Novia Chao

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on the atlas — 32

highlights — 53

Design can be applied to anything to add value.
Give Case Study - The Work of Connor Lowe
Design is the practice of turning context into value.
Give Case Study - The Work of Connor Lowe
Design, after all, is not just a job but a particular way to look at the world and reimagine it.
The State of UX in 2024
Building meaning and stories with data is a big sought-after leadership skill these days. There are so many opportunities and so many new tools to explore.
The State of UX in 2024
Optimism isn't about reliving the past—it's about creating the future we want before someone else does.
The State of UX in 2024
pov you started djing yesterday2024-08-21
Stream pov you started djing yesterday2024-08-21 by Ian | Listen online for free on SoundCloud
Get professional assistance, over and over and over. Ask a designer to look over the site, to critique it, to identify what is working well and what is working poorly. At the same time, seriously study and learn from what other people are doing. And keep coming back to the fundamental question: what would most enhance my ability to think and create?
How to use a personal website to enhance your ability to think and create?
From where I am sitting, I am pretty sure the best way to live a Good Life is to make choices that will give you fun problems to solve, and that will leave you with a version of yourself that feels more alive, expressive and aligned once you’ve solved them.
being more available to myself requires me to be less available to others
My other goal is to emphasize that cities are a designed object whose designers stretch across the centuries.
Walking Tours - Matthew Jordan
A Parkdale resident is coordinating a fundraiser to raise awareness and financial support for the Parkdale Community Food Bank — but this is not your typical fundraiser.
Toronto resident vows to run a half marathon wearing a Minions onesie
“There are only so many people who are interested in learning physics, but Richard Feynman is much better known than any physics teacher would otherwise be because he talked about something grander than that. He took his insights from physics and turned them into insights about life. At some point, he started motivating people, inspiring them to lead better lives. As physics became a subset of what he was teaching, his physics students became a subset of his new audience; far more people want to live better lives than want to learn physics.
Why Google becoming TikTok matters
There are three primary reasons why people consume content: to learn, to be inspired, and to be entertained.
Why Google becoming TikTok matters
ALL MEDIA IS BECOMING SOCIAL. Last week Google announced changes to its search and maps to feature more images and video in search results. The updates are designed to account for massive shifts in how people (especially younger generations) are searching for information online these days.
Why Google becoming TikTok matters
Interesting to me how 99% of this applies to video game design. Avoid things people will misinterpret, make important things brightly/contrastingly colored, put lots of unique landmarks and divide the world into tiny, visually/aesthetically distinct zones for exploration sessions that will last 1-2 hours at a time.
How “dementia villages” work - YouTube
A user’s physical or mental state impact their cognitive or literal bandwidth to enjoy your experience. Having an emergency/crisis Cognitive impairment Permanently or temporarily disabled “Out of spoons” Inside or outside On a plane or train In the city or in the woods
UI = f(statesⁿ) - daverupert.com
Users aren’t uniform in how they interact with their devices and may be using one or any combination of inputs and outputs all at once.
UI = f(statesⁿ) - daverupert.com
Nothing - An empty element Loading - A fetch is happening None - No items returned One - A single item comes back Some - A few items comes back Too Many - Too many items, need pagination (or similar) Incorrect - An error occurred Correct - A success happened Done - The operation finished
UI = f(statesⁿ) - daverupert.com
Being poor is knowing exactly how much everything costs.
Being Poor | Whatever
Through this process, I’ve created a tool for generating expressive, functional, and accessible color systems for any design system. I’ll share the full code of my solution at the end of the essay; it represents not just a technical solution but a philosophical shift in how we think about color in design systems, emphasizing the balance between creativity and inclusivity.
How to generate color palettes for design systems || Matthew Ström, designer-leader
Contrast is the most consistently important design fundamental. Make sure to avoid minimal differences in typography for visual designs, like on websites and posters. This includes weights, sizes, and different font families.
Tips for better typography
Branding is an art and a science. As creative people, the art side—the moodboards and concepting, workshopping and wordsmithing—tends to get the lion’s share of our attention. What can we say? Nuts and bolts aren’t nearly as glamorous as world building.
The ROI of Branding: Best Practices for a High-Impact Project | Designer Fund
In first creative presentations, to ensure your creative work has time and space to land, ban all of the devil’s advocates from the room before you show a thing. Then say this: “We are here to create something new. New ideas can be fragile because they are unfamiliar. You may not like something you see here, but you are not allowed to say that for now. We’ll have to edit and remove some of this work later, but for now, everything will be in play. So find something, anything, you like in every idea. A color. A word. An image. A sentence. Anything. In the end, we find what we look for. And today…
101 design rules | COLLINS
The era of problem-solving is gone. It’s too reactive in a world where the future arrives too fast. Designers must now be problem seekers, finding and anticipating problems before they arrive on our desks, because at that point, it’s already too late.
101 design rules | COLLINS
In the end, it’ll not be what you took. It’ll be what you gave away.
101 design rules | COLLINS
Mastery is not gained from intellect. Mastery is not gained from talent. Mastery is not gained from ambition. Mastery is only gained from time and focus applied to your craft over many, many years. Do not conflate it with fame.
101 design rules | COLLINS
Notice someone doing something cruel for the first time? Never wait for a second time. Address it fast, or cut them out. Either way, do not “wait and see.” It leaves you and your team vulnerable. What they showed you is who they are. Move fast.
101 design rules | COLLINS
We don’t create fantasy worlds to escape reality. We create them so we can better see, understand, and reshape reality.
101 design rules | COLLINS
