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Design The List
Michael McWatters wrote a great piece on the life of a commercial designer. Twenty-nine statements most working designers have heard or used. Here are a few of our favorites:
You may be a user, but you’re not the user.
You don’t label and organize your layers because you work on tight deadlines. Other designers don’t label and manage their layers because they’re lazy sociopaths.
The best idea will come to you while riding a bike, kneading bread, prepping for a colonoscopy, or any other time you can’t act on it.
Suppose you have ever been a working designer or, like most of us, a designer by necessity. Most of us don’t hire a designer for our Twitter page or Tik Tok. We fumble through design ideas and apps we find online. On the other hand, great design is just like porn; you know it when you see it.
As writers, editors, and publishers in the newsletter world, we tend to think of design as a secondary element when it is as important as the letters and words we combine to create stories. In the end, we both use lines to tell stories.
lorem ipsum
Another statement from McWatters about when to use placeholder text led to an expanded idea from Cat Overman. In her article, she writes about the downside of using placeholder text and how it might confuse the stakeholders you are showing the draft work.
We agree with this overall assumption, and we discussed the topic with another designer we work with and developers who need to show the beta version of certain apps in the builds. Most of the comments agreed with Overman but argued that if placeholder text or even images are used, it is typically only there for layout purposes or dimension plotting. Before early drafts or beta versions of projects are shown to stakeholders, all placeholders are removed.
Overman does get to this conclusion in her piece and explains that using Intent Text is better than placeholder text. The intent text means something more in-line with what the content will eventually be. Our designers said yes, that’s what we do. If you ask a designer to design or lay something out for you, they don’t include big blocks of images called test images goes here.
It comes down to who you are presenting to. If you give to a team, you will hand it off to a client, don’t use placeholders. You can use placeholders if you are working within your design/development team.
Stranger Things
Mysterious Ways
When it comes to product design, Apple leads. As legend has it, that came from the Iconic Top, Steve Jobs. Recently Jony Ive Apples’ a long-time top designer, left Apple (2019) to start his design firm.
Evans Hankey replaced I’ve in the Lead Design role in 2019; Hankey, the VP of Industrial Design, has been the top designer for almost three years. She will remain in the position for another six months while they work on her replacement.
Rumors and speculation are a brewin’. We will continue to follow this story and report back.
[Music Notes]
The When We Were Young 2022 Festival got off to a rough start this weekend. Hurricane-force winds were expected to hit Las Vegas on Saturday, October 22nd, forcing organizers to shut down the festival for the day. The team is digging in now and will report more on this as we verify the stories.
Rehearsal Rooms:
Let this one inch your brain for a bit; coming soon!
More New Stuff:
Don’t Tell A Soul
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Jukebox Shuffle
Thoughts on Music
Best Double Bass Song Ever!
Click on the Apple Music image to listen to the song on Apple Music or on the Spotify Image to listen to Spotify.
Words from Gen X
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With A Shout Team