. This quickly evolved into a visual standard for our illustrations. Four became a magic number, it allowed everything it touched to scale beautifully on both retina and non-retina displays. Now we use multiples of four, to the point of obsession, for spacing, stroke width, and shape size for all of it.

We experimented with gradients earlier on, but ultimately decided to utilize the colors in our brand palette to create depth. This kind of creative constraint is a fun challenge for me.

You have a very slick rebranding story here but quite often these sorts of rebrands are criticized for lacking originality. The iconography, logo and colour palettes all fall into a very ‘safe’ and ‘digital’ framework.

Were you concerned that you had stripped too much personality away? What were the arguments for and against? (Dan Sherrat)

I really appreciate this question, Dan, because we thought a lot about this throughout the rebrand process. But ultimately we realized that a logo cannot be solely responsible for “personality” — a brand gets its reputation from everything it does. So we streamlined the logo and came up with something that allowed for flexibility + a little homage to our roots/values.

What were, for each of you, the click moments? Where a change of direction (design or otherwise) made you go “aha!” and made things just fall into place? (Dirk)

It was more a series of incremental “aha’s” throughout the different phases of the project. I can’t say that a specific shift or decision suddenly provided us all the right answers for getting to the finish line. Overall the design culture at Help Scout is really iterative; we prefer to live with something, and test/learn/react as we go. But here’s a couple of the smaller “aha” moments that come to mind:

• The mark: Mentally, punting on the laurel direction was a big help. After a certain point it became clear we were spinning our wheels and a more refined and unique version of our existing mark just wasn’t going to happen. Wiping the slate not only allowed us to start thinking outside the box, but also rejuvenated us creatively. On the surface the final mark we settled on felt like a simple, organic form, and we liked that. But getting back to our process of living with it first, we spent a lot of time thinking about how it connected back to our brand and values. In the end, I think we were all pleased with just how much it embodied Help Scout.
• Scouticons: I couldn’t be more proud of the work Stephen did on these icons. We love them and wanted them showcased throughout the app as much as possible. But you have to be really careful with such a dense application that customers are using everyday. As superficial as it can sound, point sizes and spacing really do matter and play a key role in their experience. We ended up having to reign it in on the icons to find the right balance.

This is just a taste of Help Scout’s AMA. Check out the full conversation ✨here!✨

Designer News is where the design community meets. Join us!

We’re part of the team behind Vox Product’s Accessibility Guidelines. We’re excited to answer any and all questions you have about accessibility, Vox Media, our teams, and our favorite lunch spots, but before we get there, a little background on our foray into accessibility.

In May, six Vox Media team members gathered in Washington, D.C., for two days to figure out how to approach accessibility on a company-wide scale. We have many advocates for accessibility throughout the company, but at the time of our gathering, we didn’t have a company-wide structure in place to implement standards across the board. Over the course of two days, we documented role-specific best practices and how each team member could implement them into their actual work. Later, we shared what we learned with the company.

Two months later, in July, we picked up the project again at our annual hack week, Vax. We sketched, wireframed, and built this checklist as a tool for teams to use. Guidelines are listed by role because everyone is responsible for accessibility on a team.

Ally Palanzi is a senior front end engineer at Vox Media based out of Washington, D.C. Currently, she works on the platform team working on a scalable system to create websites for our brands. Previously, she worked on design and development for both Vox and Polygon.

Sanette Tanaka is a product designer at Vox Media based out of New York City, and works with Ally on the platform team. Prior to that, she worked on Vox Media’s experimental, R&D team. Before she became a designer, she was a real-estate reporter at The Wall Street Journal.

Kelsey Scherer is a senior product designer at Vox Media based out of New York City. She works with the Storytelling Studio to help tell stories through clear and simple designs that best serve their audience. Previously at Vox Media, she worked on the relaunch of Eater and the relaunch of Racked.

Vox Media builds smart brands people love in categories they’re passionate about. We are SB Nation, The Verge, Polygon, Eater, Curbed, Racked, Vox & Recode.

How do you think about ad blockers? As someone who regularly uses one, I’ve seen sites like Wired and Forbes putting up ad block walls for me.

I understand the business need, but walls seem like a pretty ham-fisted solution. Are you guys looking into other avenues? (Yitong Zhang)

Hi there, great question! I can help answer this one. Ad blockers are a result of people fighting back against bad practices — there’s room in all parts of the industry to improve standards, thoughtfulness, and security. We don’t have ad block walls on our sites, and we don’t have plans to in the future. We actually pioneered a new type of ad and placement in response to interstitials, one that I think is more thoughtful — we call it Prelude.

At Vox Media, we’re always working on making better ad experiences — we’ve got a Revenue team that’s super passionate and amazing to work with. (Tate)

Shout out to everyone making Revenue better: Pam, Alisha, Brian, Megan, Heather, Drew, Winston, Casey, Messay, Steve, Guillermo, Scott, Matt, Ngan, Marvin, Nate, Josh, Kat, Constance, Alesha, Jack, Victor, Kevin, Corri, Ian, Jacqueline, Drew, Briar, Emily, Andrew.

