Jesse Hoyos, Designer
The folks at Framer are back at it with a cool new update. I'll admit I havent had a chance to give Framer a real shot as a design tool, but they seem to constantly release features that are right up my ally. With Framer for developers, they are taking the "Design and code" workflow to a new level. You have the ability to pull in real world data from your app and also export production ready React components, Framer seamlessly brings these things together in one tool, and thats really neat. Maybe I'll finally give it an honest shake.
Rachel Lang, Designer
Rollo May - Anxiety Is A Gateway To Creativity
This 5 min video is taken from an interview with existential psychologist Rollo May. He touches on ideas I think about often when I need inspiration.
Anxiety and frustration are unavoidable parts of the creative process— you either press on or give up. That anxiety is actually a feeling of discrepancy urging you to make something, to do something. And that stimulus towards creativity is what I believe life is about.
"Joy is the zest that you get out of using your talents, your understanding, the totality of your being for great aims."
Matt Rossi, Design Director
Finding the right tool for the job.
The other day I was playing some classic/retro NES games on our Nintendo Switch in handheld when I realized, a lot of these games stink with the joy con. That's because they weren't designed to be used with it—they were meant to be used with a d-pad. For the newer games I play, I very rarely use the d-pad (as it was intended to be), but had it been removed I would have hated these classic games. I switched over to using the d-pad on the Switch (as terrible as it is) and instantly improved my performance.
It got me thinking, a lot of times as I'm designing I find it easy to build something that 'works' but much harder to make something that 'works better'. The user experience is in absolute perfect harmony when the controls are intuitive and offer the least friction with the most gain.
I did some reading this morn, and this article brings up a lot of my thoughts/feelings.
Chris Wynn, Front-End Engineer
The History of Command Palettes: How Typing Commands Became The Norm Again by Matthew Guay
A couple days ago a friend was looking at my iPhone home screen and noticed that it was completely empty. They asked why, and I explained how I use spotlight search for everything. I never really thought about it but over the years I've become reliant on getting around a system by typing a command. This led me to do a bit of research on command palettes and I stumbled upon Matthew Guay's great article on the topic. It covers the history of command palettes, and what the future might look like. I even picked up a good tip about the hidden command palette in Photoshop.