The Designlab Digest–May 2017

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!

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)

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)

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)

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

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
• User Personas: What Are They And Why Use Them?
• 10 Ways To Excel In A UX Bootcamp—Even With A Full-Time Job

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