1. How did you go about compiling the list? Were these things you learned over the years or things that were mostly new and you wanted to implement across all the properties?
2. What would you say to a company that think implementing these will take too many resources? (Jonathan Shariat)

Hi Jonathan! Great questions. To answer your first question, we started out by learning just what accessibility means to a modern media company. We brought in an expert, Jeremy Fields from Viget, who has written extensively on accessibility, and consulted books and online resources. We then went through various best practice lists and figured out what which guidelines made sense for our specific products and processes. The guidelines we included are a combination of ones that are not currently reflected on our properties, as well as ones that we already follow.

To your second question, we are fortunate to work in a company that’s incredibly supportive of these efforts, but we understand that isn’t the case at many places. My best piece of advice is to start small. Our first formalized push in accessibility started with a group of six people and two days of work. We tried to come up with something of value immediately — which in our case, was role-specific guidelines on how to advance accessibility in folks’ every day projects. That helped us demonstrate the value to our leadership teams immediately. Later, we built on that foundation by presenting internally to different teams, building out the checklist tool, and so forth, but it all started with a small amount of resources. (Sanette Tanaka)

You mentioned that you developed processes, guidelines, and tools that employees across the company could use. In my experience, that stuff — while great — only works if there’s accountability. How do you plan on keeping people accountable and ensuring that these guidelines are used consistently and effectively going forward? (Brian Alexandrowicz)

This is a great question! And also something we’re still figuring out. Before we launch products, they generally go through testing from our Quality Assurance team. It’s a work in progress right now, but in the future we’re going to ensure that along with standard browser and device testing we also test for accessibility.

We strive to treat accessibility just as any other function or feature that needs to be checked off before something can be launched. We’ve been doing accessibility best practice presentations to spread knowledge across teams to show that everyone is accountable. (Ally)

Not a question, just a little note & a “thank you”.

I used to write/admin for SB Nation. They have a blog geared towards (and only accessible to) their writers that aims at teaching them how to both best use their CMS and write optimal copy for the web.

While writing for them, I learned a metric ton of things I wouldn’t have otherwise known. It was really insightful and I’m kind of sad I no longer have the time to write for them anymore and thus lost access to that great resource ;)

But it’s been a privilege and it’s helped my career greatly.

While this isn’t a “thank you” to your team in person, you can accept it anyway, since I’m just happy to see a huge company be so dedicated to a craft that is dear to me; telling & spreading stories, online. (Dirk)

That was a lovely note to leave Dirk, props! (Duncan)

This is just a taste of Vox product’s AMA. Check out the full conversation ✨here!✨

Designer News is where the design community meets. Join us!

We’re Shawn Cheris, Sonja Hernandez, Sam Wick, and Anny Chen and we are the Adobe Design Brand Team. We’re responsible for the overall visual execution of Adobe’s brand in product experiences, covering well over 100 products and services across three distinct verticals. We design the visual architecture of the brand, create every product logo and splash screen, and execute all the branded pieces and parts that surface inside the products and in Adobe’s marketing. We also occasionally do printed matter including books, posters, and environmental graphics.

Recently, we re-branded our org within Adobe, changing from Adobe XD (Experience Design) to Adobe Design. You can see more about that project here.

Shawn Cheris is a Director of Experience Design. In addition to watching this amazing team do their thing, he manages the icon and frameworks efforts efforts and strives every day to bring a unified experience to all Adobe products.

Sonja Hernandez is the Experience Design Manager for the Adobe Design Brand team. Besides focusing on consistency in Adobe’s branded areas, she is especially passionate about extending the brand language into physical spaces, objects, and new partnerships.

Sam Wick is the Design Lead for the Adobe Design Brand team. His particular focus is branding for mobile products and the related marketing campaigns.

Anny Chen is an Experience Designer on the Adobe Design Brand team. In addition to working on the recent rebrand of Adobe Design, she supports the team’s efforts in creating a unified brand experience across all of Adobe’s products.

We’re happy to answer any questions you have about designing for large brand systems, rebranding orgs and products, recent trends around color and gradients, and anything else!

What challenges have you faced while trying to unify a brand with over 100 products? How do you ensure all those products feel current? (Hunter Caron)

The challenge of unifying Adobe’s brand doesn’t just come from number of products. It also comes from the rate of change with them and the fact they are interconnected. The tech industry in nimble. Adobe is no different. Strategy pivots frequently. New products are developed, existing products are rebranded, and taken off the market all the time. Building a trusted brand and constant change are two ideas that can be at odds. We have needed to develop a system that can withstand all of that change and still feel cohesive. Everything we design, we do with the whole system in mind.

Making products feel current poses another challenge. Logistically, chasing trends for high level branding isn’t realistic. Changing 100+ interconnected products with different release cycles, goals, and keeping everything unified is a tall order. Instead we’ve tried to create timeless logos, and change certain other implementations incrementally.

When I first started here, the bubbly, web 2.0 aesthetic was all the rage. We got a lot of criticism for bucking that trend. Now look at the industry. It ended up where we were. I’m not saying everyone followed us. What I am saying is that by definition trends change. What’s feels current now, might not next year. You need to build design principles based on broad business needs, not just on what’s hip. (Sam)

Do you use Sketch? (Janis Vegis)

No, but I have used it in the past. As a designer working for a company that makes design tools, its important to familiarize yourself with all sorts of tools. (Sam)

Can you estimate in percentages how much of your job consists of design execution, and how much of the politics involved in a huge org.? And which is the hardest challenge? (Xavier Bertels)

That’s a really good question. Sounds like you’ve spent some time doing design work in the real world.

