📰 3 ARTICLES
🌟 Designing the Future: A Conversation with Visual Electric Cofounder Colin Dunn 🌟
- We’re excited to announce a special event we’ll be hosting with the co-founder and CEO of the innovative design tool Visual Electric, Colin Dunn, running on Tuesday, September 17th, at 1PM EST.
- Colin will be joining us to share his journey from product designer to pioneering the first AI image generator made specifically for designers. He will also offer a live demo of Visual Electric, showcasing the tool’s unique capabilities and why it’s an indispensable tool for modern designers.
- This is a free event, and all are welcome and encouraged to sign up. Register here, and receive a recording even if you can’t attend live.
When Should We Trust AI?
- UX Specialist Caleb Sponheim discusses the concept of “Magic 8 Ball” thinking, a call-back to the childhood toy that would provide arbitrary answers to questions asked; in AI, this thinking refers to implicitly trusting a promoted response without critical assessment or fact-checking.
- Sponheim, who works for UX thought group Nielsen Norman, warns against placing too much trust in AI, as it can produce errors or "hallucinations", emphasizing the importance of verifying AI outputs—especially in professional contexts, where incorrect data or information can have strong consequences.
- “When adopting any tool for professional use, you must ask yourself: Does this save time? Is this worth it? If you were required to look over every email sent on your behalf by a hypothetical executive assistant, you might be better off writing that email yourself. The same goes for AI.”
How to Defend Your Design Process
- UX design and front-end dev expert Vitaly Friedman provides strategies for defending your design process against pressures to speed up from stakeholders, highlighting the importance of clarifying expectations, emphasizing the value of design, and maintaining open communication.
- Friedman explains and champions a process called “Event Storming”, which provides a highly visual and thoroughly demonstrative understanding of the necessary steps of a design process, and how each adds relevance and value, to help with aligning those outside of UX.
- “I can’t emphasize enough just how incredibly impactful this can be to create a shared understanding about what we are doing, how we are doing it, and what is required from all teams for a successful delivery.”
💜 PORTFOLIO INSPIRATION
Anna Li, a UX Academy graduate, puts empathy and ease at the forefront of her design work. She brings her prior experience in the healthcare industry as a nurse to Masked, an app where nurses can connect to help find community and support when dealing with burnout. And in her design for WatchBuddy, Anna helps take the exhaustion out of design fatigue by providing users with customized streaming options based on interest and mood in the moment.
Got a portfolio you love that you’d like to share with our audience? Email your suggestions to hello@designlab.com.
💡 INTERESTING STUFF...
- Is the AI Bubble Bursting
- Using LinkedIn Wisely—Without the Cringe
- Podcast: The Intelligence All Around Us
- How Creatively Nutritious Is Your Feed?
Great things are not done by impulse, but a series of small things brought together. — Vincent Van Gogh
🧪 FROM THE LAB
🎉 New Course Announcement: Design 101
At Designlab, we’re proud to have helped thousands of students launch and grow their careers in digital design. But now more than ever, non-designers–from marketers and content creators to entrepreneurs and business owners—are finding themselves doing more design work.
We’re therefore excited to announce our new Design 101, our latest 4-week course aimed at teaching practical, actionable, design principles to non-designers. Whether you’re creating marketing materials, looking to sharpen your presentations, or building emails and graphics, this course is perfect for anyone who wants to improve the impact and effectiveness of their visual deliverables.
Our first cohort of Design 101 launches on October 25th, and we’re offering a $100 discount to students in this inaugural cohort. Sign up for our upcoming webinar on Tuesday, August 27th at 12PM EST, or check out the course page on our site to learn more.
🎤 Upcoming Design Events
- August 29th 1PM EST: Using UX Thinking to Solve Everyday Problems
- September 5th 1PM EST: Networking Made Easy
- September 11th 4PM EST: Generative UI: Designing Inclusive Products for Everyone
- September 23rd 4PM EST: Paths to Design Leadership
🚀 Designlab Courses Launching Soon
We have a slate of courses launching over the next couple of weeks for both beginner and advanced UX/UI designers.
- Data-Driven Design, launching Friday, August 30th
- Prototyping in Figma, launching Thursday, September 5th
- UX Academy Foundations, launching Monday, September 9th
- Advanced Figma, launching Friday, September 13th
Learn more, find upcoming webinar dates, and enroll on each course's dedicated site page.