As my intellectual hero, Heinz von Foerster, once wrote: “The problem is not truth, the problem is trust.” Where there is no trust there can be no communication, and communication is the key to managing wickedness.
Software Development as a Wicked Problem - Increment
When you’re out-gunned, out-staffed, and out-equipped in a competition, what are the things you’ve got left to use? Kindness and imagination.
101 design rules | COLLINS
When designers get overwhelmed we can retreat into passivity. We pull back. This gives us an illusion of control. The less we try, the less our chances to fail. We make it look like we’re not responsible for what happens to us. But never give up. Move in closer, instead. Try. Make a mistake. Apologize quickly. And keep trying.
101 design rules | COLLINS
We can transform what is into what should be. We can imagine, plan and build the tomorrows for our world—and invite others to experience it.
Charlota K. Blunarova. Branding, strategy & web design
But the manifesto emphasizes an essential truth: The success of complex software projects hinges on trust-based communication. Indeed, three of its four values—individuals and interactions over processes and tools, customer collaboration over contract negotiation, and responsiveness to change over following a plan—are about communication.
Software Development as a Wicked Problem - Increment
Growth designers are like great dinner party hosts: We turn dials, flip switches, and look for meaningful ways to make in-product experiences seamless.
The emergence of the growth designer
Now that I reflect on it, I wish I left the space emptier for longer.
How do you fill a home? - tommy trinh
I want to leave this place, but at the same time I'm scared of leaving.
How do you fill a home? - tommy trinh
But a better reason is that it makes the writer's experience better. In particular, improving the design can be a way of enhancing your ability to think and create. When you invest time in the design, when something looks and feels beautiful, you take it more seriously yourself.
How to use a personal website to enhance your ability to think and create?
Learning to think fluently is important. This means learning to identify discomfort, and learning how to respond to it. Double down on whatever makes it easy to have good thoughts2.
How to use a personal website to enhance your ability to think and create?
These are not brave new realms of human endeavor. We share the blood of cavemen who pushed spears into mammoths and drew pictures of them in the living room. By now, these two activities have evolved into well-established design disciplines: graphic design and industrial design.
Magic Ink: Information Software and the Graphical Interface
But then I think, Who am I to challenge it, if that’s how she felt? The point is: she felt canceled. She felt as if her career had been taken from her. Something in her had been lost, and she was grieving it. Maybe this is the real Taylor Swift effect: That she gives people, many of them women, particularly girls, who have been conditioned to accept dismissal, gaslighting, and mistreatment from a society that treats their emotions as inconsequential, permission to believe that their interior lives matter. That for your heart to break, whether it’s from being kicked off a tour or by the memory …
Person of the Year 2023: Taylor Swift | TIME
in late Capitalism, interior design has become a signal for class and cultural standing, rather than a matter of pure aesthetic or practicality. Similar to fashion, you dress (your rental) to impress. You get confused because you're not only choosing furniture, you're curating your own identity. In the Instagram era, one's identity has been expanded to the aesthetic of their lifestyle - the looks of the hotels you visit, the green smoothies you drink, the yoga you do, and the interior design you got in your room have all become part of how you present yourself to the world, and therefore to yo…
How to decorate your home when you're feeling INDECISIVE - YouTube
Like many things, it’s a process, and because the final result involves so much hidden work, it can be easy to think we’re not being productive. The immediate output doesn’t match the input.
How to Be More Productive: 10 Tips to Get on Track
“That's how it begins, making a film, writing a book, painting a picture, composing a tune, generally creating something. You have a wish. You wish that something might exist, and then you work on it until it does.” — Wim Wenders b. 14 August 1945
Rhys Tranter on X: "“That's how it begins, making a film, writing a book, painting a picture, composing a tune, generally creating something. You have a wish. You wish that something might exist, and then you work on it until it does.” — Wim Wenders b. 14 August 1945 https://t.co/AZQrWKPGNI" / X
We’re all just experiencing the world through the eyes of half-familiar avatars, consuming selective projections, surrounded by people we love but don’t know and people we know but don’t love. We live both unbearably close and infinitely far apart from each other.
The parasocial friends you'll never meet - by Kasra
We’re all just experiencing the world through the eyes of half-familiar avatars, consuming selective projections, surrounded by people we love but don’t know and people we know but don’t love. We live both unbearably close and infinitely far apart from each other.
The parasocial friends you'll never meet - by Kasra
The people talking about self-improvement and connection are the ones who have suffered enough to have to spend time figuring out how to be happier, who are lonely enough to have to think hard about how to connect. I am one of those people, you shouldn’t have any illusions about that.
The parasocial friends you'll never meet - by Kasra
A redesign should not completely disassemble the product to its atomic parts. While you might have ambitious goals, you also have to be realistic and manage risks.
How we redesigned the Linear UI (part Ⅱ) - Linear Blog
I didn’t realize how much I longed for a sense of community, until I came here and experienced how rich it is to not just have one community to lean on, but interconnected communities.
evening glow - by kel - the (un)comfy corner
There are countless people who have made me feel this way and these same people have lifted me up, talked me out of my patterns of self-doubt, helped me see myself and my own life differently (for the better), and left an indelible mark on my entire being as a result.
A thank you letter. - tommy trinh
brewed homemade ginger lemon tea for me when I was feeling sick
A thank you letter. - tommy trinh
A secret I've learned is that when you tell people a design is a "concept" or "conceptual" it makes it less likely that the idea is attacked from whatever perspective they hold or problems they see with it. The concept is not perceived as real, but something that can be entertained. By bringing leaders or even teams along with the concept iterations, it starts to solidify the new direction in their mind, eventually becoming more and more familiar. That's the power of visual design.
A design reset (part I)