Sketching for UX Newsletter Issue #12 (July 2023)
My favorite design & visual thinking resources I discovered in June
My work
Before sharing my favorite resources, here are some of my achievements:
#1 Proof copy of my book
After some proofreading and final editing, I ordered a proof copy of my book: The 100-day Long UX Visual Library Building Challenge, and it looks awesome :) You, dear subscriber, get the first sneak-peak of it:
It’ll be released in September: the physical (soft cover) copy will be available on amazon.com, while you’ll be able to grab a copy of the digital format via my Lemonsqueezy shop (on a pay-what-you-want basis).
#2 Ideation workshop at xLabs
xLabs’s UX Project course is a 10-week long intensive UX Bootcamp, I’ve been a mentor and trainer for more than four years now, I teach ideation techniques and sketching. Here is the result of my 4-hour long ideation workshop format, it was a pleasure to work with this enthusiastic summer-cohort!
Feel free to reach out to me if you are interested in my ideation or sketching / visual thinking workshop format!
#3 Product Hunt success of 10x
The 10x Designers community has become the Product of the Month in the Education category!
Join me on this learning journey, let’s grow together as design professionals! (Launch sale: $99 instead of $129 for 3 months)
Favorite resources
Here are my favorite discoveries of July, 2023:
#1 Invisible Details of Interaction Design
If you just check out one thing, this should be it. This is an extraordinary design essay by Rauno Freiberg.
#2 The UX Of Flight Searches: How We Challenged Industry Standards
An epic - fictitious - case study by Robert Goesch. “With this study, we want to question habits, break down barriers and offer new food for thought to improve interactions.”
#3 Workshop Patterns
A collection of 100+ plays: “The Workshop Patterns Playbook is a rich, curated collection of 100+ versatile workshop exercises, designed to support facilitators at every level.”
#4 Uplifting Shopify Polaris
The story of uplifting Polaris’s design language - one of my favorite design systems of all time. “Ultimately, our design language had to make the product feel more effective and coherent in the context of commerce, while being aesthetically pleasing, and able to create moments of joy.”
#5 Loading & progress indicators — UI Components series
Taras Bakusevych wrote a fantastic article about one of my favorite topics inside design: the UX of waiting. “In this article, we’ll dive into the importance of loading and progress indicators, psychology of waiting and explore best practices to create effective and user-friendly designs.”
My sketch about this topic: Progress and Perceived Performance
#6 The Power of Product Thinking
Julie Zhuo - author of one of my favorite books about design leadership and management - published a great piece on the The Power of Product Thinking. “The simplest way to define product thinking is that it is the skill of knowing what makes a product useful — and loved — by people.”
#7 Handoff Helpers 2.0 by
Ridd has updated his awesome “component library built to help designers communicate more effectively inside of Figma.”
#8 What’s The Perfect Design Process? by
There is no such thing as “the perfect” design process. Vitaly wrote a great article on this topic. “Of course, there is no “right-and-only” way to frame a design process. It’s defined by whatever works well for you and for your team.”
My sketches about this topic:
Product Development Processes
Design Workflow - this sketch is often misunderstood when it’s shared on social media without its original context: naturally, each and every design process is different, and it is not a linear process. This sketch serves as the table of contents for my other 99 UX Knowledge Base sketches, so you can use it as a starting point for browsing.
#9 The difference between creative & uncreative people
I really love Tobias van Schneider’s thought provoking pieces. This one is about fully experiencing moments instead of just quickly capturing them by our phone. “When we satisfy our desire to certify the moment with a Tweet, or a Story, or a text to a friend, or a TikTok video, we sell it short. We reduce the experience to a single, throwaway-able moment, swiped by in a second, and we set the moment free.” […] “What if, instead, we went home and journaled about it? Or attempted to capture it with watercolor? Or turned it into a short story?”
#10 Recent design
You know that I love bite-sized design inspiration. Recent.design collects “The best of recent web, interface and interaction design on X, formally known as Twitter.”
+1 The modern curriculum
This piece by Seth Godin really made me think. How should we redefine the curriculum being taught to kids at school?
Favorite posts [LinkedIn & Twitter]
#1 Aleks’s newsletter
Aleks started newsletter called This week in design where he summarizes what happened on design twitter (okay, X) the given week. I love this series so much!
#2 Sakari Gin website
Read Erik Kennedy’s nice & short analysis on this Sakari Gin’s website.
#3 Kloffie by
One of the things I’ve learnt from Fons is that you really shouldn’t perfect something before releasing it. Build in public, show your work, ask for feedback, iterate quickly. Build, measure, learn. Pretty lean, isn’t it? :) He demonstrated this approach really well with the 10x community, then with Off-Grid, and now with Kloffie. Huge inspiration.
#4 Storyboarding Toolkit
Ben Crothers created a free storyboarding kit inside Miro.
#5 Alejo Porras’s sketchnotes
Alejo has been on fire lately, I really love his sketchnotes & his style, for instance check out this one: “sketchnote of a conversation with Chris Do and Ben Burns about limiting beliefs and how to overcome them.”
My newest UX Knowledge Piece Sketch: The 6 Thinking Hats
My newest sketch is about a technique called “The 6 Thinking Hats”. I truly believe that you’ll be able to make your design workshops more effective by applying this method.
Check out my sketch (high-res) & detailed article here soon. (As a newsletter subscriber, you not only get my newest UX Knowledge Piece Sketch directly to your inbox each month: you get early access to it, too.)
Coupon codes for my Udemy courses & other deals
Sketching for UX Designers course - €12.99
Be a better designer by understanding development aspects course - €12.99
Some more deals
I became an advocate of Mobbin, join with my link to support me with a couple of dollars, I’d really appreciate it!
Hundreds of you downloaded my Sketching for UX Designers Workbook, thanks for being interested in my work! Grab a copy, it is on a pay-what-you-want basis!
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!