Sketching for UX Newsletter Issue #8 (March 2023)

My favorite design and visual thinking resources I discovered in March

Mar 31, 2023

My work

Before sharing my favorites, here are some pieces of my own work:

#1 WebExpo 2023 Conference (Prague, 19-21 April) - win a ticket!

I became a media partner of the WebExpo conference, and the organizers has generously offered one conference ticket I can give to one of my subscribers. WebExpo is my favorite design event, the quality of the talks is outstanding, and the vibes are awesome, too. If you are interested in winning a ticket, here you can find all the information (it is a LinkedIn post, it’ll take around 2 minutes to participate, the deadline is this Sunday). Also, use the code SKETCHINGFORUX at the checkout to save 20% on the conference ticket price. And even if you can’t attend, you should watch back some of the great talks from previous years, e.g. I highly recommend these ones:

The Problems in Your Head - How Cognitive Biases Affect Your Research by Zsuzsa Kovács
Surgical UX: Information design for visualisation systems in surgery by Tim Caynes
Bringing Personality Back To The Web by Vitaly Friedman
How to design a design workshop by Bob Marvan
Enterprise UX: Harder, better by Běla Beránková and Jan Torsten Valder
Microcopy: Your users will fall in love by Kinneret Yifrah

#2 My first lesson inside 10X

I published my first lesson inside the 10X Designers Community, it is about training your designer eye, and I’m going to publish my second lesson next week!

Join me in this learning journey! If you use this link to buy your membership, you can support me! Let me know in a DM either on Twitter or on LinkedIn if you are interested in the membership, I can offer you a discount code that provides 25% off the first month.

#3 Typography Study Guide - my newest article

In this study guide, I collected my favorite resources that’ll help you develop your typography skills. TLDR: I highly recommend Supercharge Design’s comprehensive Typography Masterclass (currently its release price is $249, so you get a $100 off discount), it will give you a great foundation, then you should complement your knowledge by the other resources I mention in this article.

+1: I updated the StartHereDesigner.com website - the database of my favorite design resources, now it contains 455 resources. I also added new items to my Figma Study Guide.

Favorite resources

Here are my highlights of March, 2023:

#1 Drawing to Think by Jorge Arango (article)

It’s an older article but I’ve encountered it recently. Jorge explains how you can use pen and paper to think better, and he introduces drawing as a thinking tool. A great read for any designers.

#2 UI Design Systems Mastery by Marina Budarina (book)
I discovered Marina’s work some weeks ago. It is a practical guide to creating your first design system! You’ll gain a comprehensive understanding of how design systems are constructed, and you’ll learn all the key steps needed to design your own. (Here you can download a free chapter)

#3 16 little UI design rules that make a big impact

Having a system of logical rules helps you efficiently make informed design decisions. In this article, Adham Dannaway shows you this in practice.

#4 How to think when you draw issue 6

How to think when you draw is one of my favorite visual thinking books, I own the first 5 issues, and the Etherington brothers have launched the Kickstarter campaign for their 6th book (you can order all the previous ones, too). And if you don’t want to have them in a book format, you can access all their tutorials for free here.

#5 Visualizing direction and the use of arrows by Joseph Mackereth

In this article, Joseph explores how graphic arrows support our natural abilities and make us better wayfinders.

#6 Framer community

This community is for starting with Framer, asking questions, finding answers, and sharing incredible sites. You'll find a lot of tutorials, resources and a short course (for free), too!

#7 Smart Interface Design Patterns (video course)

This epic 9-hour long course by Vitaly Friedman explores 100s of hand-picked examples — from complex navigation to filters, tables and forms. I attended Vitaly’s interface design workshop 3 years ago, and I had a blast, so I knew that I’ll love this comprehensive course. This is one of the best investments you can make in order to learn and understand common design patterns.

#8 30-minute Challenge vs. Real Design Process: Which One Wins? (1.5-hour long video)

Chances are that you are familiar with the Relume Design League (if not, check it out here, it’s the e-sport of designing landing pages). In this 1.5-hour long video, one of the participants, design system expert Dan Mall explains how he would tackle the design challenge he was given during the competition in a real life situation, it’s really interesting to observe Dan’s thought process.

#9 Design decisions of the recent Wikipedia redesign

For us designers it is a good practice to analyze designs and think about why something was designed the given way. Well, in this case you don’t have to guess, this detailed explanation of the reasons behind the different decisions is a fascinating read.

#10 UX Research templates Odette Jansen

A fantastic collection of Notion and Figma research templates - both for secondary and primary research methods. As a former UX research team lead, I can really appreciate this collection, it is a true goldmine.

+1 Pablo Stanley has started his newsletter, you can subscribe here. (If you want to get inspired by his drawing style, and have a good laugh, check out his design team comics)

Favorite posts (LinkedIn & Twitter)

#1 Fridays with Fons

Fons Mans & Figma's new series contain visual experiments, tutorials and design challenges. The first tutorial is about creating geometric illustrations inside Figma.

#2 Useful Knowledge Hubs for UX Designers

A collection by Vitaly Friedman that contains useful Notion boards, repositories and guides — put together in one single place.

#3 Details on the Microsoft Loop website

An insightful design analysis by Anthony Hobday

#4 Midjourney threads

A compilation of Nick St. Pierre's Midjourney threads so far, including tutorials on how he uses his Additive Prompting framework to generate characters/models, design sets and more.

#5 The 5 levels of design originality

Tommy Geoco shares his thoughts on using design inspiration for our needs.

My UX Knowledge Base Sketches about Quantitative Research

Instead of sharing my latest UX Knowledge Piece Sketch (which is WIP, it is about using modals, hopefully I’ll publish it next week), I’d like to bring your attention to some of my older (but still very relevant) sketches: I created a series on data + UX design, here are the 6 parts:

Special thanks to Nick Babich for rediscovering my UX Metrics sketch :)

Coupon codes for my Udemy courses

Sketching for UX Designers course - 86% off coupon code, €12.99
Be a better designer by understanding development aspects course - 86% off coupon code, €12.99

Thanks for reading my newsletter, I hope you enjoyed it! 💙

Krisztina

P.S.: Have you written or found an interesting design / visual thinking article or other resource lately? Please send me a DM on Twitter! I might feature your resource in the next issue!

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