How to Work with Designers

Even when doing concept work, you often need to focus your efforts. The design concept should feel like an exciting evolution of the product. 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.

Your organization may not be ready for design, good or bad. Design-aware employees can organize brown-bag lunches and evangelize at the water cooler. Your organization will remain design-resistant unless its leaders think in a goal-directed way about its users (and customers). Consider reading some of the fundamental design books if you're a leader... See more

To avoid feature bloat and ruining the core experience, is your organization capable of sorting through a flood of design ideas and synthesizing and evaluating them holistically? Do you have the development talent and leadership to implement a good design that includes evaluating visual design, usability, and design strategy from an objective and l... See more

Primer on how we design at @linear: The main point is that the design is only a reference, never any kind of deliverable itself, so the way it's constructed doesn't really matter. 1. We screenshot the app and design on top of 2. Simple design system that has mostly colors, type and some basic components (rest you can screenshot/recreate) 3. We ... See more

people new to design tend to confuse an idea for the expression of an idea. Ideas are easy, because they don't rely on specifics. Expressing ideas is incredibly difficult, because doing it well requires a deep understanding of the medium that is only possible by having worked in it, such as understanding which methods to use where, identifying subt... See more