First and foremost, I’d point out that Sonja, Sam, and I have been together as a team for six years (Anny came on board about a year ago and has been such an awesome addition). When it comes to the aspects of the job that involve building coalition and trust, selling, and shipping design, it’s impossible to overstate the efficiencies that result from having a group of people spend that much time iterating on a single set of problems.

Over the years, we’ve built a fantastic partnership with our Brand Strategy team (with whom we work hand-in-hand), earned trust with the senior leadership of the company, and gained a strong network of support, overall. We’ve also learned what it takes to make a lasting and extensible brand architecture that can fit so many varied products and services within it.

All of those structures and relationships took countless hours of investment but they’ve paid immense dividends in the end. The kind of politics you’re referring to used to take up a lot of our time, but now is a small and slowly shrinking minority. There are still disagreements from time-to-time, but the overall alignment we have (visually, philosophically, and politically) on issues of brand limit the range of possibilities, so it’s normally smaller issues we have to grapple with these days.

But that doesn’t mean we spend the majority of our time doing the execution end of the job, either. Despite our best efforts to build a system that is extensible and timeless, the truth is that Adobe is a big, fast-moving company. Adobe is not afraid to try new things and sometimes those new things don’t fit neatly into the tidy system we’ve created. So we do spend a lot of time dealing with the strategy end of things, which involves a lot of email, meetings, research, and other tasks that don’t involve laying down pixels. (Sam)

Inconsistency has been a defining aspect of the adobe brand, in almost every possible way, from features, to branding, to UI. How do you plan to overcome this? (no tea, no shade) (Thomas Semmler)

Hi Thomas, Good question here! There’s a couple ways to break this down. First, the areas that you’re speaking to are all the components that make up that capital “B” type of Brand that users interact with. A Brand is everything from the UI and how features are presented, to the look of the branding, and extends on to the marketing, etc. My team is responsible for the visual execution of the branding: creating the visual system for product logos and app icons, splash screens, and any other associated assets that appear across desktop, mobile and web. Another team works on the UI & frameworks, and product teams work on bringing in features.

I actually think that our visual branding is pretty consistent now. Before Creative Cloud launched however, we were changing the visual brand system pretty much every year with each new suite release. Making big branding moves frequently across so many products isn’t sustainable and can lead to confusion, for sure. With the launch of Creative Cloud, one of the first things my team did was decided on a style for the product logos, create a strict rule system around that, and stick to it.

As for the UI and features, one of the biggest efforts going on at Adobe right now is to unify the UI language across all our products. We have some super smart & talented designers and engineers working on this. Some of which has already started to roll out and you’ll see in other products soon too. (Sonja)

Why did you guys create a new design language instead of joining the other styles used at Adobe? (Like the product logos, etc) (Jap Po)

Good question! Strategically, we have a history of not aligning internal org branding to that of our products. The org isn’t meant to be viewed or related to in the same way as our products, and it would be confusing if we were to align ourselves to the look and feel of a product. Also the nature of Adobe Design is to be a centralized org where the people here work across all of our products and services at Adobe. That said, there are certain elements of the new design language that still draw from the overall style at Adobe, such as the use of high-contrast gradients and the Adobe Clean typeface. I’ll also add here that Adobe Design has had its own 10+ year history and evolution of its branding, and this recent rebrand drew heavily from an existing design language that was already in place in terms of the color palette and visual system. (Anny)

This is just a taste of the Adobe Design Team’s AMA. Check out the full conversation ✨here!✨

Designer News is where the design community meets. Join us!

I am Ivan Zhao, cofounder/designer of Notion — a unified tool for docs, wikis, and tasks. We just launched the 1.0 a couple weeks ago, which you can play with the web/Mac app at notion.so (and we are hiring!)

To give you some background, our goal with Notion is to create the general purpose work tool for a post-file, post-MS Office world. My cofounder and I often joke that this was like the “hot startup topic” of the 90s. Unfortunately, tools for knowledge workers haven’t advanced much since then. The state of art is either Google Docs/Quip/Dropbox Paper (multiplayer WordPerfect), or rigid SAAS apps (forms + a table+ some buttons).

To end users, all the knowledge and workflows are trapped in different “silos”, the best people can do is to duct-tape everything together, previously with emails, nowadays with Slack — Notion is our creation to challenge this status quo of “software as silos”.

Before tech, I seriously considered a career in photography, as well as academia (cognitive science).

1. The product design of Notion is excellent, but requires thinking about documents in a very new way. How do you plan to tackle the marketing challenges of convincing people to change their workflow?
2. What other document services do you use alongside Notion that you feel it isn’t a replacement for? For example do you still have a note taking app like Evernote, or do you just put that all into Notion?

Really fantastic work, and I look forward to seeing where Notion goes! (Mattan Ingram)

1. Marketing is indeed interesting. We are less about forcing new workflows, but more about bundling the existing ones. It’s a lot more understandable that way. And who doesn’t likes all-in-one, as long as the “one” has good quality on its own.
2. Notion is all I use. It has replaced iA Writer (drafting & thinking), Google Docs (collaboration), and Evernote (collecting). The entire team is running on Notion + Slack, nothing else. The separation of tools is largely a historical legacy from the rigid physical world. The computing medium is dynamic and elastic.

