📰 3 ARTICLES
Plotlines, Pixels, & Poetry: The Art of Crafting Captivating Narratives
- The Adobe team explores how storytelling is an essential tool for designers to create meaningful connections with audiences, highlighting the intersection of narrative techniques and effective design.
- Featuring insights from top creatives, the power of empathy, emotion, and context is emphasized in shaping compelling stories, and also provides practical advice on using storytelling to elevate design projects for deeper human connection.
- “Whether documenting a project, persuading a stakeholder, interviewing for a new job, or simply communicating with people, the ability to craft an effective, engaging, and memorable story is nothing short of a superpower.”
What Not to Include on Your Designer Resume
- Product designer and mentor Shai Krishna offers practical tips for creating a standout designer resume in 2025, emphasizing the importance of conciseness, relevance, and clarity to meet modern industry expectations.
- Advice is given against outdated practices like listing exhaustive projects, unrelated work experience, or overly artistic layouts, instead encouraging applicants to highlight measurable contributions and relevant skills with clear, professional formatting, offering tangible tips along the way.
- “Creating a designer resume that shines in 2025 is not just about what you include — it’s about what you leave out. With competition high and industry expectations evolving, knowing how to keep your resume concise, modern, and relevant is essential.”
Crafting an Unforgettable Config Talk
- Carly Ayers, writer and editor at Figma, uses sessions from this year’s Config as a template for crafting compelling talks no matter where you are, emphasizing key strategies such as taking risks, offering a fresh perspective, and being authentically yourself.
- Using examples of varying talks from ConFig, tactics on how to best engage and inspire your audience across different topics are explored, with top product designers offering their feedback on why specific sessions spoke to them.
- “Tackle industry challenges with fresh perspectives… to make your talk resonate, identify pain points, share candid observations, and propose new paths forward.”
💜 PORTFOLIO INSPIRATION
Jastin Aguinaldo, a UX Academy graduate, brings a multifaceted background in marketing and branding to his UX design portfolio. A keen eye for UI detail helps bring PlanWell, an end-to-end app designed to make meal prep easy, to life. Strong user research to understand pain points is showcased in the UX work for meditation app Aware, where Jastin adds features to make saving and filtering favorited content an easy option for existing users.
Got a portfolio you love that you’d like to share with our audience? Email your suggestions to hello@designlab.com.
💡 INTERESTING STUFF...
- New Feature Allows for an Instagram Reset
- Reimagined Folklore for the Digital Age
- Silence to Help Slow Down
- Case Study: Corporate Gets Culture Coupled with Fun
People ignore designs that ignore people. — Frank Chimero (designer)
🧪 FROM THE LAB
🚀 UX Academy Foundations Launching Soon
Our December cohort of UX Academy Foundations is launching in just over two weeks, on Monday, December 9th.
The December cohort is a great opportunity to set yourself up to jump into our award-winning career accelerator UX Academy in the new year. Learn UI & visual design skills, gain proficiency in Figma, experience our 1:1 expert mentorship, and join our dynamic student community.
Learn more at our upcoming webinar this Tuesday, November 26th, at 2pm ET. Register here—if you can’t make it live, we’ll send you a recording.
Ready to enroll? Do so here.
📊 Data-Driven Design Begins in Two Weeks
Our next cohort of Data-Driven Design launches two weeks from today, on Friday, December 6th. This course is perfect for working designers who want to take their skills with data-based design decisions to the next level.
In this six-week course, you’ll gain confidence working with data, understand how to leverage data in conversations with stakeholders, and much more.
Ready to become a more data-driven designer in 2025? Don’t wait—secure your space today.
