CREATIVE TECHNOLOGISTS
A bi-weekly hand-picked grass-fed locally-sourced list of the industry articles our creative technologists are currently reading. Topics include customer experience, design, marketing, business, finance, technology, media, and storytelling.
Year
2018
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Edition
008
Published
The Woman Who Gave the Macintosh a Smile
Susan Kare designed the suite of icons that made the Macintosh revolutionary—a computer that you could communicate with in pictures.
Source: The New Yorker
Users Don’t Hate Change. They Hate Our Design Choices.
There’s an old saying: Once you eliminate quality as a requirement, everything else becomes easier and cheaper. To our existing users, stability in the design is a sign of quality.
Source: Visual Design on Medium
How to Figure Out if Your Product Actually Solves Problems
Gut and vision have paved the way for many successful projects. But one of the best things our team did was to immediately identify that the concept was our largest potential source of risk.
Source: Medium
“Writing is Thinking” – an annotated twitter thread
“Writing is thinking” is my favorite expression for how to work in a company. This annotated thread explores the value of writing.
Source: Learning By Shipping via Medium
5 best practices for delivering design critiques
VIDEO: Real critique helps teams strengthen their designs, products, and services.
Source: O’Reilly
10 Principles for Good UX Design Documentation
This is a Manifesto for UX Design Deliverables.
Source: The Versatile Designer via Medium
Open Bar for Beta Testers
Drunk User Testing is based on the principle that an app should be simple enough that a person can use it buzzed.
Source: The New Yorker
Two Fascinating Things Salesforce Discovered When It Studied Color
What you think you’ll like isn’t always what helps you make the best decisions, Salesforce Analytics finds in a new research.
Source: FastCo. Design
Foundations of atomic research
When CEOs see a frustrated customer (read: there’s an action to be taken), delighted customer (read: don’t fix what’s not broken), or an unmet need (read: opportunity for innovation), they listen louder. Change is coming.
Source: Tomer Sharon via Medium
Pure CSS Francine
This is kind of nuts. Diana Smith creates CSS-only hand coded “paintings.” Here are the rules she sets for herself.
Source: Kottke.org
Creating Usability with Motion: The UX in Motion Manifesto
The following manifesto represents my answer to the question — “As a UX or UI, designer, how do I know when and where to implement motion to support usability?”
Source: UX in Motion via Medium
Snap’s Slowdown Stirs Doubt on Redesign: Shares Plunge
In November, parent company Snap Inc. embarked on a dramatic reorganization of its mobile photo-sharing app to combat sluggish growth.

