Once a month, we send out design highlights from around the web. This time, we've got some old anti-alcohol posters from the Soviet Union, a story about how King Camp Gillette revolutionized product pricing, and a nice writeup from Marvel on maintaining their style guide using Sketch.
We’ve also got 3 awesome articles from the UX Academy community, and some more posts from the Designlab blog for you to catch up on. Enjoy!
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Anti-alcohol posters from the Soviet Union’s “dry law” campaign
“A new book features a collection of Soviet anti-alcohol posters produced during Mikhail Gorbachev’s unsuccessful campaign of 1985-88 that sought to eradicate alcohol abuse in the country. Many of the graphics make use of visual metaphors: bottles and glasses are repeatedly depicted as trapping the drinker, or transforming into weapons to wreak havoc on individuals’ lives.” (Mark Sinclair, Creative Review)
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How a razor revolutionized the way we pay for stuff
“The man who founded the Gillette corporation, King Camp Gillette, had some surprising philosophical ideas. In 1894, he advocated a new system of ‘equality, virtue, and happiness’, in which just one corporation—the United Company—would make all of life’s necessities, as cost-effectively as possible. His idea didn’t take off. But a year later, in 1895, King Camp Gillette had another brainwave that really did change the world. He invented the disposable razor blade.” (Tim Harford, BBC News)
![](https://cdn.prod.website-files.com/65130e79c72ae8812db3412e/656fc637484781b9bb721291_designlab-digest-2-1.png)
Creating and Maintaining the Marvel Style Guide in Sketch
“The essence of digital product design lies in identifying problems, solving those and improving user experiences; the visual part of things should merely be an enhancement to it all, not a blocker. One way to stop spending time fiddling with font sizes and spacing, whilst improving consistency, is to build a comprehensive collection of highly-reusable design elements and decide on a set of rules for combining them together. Through building our style guide last year, this is just what we have achieved at Marvel.” (Yavor Punchev, Marvel)
![](https://cdn.prod.website-files.com/65130e79c72ae8812db3412e/656fc637484781b9bb72128e_designlab-digest-2-4.jpeg)
From the Designlab Community
- Sonja Bobrowska (UX Academy Graduate, Cohort 1): How do user research findings contribute to developing a strategy?
- Robbin Arcega (UX Academy Graduate, Ive Cohort): Designlab: That Overtime Life. Also check out Part 2!
- Zach Fichman-Klein (UX Academy Graduate, Eames Cohort): 12 Tips for Conducting Effective User Interviews
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In case you missed it
From the Designlab blog, here’s a selection of great articles related to this month’s Digest:
- 11 Tips For Building Great Color Palettes
- 10 Ways To Excel In A UX Bootcamp—Even With A Full-Time Job
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