Notion on Twitter

Struggling to recreate the content on our front page? Check out our new templates! https://www.notion.so/What-s-New-157765353f2c4705bd45474e5ba8b46c ...pic.twitter.com/Yf57yyjiv4

To begin with, I totally love Notion! It’s one of the best web apps I’ve seen in recent years which I felt can be good replacement to my Mac Notes app.

1. Can you share some insight on how you guys came up with the idea — like design iterations etc. (I’m using the app from 0.8 I guess — #beta times )

2. Whats the future of Notion?

3. Not a question, but a feedback on the website — The illustrations are really pretty! I loved the site design because it’s not like the usual trend — Very minimal and speaks about the product directly!

Kudos for building an amazing product :) (Suganth S)

1. Our guiding light has always being history. To be honest nothing is new in Notion. We copied everything from earlier systems.
2. Oh big question. More bundling, more polishing.
3. We love the website too. Digital visual design always feels a bit too segregated as a young discipline for me. There’s a lot of good inspirations from the past (e.g. print ads from 60s-80s) or other disciplines (e.g. pre-modern American architecture, Japanese crafts). Too many places to steal.

Notion on Twitter

This is big! We completely revamped our editor - check it out! https://www.notion.so/What-s-New-157765353f2c4705bd45474e5ba8b46c ...pic.twitter.com/OlpO0D1S7V

Hey Ivan! — thanks for joining us.

1. Thus far, have you noticed how users are mostly taking advantage of Notion? — Docs? Wikis? Tasks?…or a combination?

2. Is Notion for team use only?… or is there a use case where you might share with users as well?

3. Can Notion be associated with a custom URL?

4. You mention Slack integration a couple times, in your eyes how imperative was it to get Slack and Notion working together? (maxlind)

1. The idea of Notion comes from history. In the early days of computing, we created interesting systems that celebrates the power of computing medium. Somehow since the early 80s, we have been building software tools that imitate paper. Notion wants to challenge that.
2. People usually start with one use-case, and then discover the power of combining multiple in one tool. There’s a large portion of people use Notion as personal Evernote replacement, which surprised us since it’s not something we advertise on the marketing page. All welcome though ;-)
3. Indeed. Custom domain is on the upcoming roadmaphttps://www.notion.so/What-s-New-157765353f2c4705bd45474e5ba8b46c
4. Slack is one of our very top priorities. It has a monopoly on the internal communication/notification space. We don’t want to reinvent the user habits there.

Notion on Twitter

DesignDetails Hey typography nerds, we have upgraded the fonts to Nitti (a la iA Writer) & Lyon. You are welcome pic.twitter.com/Jf6FxedQwf

Big fan of your work. I think it is becoming increasingly clear that rethinking the role of the document has the potential to unlock a lot of value for individuals and businesses in our modern, mobile, and connected context. Salesforce’s recent $750M acquisition of Quip is one significant market validation of this movement.

I have kept a close eye on this space for quite some time, and Notion has the most interesting approach that I’ve seen yet. There are two very large opportunities that I see in the product, and am curious how you’re thinking about them.

1. Regarding collaboration: Notion is clearly promoting Slack as the tool to enable communication around the content within Notion. Part of what made Quip so powerful and valuable for me was the colocation of conversation and content. The context is so much stronger when you can hover/tap a highlighted segment, and surface the questions/commentary pertinent to that piece of content without losing your place. It made achieving a full understanding of the relative development of the document quite doable. How are you thinking about enhancing Notion’s capabilities to bring rich conversation directly into the content? Maybe Slack can still serve as a remote notification center and changelog, but only as a redundancy?
2. Regarding todos and team coordination: I use the checklists in Notion and like them, but there are still questions that cannot be answered in Notion. Questions like: What is due for me by the end of the week? If I was working with a team in Notion, I might ask: What does Jay have on his plate this week? Again, I see benefit in colocating the tasks my team is accountable for with the content needed to perform those tasks, just as I do in colocating conversation and content. Combine all three in the right way, and you have something truly unique, and incredibly powerful. Is Notion of the opinion that it should be a supporting role in team productivity, maybe living life as a hyperlink in the notes section of a task in another more dedicated piece of task management software, or are you thinking about how to move todos into first class within your system? (Sky Winston)

Hi Sky,

• I don’t have a definite answer on how to make Notion more Slack-like. Our stance is that quick, communication-heavy collaboration requires very different channels and habits from knowledge-building collaboration. Slack has built great pipes on the former, and Notion is good at the latter, so we want to leverage Slack as much as possible. The pie is large.
• We’ll definitely beef up tasks. Once you break free from paper metaphors, the possibility is amusedly endless. Right now calling Notion a unified workspace for “docs, wikis, and tasks” is a bit false advertising. We should replace “tasks” with “checklists”.

Thanks for all the feedback and patience. We’ll get there :-)

Notion on Twitter

Mass export is here! Take your content anytime . We know we are the new kid on the block - we'll earn your trust pic.twitter.com/R4IWoSr3Fi

This is just a taste of Ivan’s AMA. Check out the full conversation ✨ here!✨

Designer News is where the design community meets. Join us!

Hello everyone! I’m Margaret Gould Stewart, and I am a part of the Facebook design team. I lead the designers and researchers who help build a lot of our tools for business, big and small, all around the world, to help them connect with Facebook’s 1.7B users in meaningful ways.

