The Designlab Digest–July 2017

Once a month, we send out design highlights from around the web. This time, you can read how Spotify overcame a fragmented product design, learn about how a Creative Director copes with ADHD, and hear from Errol Morris on how typography shapes our perception of truth.

After that, we've got 3 great articles from the Designlab community, links to some awesome free design resources, and more posts from the Designlab blog for you to catch up on. Enjoy!

Design Doesn’t Scale

“When I joined Spotify’s design team in 2012, the level of inconsistency and fragmentation shocked me. The premise for my quest was Design Doesn’t Scale or: How does a team of distributed designers, spread across different time-zones, projects and competing objectives ever find a way to work together so they can create one coherent experience? Here’s what we discovered.” (Stanley Wood, Design Director, Spotify)

4Creative’s John Allison on living with ADHD and the importance of asking for help

“Last year, John Allison, an ECD at 4Creative, Channel 4’s in-house creative agency, was diagnosed with suffering from Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder, a condition he has lived with all his life and which has had a significant impact on his personal life and work. Here he talks to Creative Review about 'coming out' to colleagues and friends as suffering from a mental health condition, and the importance of asking for help if you are struggling.” (Eliza Williams, Creative Review)

Errol Morris: How Typography Shapes our Perception of Truth

“In 2013, acclaimed filmmaker and author Errol Morris ran a bold experiment. With the collusion of the New York Times, he asked 45,000 readers to take an online test. The test allegedly measured whether or not readers were optimists or pessimists. But in reality, Morris was trying to find out if the typeface a statement was written in had any impact on a reader’s willingness to agree with that statement. Simply put, are some typefaces more believable than others?” (John Brownlee, Co.Design)

From the Designlab Community

• Dan Andrews (UX Academy Graduate): I finished Designlab’s UX Academy. Here are 10 things I learned

• Sara Vilas Santiago (Designlab in-house mentor): How I went from burnout back to happiness in 10 steps

• Andrew Wilshere (Designlab content writer): The lessons I learned from a logo design project for Warrington Choral Society

Awesome Free Design Resources

• Typespiration—inspirational web font combinations with color palettes and ready-to-use HTML/CSS code

• Specimens of chromatic wood type, borders, etc. from 1874—made available by Columbia University Libraries Digital Collections

• The Noun Project—nearly a million curated icons, created by a global community

In case you missed it

• What On Earth Is A Brutalist Website? 5 Things Today’s Designers Can Learn From Brutalism

• 5 Ways To Get The Most Out Of A Designlab Short Course

• Great Design Thinkers: Tim Brown on Design Thinking

Want to learn more about design? Here at Designlab, we offer a range of design short courses as well as an advanced UX Academy program.

Working 1-on-1 with a design mentor, students receive feedback on a portfolio of UX projects through a dedicated online platform, community critique sessions, and video calls. Find out more!​