Chapman Bettis, Designer
My Go-to Visual Design References
Our team has been talking a lot about UI design recently. Visual style development for a few projects has fallen within the same week, and so we’ve had productive FigJams and discussions about what makes a successful visual systems. Even with good team discussions, sometimes you just need fresh inspiration.
A couple of my go-to resources are Mobbin for mobile patterns (and Pttrns although it’s slightly less organized), Nicely Done for web applications, and Figma’s list of open design systems for complete systems. It’s always helpful to checkout what patterns, styles, and components work for other teams. Happy designing!
Jesse Hoyos, Designer
Last week was Apple's WWDC, their developer conference where they showcase all the latest and greatest software coming to their platforms in the months to come. Among the many announcements, we got to see a completely new and redesigned version of their web browser, Safari. It looks interesting, mostly becuase they (in classic Apple fashion) introduced a new design paradigm that will change the way we design for the web by and large. This video walks us through the new browser and teaches us how to effectively design for it. It's a short watch, and I would consider it essential for anyone working on the web.
Rachel Lang, Designer
Among my creative endeavors, I'm a digital painter. Creating art with digitals tools— like Photoshop and Procreate— can pose a particular challenge because every stroke has to be deliberate. Sometimes I need unexpected marks or added randomness to help develop my ideas.
So the painting tool I'm currently excited about is Heavypaint, developed by concept artist Vaughan Ling. It has stripped away a lot of the layering and effect tools you might expect for digital art, and put it's money on pure colors, shapes, & mark-making. My absolute favorite part is the hue variation setting. As you paint, regardless of whether you're blocking out shapes by lassooing or drawing strokes, you get a range of hues in each mark. It vibrates off the page— just gorgeous. With Heavypaint, like when painting in real life, stuff just happens. Which is kinda the point of creation.
"We don't make mistakes, we have happy accidents." - Bob Ross
Matt Rossi, Design Director
Interaction Design In Webflow - Course
I learned frontend development so I would not annoy my developer friends with change requests. I wanted total control over the final outcome, and everything in between. So for the past however many years I’ve been writing my own code, and it’s worked out just fine. These days however, time is more scarce.
My friend and former colleague shared this deal with me recently and it sounds exactly like what I am looking for to help push my designs, while keeping the time investment down. Other folks on our team have expressed interest as well, so I’m excited to see how this works out.
Chris Wynn, Front-End Engineer
Noto The Talking Ball / TouchDesigner Introduction to GLSL by Davide Santini
Recently I've been experimenting a bit more with TouchDesigner. TouchDesigner is a fantastic node based programming language that is mainly used for creating various forms interactive media. There are tons of great YouTube channels out there with TouchDesigner tutorials but recently been really into Noto The Talking Ball. The tutorials are given to you from a floating talking ball which is pretty fun, and concepts are thoroughly explained so I feel like I'm actually learning how to use TouchDesigner at a fundamental level while also creating visually interesting generative art projects.
For a while now I've been discussing my GLSL shader journey and the learning materials I've been using in these Roundups. I was delighted to see that I could programing shaders right in TouchDesigner, and have used this book by Davide Santini as reference. While a large portion of the book is spent explaining shader fundamentals, the tail-end is filled with examples of plugging TD nodes into the shader as uniforms for producing cool animation. The book culminates in the creation of a really neat 3D particle system.