Previously, I led design at YouTube, and before that for Google Search, Google News, and a bunch of other consumer stuff. I started my career a while back at a start up called Tripod, which was one of the big homepage building sites in the first dot.com era.

I studied Theatre as an undergrad, which has been more useful to my career that you might think. I did my graduate studies at New York University’s Interactive Telecommunication Program (ITP), or as some like to call it, “Engineering for Poets”.

I love working on big, gnarly design problems that look to address large scale societal problems. I love democratizing systems like the media and markets to benefit the little guys. And I love building teams who work together to build beautiful, meaningful things.

I write on Medium and run a event series called Elegant Tools which looks to inspire more designers to apply their talent and time to under-served industries.

Finally, I am the mother of three kids, married to a Canadian, and have a dog named Sunny and a cat named Pepper Potts, who is just as sassy as her name indicates. I love photography, I love to bake, and I LOVE going to the movie theatre where I can immerse myself in a good story while eating popcorn.

If you have any questions about what it’s like to work at and design for Facebook, about building design teams, about collaboration, about diversity in tech, why theatre training has been useful in my career, or just about anything that comes to mind, leave your questions here and I’ll do my best to answer them!

Hi Margaret, Thank you for your AMA!!! In your role, how do you balance user experience and profit and how do you justify it to management? Thanks! (Darren Treat)

There are always the extremes when it comes to issues like this. In this scenario, one extreme is making all decisions based on what will generate the most revenue, and the other extreme is not thinking at all about revenue. As is true with most things in life, the truth lies somewhere in the middle :) It’s important to care about creating a sustainable business, and ultimately it’s the value that you put out into the world through your products that matters. The key thing is what do you primarily orient yourself around, and what is secondary.

At Facebook, we look at the value we generate for people all around the world as the most important goal. If we create a lot of value for people, then businesses will be able to create value for themselves by connecting with those people in meaningful ways. One has to follow the other. This is important, because it affects the decisions you make, ensuring that you focus on long term value and not short term gains.

This focus on long term value is really important. If you try to generate as much short term revenue from people and businesses as you can, you’ll have a nice blip in your revenue chart. But you will end up eroding trust with everyone in the long run. If you take the long view on things, and ask yourself how you can be a valuable part of people’s lives over years, you end up making a different set of decisions, and ultimately, creating a healthier, more sustainable business.

As far as justifying it to management, I am lucky that I don’t have to spend a lot of energy justifying this to Facebook’s leaders, since our they really drive these philosophies from the top down. Ultimately, creating great user experiences is everyone’s job.

If you find yourself in a culture where short term revenue comes first, perhaps you can think about how you might change/evolve that culture by showing a different path, visualizing the long term affects of the current decision making, or helping leaders empathize with what their decisions are doing to the user experience. It can be a tough thing to change, but if you succeed, you will transform the business for the better.

As a design student who would love to work at Facebook, what specific design skills should I focus on in order to achieve that goal? Any advice would be much appreciated. Thanks! (Hunter Caron)

Hi Hunter! At Facebook, we are looking to create a diverse team, so that means there’s not one answer to this question :) At the core, we are looking for designers who are makers and doers who care deeply about our mission to make the world more open and connected. We look for people who are curious and collaborative, because building great software is a team sport. We look for people who are confident in what they do know and self-aware about where they can learn and grow. As far as specific technical skills, we look for strong product thinking skills (do you have good instincts and a process for determining the right problems to focus on?), interaction design (can you think through complex problems and bring an intuitive approach to flows and interactions?) and visual design (do you have a strong attention to detail and care about getting the small things right).

Throughout all of this, we value intentionality a lot; can you explain why you made the decisions you made, share the various options you considered, and why you decide on your final solution? Lastly, we look for people who will be proactive and take ownership over their work. Of course, people come in with all kinds of variances in strengths across these areas, but those are the things we tend to look for and what we find indicates a strong likelihood to be happy and productive at Facebook.

Let’s talk diversity in tech. :) As a non-American, woman of colour working as a product designer I found it really hard to find employment in North America. Even with the right experience, skills and qualifications, I think there are real barriers for an outsider like me — visas, cultural differences, biases, language, etc.

I could imagine that this is also hard on the company side. How is Facebook ensuring that their teams are truly diverse? Are the numbers getting better? What are the challenges with this? With design teams that are heavily concentrated in the west, how do you ensure that your products are relevant to people from all over the globe? (Vicky B)

Thanks for asking this really important question, Vicky. On the walls of Facebook’s offices, you’ll often see a poster reflecting core company sentiment: “At Facebook, nothing is somebody else’s problem.” That statement is particularly true when it comes to building a diverse team. Facebook’s mission is to give people the power to share and make the world more open and connected. In order to achieve that mission, we need an employee base that reflects a broad range of experiences, backgrounds, races, ethnicities, genders, sexual orientations, abilities, etc, of the incredibly diverse population for whom we are designing. More than 80% of the people who currently use Facebook reside outside of North America. We are a global platform that supports over 1.7bn people who use Facebook to connect to communities around the world. For us, this isn’t just the right thing to do, it is also good business sense.

Over the past few years, we’ve invested a lot in increasing diversity at Facebook through a variety of internal and external programs and partnerships. These initiatives are designed to help us reach the underrepresented talent that currently exists, as well as engage with and inspire young people — and hopefully future applicants — to consider careers in design and tech.

