- You’re never bad at something, you’re just new to it.
- Pull your ideas apart. In order to truly validate your hypothesis, you need to test your framework against others that are different enough to get meaningful user feedback. Sometimes you need to exaggerate those differences in your designs so they’re visible to the untrained eye.
- Whenever there is an argument between two ideas, find the third idea.
- Simplicity is repeatedly saying no to almost everything.
- Antoine de Saint-Exupéry said that “perfection is achieved not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away”.
- Train your eye to spot redundancy. Look around your screen, find elements that are serving a similar purpose. Either pull them apart, group them closer together, or simply merge them into one. That’s how you move closer to simplicity.
- Create space for the eyes to pause. Consuming visual information is a choreography of the eye. You can dictate that rhythm by inserting the right pauses and white space in your designs. The pixels you don’t use are as important as the ones you do.
- If you’re trying to explain what your product/feature does and your find yourself using the words “and” or “also” halfway through the sentence, something is wrong. It might be trying to do too many things for too many people.
- Learning to frame your ideas is learning to see. The exercise of looking at a design (whether finished or unfinished) and being able to rationalize why it looks the way it does is one of the most powerful tools on a designer’s belt.
- There are hundreds of different ways to frame your designs before you share them: with a conceptual name, a short sentence, a moodboard, a story, a video, a poem, a metaphor, a drawing, a framework, a datapoint, a powerful quote—you name it. Trust your intuition and find the format that ‘feels right’ for each context and audience.
- When you present your work, stop describing what’s on the screen. Talk about how that experience will help users. Talk about how it will help reach business goals. Talk about what inspired you to arrive at that solution. Talk about anything other than giving people the unrewarding “real estate tour”, where you describe exactly what they are already seeing on screen. Design the experience you want your audience to have.
- Choose consistency over intensity. Consistency compounds. Consistency makes things last.
- Proofread everything once more.
- While the vast majority of the work we do as digital product designers is incredibly systematic, it is when we break the system that we are able to make our products more memorable, relatable, and special. Knowing the rules is important, but knowing to break them is even more.
- Know when and why to break the system. Rationalize to yourself first why you are deciding not to follow the rules in this particular point of your product experience. You’ll want to have a strong, rational case when you start sharing those ideas with your team.
- Flip things upside down. What if you completely changed the background color now? What if you made the type 10x bigger? What if you shortened content in 90%? What if you reverse the order of your flow? Those are the types of questions that lead to delightful and unexpected results.
- It’s ok to detach instances every now and then.
- Designers who are generalists tend to be more successful when breaking the system to create unexpected experience moments. When you’re thinking about all aspects of the experience —UX, copy, motion, visuals— you have more control over making it all work together to deliver those magical moments.
- No user will remember your design system. They will remember the experiences your product enabled them to have.
- Designing is changing. Most people become designers because they believe in the power of making things better around them. They believe in change: that it is possible to improve things so they can better serve humans, nature, and humanity.
- Design is a team sport. Projects change, products get redesigned over time, jobs come and go. People, and the memories they create together, stay.
- Ignore titles. Introduce yourself without saying yours. This will flatten the conversation and make sure people are heard because they have something relevant to say, not because of their seniority.
- Criticize in private, praise in public. You will get way better results when you elevate good behavior than when you punish bad behavior.
- Stop asking for a seat at the table, or to be involved in certain conversations. The so called “table” doesn’t exist. Instead, find ways to add so much value that no one will forget to invite you next time an important conversation is happening.
- Elevate others. Celebrate others.
Quotes by Fabricio Teixeira
rastplatznotizen. 