Friday Gems (Designing Selection Colors, Maker's Knowledge, Design is Political, and much more!)
The first condition to create good design is passion for transformation. - Enzo Mari
Hello dear readers,
I hope your week went well. This week I started a new project at work where I shifted from designOps to product design. It’s interesting to think broadly about how teams use design tools and how to improve the employee experience and how teams collaborate to then dig into the details of designing features and using Figma Make in the process.
So today, I share a few gems that touch on the topic of learning by doing and what we lose when using AI in the process, which is the tacit knowledge we gain by making things ourselves, instead of AI doing the work for us.
Peace ✌🏽
Today's Gems
Product Design: Designing Selection Colors
The Mindful Designer: Maker’s Knowledge
Visual Thinking: Design is political
Product Design
Designing Selection Colors
I stumbled upon this post, a collection of tweets, by Marcin Wichary, who I just learned designed the Selection Colors feature in Figma. This feature alone has saved me countless hours working with color. Reading through the tweets, it’s interesting to learn just what it takes to get a feature that on the surface seems simple, but the tweets show just how complicated the process was. Reading through the decisions that needed to be made, the feedback, the iterations, the development challenges, you realize how much effort each part of an app actually takes to bring to life.
I have a newfound respect for designers who are able to deliver experiences that help even against great odds.
🔗 Designing Selection Colors
The Mindful Designer
Maker’s Knowledge
The AI tools I use may help me get results quickly, make my work seemingly efficient, help me begrugingly skip over critical parts of the design process, what I lose in the process is the tacit knowledge that I gain from the active, hands on learning that comes from thinking, making, sketching, comminicating, iterating and going through the ups and downs of the process building my knowledge one step at a time.
In a client meeting this week I heard someone speak to this exact idea that we lose the understanding and knowledge of what we are working on because we end up with the results ready to be used.
We get to know things not by reading or hearing about them, not by observing and studying them, but by creating or recreating them with our own hands. At first, his strikingly simple claim, often also referred to as Verum Factum, sounds like nothing new. It seems common sense. And, indeed, in its most basic form, it is generally accepted: theory is nothing without practice. Experience trumps mere words.
🔗 Maker’s Knowledge
Visual Thinking
Design is political
Visual thinking is a powerful tool for conveying ideas.
The above illustration is an example from Italian Radical Design, a movement that sought to use design for social critique.
Designed by Enzo Mari, an Italian designer, who collaborated with Francesco Leonetti, a poet, to distill dense Marxist and Leninist political theory into a visual to make the idea accessible and digestible.
The red line represents the revolutionary path for the working class and how it can bypass existing structures to seize more power. The purple line shows a reformist approach to capitalist hierarchy.
Design is political.
This illustration is a good example of how we can use visual communication to share ideas and make them easy to understand.
Also…
Within the final and true world image, everything is related to everything, and nothing can be discarded a priori as being unimportant.
– Fritz Zwingy 1969
That’s it for this week’s Friday Gems.
In stillness, find your next step.✊🏽