This is and always will be a work in progress. We still have a long way to go, but as we continue to strive for greater change in the long term, it’s encouraging to see positive hiring trends. For example, while our current representation in senior leadership is 3% Black, 3% Hispanic and 27% women, of new senior leadership hires at Facebook in the US over the last 12 months, 9% are Black, 5% are Hispanic and 29% are women.

In order to continue and amplify that trend, we need to address these issues in the short, medium, and long term. In the short term, we are building a diverse slate of candidates and an inclusive working environment, as well as improving talent-sourcing tools and investing in better training for everyone involved in hiring/managing for diverse teams. In the medium term, we are supporting students with an interest in tech through Facebook University (FBU), an internship program for college freshman — primarily women and people of color — who demonstrate in interest in STEM/CS. And our long term efforts focus on creating opportunity and access through programs like TechPrep, an online resource in English/Spanish for parents, guardians and future programmers who want to learn more about computer science and programming.

We’ve also committed $15 million to Code.org over the next five years to ensure that every person in the US to has the opportunity to learn the skills that our industry needs — and that we have the chance to hire them. And we’re partnering with organizations like Girls Who Code and Year Up.

There’s so much yet to do, and so much to gain as we more towards a more inclusive and diverse workplace. We are excited about the future and committed to making it better for our employees and the world through the products we build together.

Hi Margaret! Do you get imposter syndrome? If so, was there a point in your career where it was strongest? How did you deal with it then, if this was a problem for you? I find I am can sometimes become irrationally stressed out by the quality of my work, even if I did what others would consider a good job. This is especially true when I am still developing ideas and sketching wireframes. (Patrick Burtchaell)

Oh, Patrick, yes yes yes. I have and some days still have bouts of imposter syndrome. Anyone who has a tendency to throw themselves into challenging roles, taking on a lot of responsibility or taking on big, hairy problems will have moments where they think, “Am I even qualified to do this?!” So the most important thing to know is you are not at all alone in feeling this way sometimes.

That being said, I think there are some important nuances to this. First, at its core, Imposter Syndrome is an example of overplaying a strength, and that strength is humility. This is something that, in reasonable doses, I greatly value in my colleagues. Humility allows us to be vulnerable, admit when we are wrong, and see when we have an opportunity to learn from others. This is HUGELY valuable. But if you overplay that humility and it turns into being in a constant state of low-confidence, that’s not good for anyone.

It’s great to have a sense of where you can grow and do better. But it’s important to embrace your strengths and believe people when they say you are doing well. Otherwise you will drive yourself crazy wondering whether people think you are incompetent, when in your case they apparently think you are doing great!

One interesting technique for this is to take the job description of your current role, or a job ladder description if your company has one. Take green, yellow and pink highlighters and go through all the skills and rate yourself with green = doing well, yellow = developing, red = not yet developed. Then have a trusted mentor, could be your boss but could also be someone else who knows your work well, go through and do the same thing independently. Then compare notes, Based on your description, I suspect you will have graded yourself a lot more harshly than the person whose opinion you so value. There will undoubtedly still be areas to grow, but you can relax knowing that you are not an imposter. You are talented human! Hope that helps :)

This is just a taste of Margaret’s AMA. Check out the full conversation ✨here!✨

Designer News is where the design community meets. Join us!

Hey all!

We’re Super Team Deluxe, a collaborative funhouse helmed by friends and co-humans Rogie King, Justin Mezzell, Hannah Mezzell, Drew Melton, & Alicja Colon.

For years — literally years — Rogie King & I (Justin Mezzell) have been kicking the tires on a number of collaborative projects that we never really got off the ground, largely due to disorganization, motivation and/or general lack of prioritization. This April, we decided to put a hard deadline on a project launch wherein if we hadn’t launched by Summer, we’d stop pretending like we were going to launch anything at all. Turns out, that’s exactly what we needed. So we rounded up some folks we’ve always wanted to collaborate with, tightened the velcro on our runnings shoes, and barreled blindly down the road like a clumsy bat with misshapen wings out of hell.

The idea was simple: Most of us have been working the web for quite a while, so it seemed like a nice departure to work in the world of physical goods, since we so rarely get to hold anything we’ve made physically in our sweaty palms. After scrapping a few dead-ends, we ultimately decided to leave room for these ideas to evolve and take shape under the moniker “Super Team Deluxe”. The idea has been to simply create products that we’d like for other humans that might like them too. As of now, we’ve launched with a limited edition run of lapel pins and a couple patches, but we’re trying to leave the road open for exploration. After all, we’re still learning a lot and we’d love to invite you in on the journey.

We’re here to answer your questions on design, competitive snacking, the human struggle for significance, and whatever else.

Should designers code? (Daryl Ginn)

It’s a scientific fact that designers should code, break dance with broken legs, be able to recite every lyrics of Barenaked Ladies’ 1998 breakout hit “One Week”, divide by zero, complete at least one Olympic feat better than an Olympian, and/or hold a public office for no less than 17 years. These aren’t our standards by which to measure your candidacy as a designer, merely the universe’s.

It’s just science and you can’t argue that. (Justin Mezzell)

It depends on what kind of designer you are. I started out by learning HTML and building websites. In high school I got an internship at a local web design and development company where I learned to program in ASP/Access/Flash/PHP/etc. I can definitely hack my way through a Shopify theme tweak if I need. However, I don’t consider this a necessity to being a good designer to be honest. I removes a barrier for certain personal projects (launching a small product line/etc) but otherwise it doesn’t contribute to my design directly.

In short — If you’re really passionate about something don’t let other people’s requirements hold you back. Be curious, be passionate and go. (Drew Melton)

document.getElementById(‘daryl-ginn’).style.perspective = ‘inherit’; (Rogie King)

Super Team Deluxe on Twitter

If you dramatically lower your standards enough, Super Team Deluxe will be the greatest thing that's ever happened to you.

Do any of you have children, if so how do you find time to to work on side projects like this, and still find time to be a parent and support a family financially? (Bevan Stephens)

Rogie, Justin & Hannah, and I all have kids — 8 all together. That’s a lot of poop.

For me, with 3, I tend to only work on side gigs after they go to bed. My husband and I have a pattern on certain days we have “alone” time — pursuing individually what we are passionate about. Setting those family priorities and expectations help us more forward smoothly.

In a collaboration like this, it’s important for us to keep in mind of each other’s family needs. Meaning, when it was time for me to craft the photos, the crew looked to ME to set that timeline — then they respected that decision and set it up in the grand timeline. (Alicja Colon)

I have 3 spawn and a lady-unit that’s chosen to reside with me for all eternity…or until I die, whatever may come sooner.

Bevan, really for me it comes to choice. I made the choice to turn down other opportunities, be it being a regional foosball champ, or even reading a cool book, or seriously working on other pieces of art in my spare time. The team did the same. We chose to fire all of our ammo at this, and like Alicja said. In our spare time. In the off hours of the evening after the kids goto bed. Or at 6am. It’s a bit like a workout routine. It’s hard to keep but if you schedule it and are serious about it, even with a family its attainable. (Rogie King)

The product photography on the site is pretty great. Could give some background on the process in its creation?

Also I almost used the abbreviation “your STD photography” but chose the high road instead. (Heath V.)

Well, Heath, this is my fav question yet asked. It could be that it’s directly related at me, or your moral high role abstaining from “STD photography” — but more likely the former.

First is concept… it needed to be simple enough to further the idea of the product, but also be unique in that it didn’t step on another product photo’s toes. I reach out to others for concepts, but ultimately the designer of the pin is the Creative Director of the shoot.

Second is production of sets… props, backgrounds, colors, it’s all considered. Some propers are made out of fake blood, others out of paper. Many times the concept is figured out but it takes lots of iterations on executing with with set to find a solid direction.

Third is lighting …. light is part of the story. The angle, the modifiers — again this is iteration.

Lastly — post production. Few of the product shots were simple edits and retouching, while others are composites.

I’ve broadcasted the production of Untitled-1.ai on Twitch, if you’re interested: https://www.twitch.tv/alicjacolon/v/81756054 (Alicja Colon)

Hey Guys! — thanks for joining us…

• How does the process for designing, prepping, and approving designs for pins or patches differ from something like a simple print job?
• What’s the best way for someone to keep tabs on when new items hit the store?
• You mention the possibility of collaborations in your W(ho)TF page :) …are you thinking these products could eventually be sold on the site?…or more so meant for the collaborator’s use only?
• What’s the coolest and/or most random thing on the internet you keep coming back to as of late? (could be a website, service, album on Spotify, etc) (maxlind)
• I haven’t been in the Print Kingdom for some time, but I used to work on magazines. That was definitely a tougher world to work in as print weeks were essentially spent sleeping in the office on a copier or under a desk. So far, we haven’t pulled those hours, but I’ve also noticed that while these are much smaller pieces to work, the time we have to spend concepting is so much longer. Getting the sizes just right for this medium has been one of the more fuzzy areas as designs that are too complex get muddied and also start to resonate less with folks. This first batch was definitely a bit of a wide swath in terms of complexity and style since we really wanted to pressure test the canvas in what this medium was capable of.
• As for updates, we’ve got a newsletter that you can sign up for on the site as well as our various social accounts on this here internet viaTwitter, Instagram, and Facebook.
• Collaborations! Right now, we’re just getting things going and figuring out just what our current bandwidth allows for. In the future, we’d love to be able to bring in other artists on goods!
• Regretfully, I’m a voracious consumer of Imgur and dank memes. That includes but isn’t limited to cool/random. (Justin Mezzell)

Super Team Deluxe on Twitter

Pro Tip: You can use "Member of the Super Team" on all résumés, portfolios, and legal documents for mixed results.

What designers are your inspiration at the present time? (Angel Vasquez)

Justin, Alicja and Drew. (Rogie King)

Tony Dispigna, Ken Barber (forever), Herb Lubalin, Erik Marinovich, Neil Hubert, Tattoo artists, Simon Walker, Steve Powers, the Hoodzpa Twins, and I could go on and on… (Drew Melton)

Oh, great question! Loving the work of James Gilleard right now. Such stunning work with geometry and creating depth. Also, huge fan of MUTI as their work is so diverse it’s overwhelming. Also, these folks at Super Team Deluxe. It’s why we’re working together :) (Justin Mezzell)

I think for me it’s both the caliber of work, but also the heart behind it. Frankly I’m always smitten by the work of the Focus Lab team and Super Team — as each designer I’ve worked alongside are humble, about collaboration, and highly skilled. (Alicja Colon)

This is just a taste of Super Team Deluxe’s AMA. Check out the full conversation✨ here!✨

Designer News is where the design community meets. Join us!

Hey everyone! I’m Jeremiah Shoaf, a freelance designer who works on lots of side projects, with the most notable being Typewolf.

Typewolf showcases web fonts in the wild and features curated font lists like mycollection of Google Fonts. The site has gotten fairly popular over the last several years with over 250,000 unique visitors a month. I do everything on Typewolf — design, development, curation, writing, etc.

I’ve also been freelancing full-time since 2007 and have worked with clients like Discovery Channel, Pepsi, Sharp and The Washington Post.

I live in Colorado with my wife, 6 month old daughter and hyperactive yellow lab.

Feel free to ask me anything about Typewolf, Google Fonts, running side projects, freelancing, being a first-time father or anything else!

Do you monetize Typewolf? If yes, how and (approximately) how effectively? If not, is that something you’re considering? (Sacha Greif)

I do indeed monetize the site but not super aggressively. I earn a small affiliate commission when I link to fonts on MyFonts and Fontspring. It’s not much but it helps support the site.

I also sell two $39 guides — The Definitive Guide to Free Fonts and Typewolf’s Guide to Typekit. The guides earn much more than the affiliate links.

I don’t make enough for a full-time living but I make enough to want to continue working on the site. I’m actually currently working on a new product that I’m planning on launching sometime in the next several months. I’m hoping that will turn Typewolf more into a real sustainable business than a side project.

Thanks for being the coolest! Crap, that’s not a question. Okay, here’s some questions:

1. How did you get the first people to hear about Typewolf? I tell everyone I know, but how did the first 100–500 people hear about it?
2. Do you think there will there ever be a condensed all-caps serif trend like there was with condensed all-caps sans? (Andy Stone)

1) When I first launched Typewolf in 2013 I literally just emailed everyone I could think of saying “check out this new project I just launched”. From there, the site got featured in a few newsletters like Webdesigner Depot and maybe Smashing Magazine (can’t remember exactly). That gave it some nice initial traction. I would like to say after that the site spiraled in popularity but really it just died down after it was no longer the hot new thing. At that point it was just months and months of grinding things out with not many people knowing about the site until it slowly started to grow again.

I see that happen a lot with side projects. They get that initial buzz because everyone likes to talk about what is new and fresh, but then things die down pretty quickly and the creator gets bored with it and gives up. I think the key is just to keep grinding it out if you really believe in your project.

2) This is a trend I would love to see. Wired are doing that using Ambroise (which is available on Typekit but not many people know about it). We see that so much with condensed American Gothics and DIN Condensed that I think a serif trend would feel really fresh.

What is your favorite web type trend that has occurred within the last 5–8 years? (Christopher Reath)

The explosion of web fonts would be an easy answer but I would have to go with super large type as a design element. I love seeing the details of a typeface when it is set at 100px+. Obviously it’s possible to go overboard with that but when done tastefully I really dig it.

Love your site! How do you find all these sites for your ‘Site of the Day’? Do you have a process? (There’s usually a large number of well designed sites I haven’t seen referenced anywhere else!) (Nathan M Long)

I spend a ton of time on site selection, so glad you noticed it. :) I have probably a dozen or so gallery sites I regularly visit, with my favorites being beingsiteInspire and httpster, but I try look beyond some of the obvious sources. I follow a lot of agencies I admire to see when they launch new work.

Probably half the sites I feature come from email submissions. I have a nice network of designer pals that send me not only new sites they launch but other sites they stumble across from surfing the web. Those tend to be the best/most unique submissions.

1)How do you overcome the problem of typefaces that would fit what you want perfectly but have been overused or used by big brands/companies?

2) What do you think is the most sustainable model for selling web fonts? (I like buying outright, self host and use as much as I want for a certain number of views per month overall).

3) Have you ever thought about making your own typeface? If so, when you have the letter shapes, how do you work out the spacing (first sidebearings and then kerning)? Scouring the internet, there doesn’t seem to be a good starting rule of thumb for this…(M T)

1) If the typeface is perfect for your project then I wouldn’t worry too much about the typeface being too popular overall as long as it isn’t overused within your target market. Sometimes things feel really overplayed to designers but will feel new and fresh to your target audience.

If it’s a typeface that is really used everywhere then it may be worth looking into different typefaces that share a similar aesthetic. I did a blog post about the 10 most popular fonts of the year where I listed four alternatives to each typeface that isn’t as overused. That could be a good place to start.

You could also just use the overused typeface in a new or different way. Maybe use a different weight or style or do stuff with color to make it stand out.

2) I prefer buying as well rather than renting through a service. I’ve heard type designers don’t make much through services like Typekit unless the font is super popular. If I were a type designer, I would just focus on doing really amazing work and then selling at a higher price point more as a luxury item. Trying to compete on price is difficult as there are so many free fonts available now. There is an “exclusivity” factor and I think people will pay money for that, especially for a really high quality product.

3) The more I learn about type, the more complex typeface design seems. I feel like it would take years and years of study and practice to create something I would be proud of. So I really don’t have any desire to go down that route.

As far as sidebearings vs kerning, I would check out the TypeDrawers forum. That is where all the type designers hang out and they have lots of posts on the technicalities of typeface design.

Don’t forget to check out Jeremiah’s full AMA here.

Designer News is where the design community meets. Join us!