DailyDe–lights

A curation of links about art, design and development picked -somewhat daily- by Félix Péault, Art Director and Digital Designer.

December 2024

Tuesday, 3rd

1 link

Creativity is the only thing. An open letter to my fellow creatives…

Creativity is risk. To do something different, or meaningful, or human, is messy. Creativity is accessing the part of the brain adjacent to emotions, and emotions are the opposite of rationality. It doesn’t fit neatly into an ideal customer profile. You can’t attach quarterly goals to it.

uxdesign.cc

November 2024

Wednesday, 27th

1 link

Rethinking Rebranding

Rebranding isn't just a logo swap—it's a deep introspective journey. By questioning fundamental purpose and making thoughtful, incremental changes, even centuries-old institutions can breathe new life into their core identity and relevance.

reiinamoto.substack.com

Monday, 25th

1 link

Design Principles

Set of guidelines that empower a team to make wise decisions and appropriate trade-offs when designing, building and innovating.

principles.design

Tuesday, 19th

1 link

Jonathan Ive - rams foundation

Jonathan Ive, the long-time Chief Design Officer at Apple, is among the most prominent creatives who have been influenced by Dieter Rams and his design principles. Here, in one of his rare interviews in recent years, Ive speaks openly about his admiration—pointing out one important achievement of Rams that is often overlooked.

rams-foundation.org

Monday, 18th

1 link

Updating Our Web System For A New Era

Want to see how we used Figma’s latest features to audit and refresh our web system? Here’s a behind-the-scenes look at how we streamlined our components, improved our workflows, and built for the future.

figma.com

Wednesday, 13th

1 link

The obsession over craft

People get annoyed about hearing about craft as they know being a good designer requires other skills to succeed: strong communication skills, a growth mindset, and ability to collaborate. However, I must share the hard truth. Craft is an unavoidable foundation as a designer.

proofofconcept.pub

September 2024

Monday, 30th

1 link

Branding Anterior. Medical Insurance? AI? Oh my!

Smith & Diction showcases their project for Anterior. […] After Perplexity dropped we got a lot of inquiries from other AI companies. Like, a lot a lot. Most of them were very early in their journey and didn’t really know what they were building or who they building for.

medium.com

Monday, 23rd

1 link

UX needs more punk. Disrupting the status quo in design.

Polished interfaces and seamless experiences dominate the design landscape. UX design has, in many ways, become too safe. We prize consistency, accessibility, and user-friendliness — values that are crucial to creating good products. But is “good” enough? Have we, in the quest for perfection, lost the soul of UX? Don’t we need more punk?

uxdesign.cc

Tuesday, 10th

1 link

Sanding UI

One of the ways I like to do development is to build something, click around a ton, make tweaks, click around more, more tweaks, more clicks, etc., until I finally consider it done. With software, the fact is that sometimes there are just too many variables to know and test and smooth out. So I click around, using the UI over and over, until I finally cannot give myself any more splinters. It’s a small thing, but lots of small splinters lead to an agonizing experience.

blog.jim-nielsen.com

Friday, 6th

1 link

The Lost Sense

Next time you reach for your smartphone, pause and consider what else you could reach for that offers not just a function, but some feeling. And if you are someone who creates, in any medium, challenge yourself to elevate touch to the level of other senses. […] Otherwise the default path we’re on will lead us into an empty room with just walls and screens — and not much else.

workingtheorys.com

August 2024

Friday, 30th

1 link

Madalena Studio push the boundaries of branding in their look for Crucible, cultured with bacteria

A petri dish bursting with vibrant bacteria – Crucible’s identity is as intriguing, unconventional and experimental as the creative hub itself. Housing a drinks, bar and restaurant consultancy, flavour lab and a collaborative workspace, the London-based company is designed for bartenders to unleash their creativity – working with equipment such as a centrifuge, a freeze dryer and a rotovap!

the-brandidentity.com

Wednesday, 21st

1 link

“Smart” Layouts With Container Queries

Modern CSS keeps giving us a lot of new, easier ways to solve old problems, but often the new features we’re getting don’t only solve old problems, they open up new possibilities as well. Container queries are one of those things that open up new possibilities, but because they look a lot like the old way of doing things with media queries, our first instinct is to use them in the same way, or at least a very similar way.

css-tricks.com

Friday, 16th

1 link

We don't need a boss, we need a process

Everyone can agree that design by committee usually fails. But it’s not because there are multiple people involved, it’s because (most) committees are not made up of skilled collaborators with a shared vision and process. Shared vision and collaborative process don’t just happen when good developers sit around a table. Like anything else, collaborative art and design are skills that people learn and practice […]

miriamsuzanne.com

Monday, 5th

1 link

Losing is part of being a designer

This is a good thing. Because when you realise that being challenged and ignored is part of the job it takes the pressure off and you do better. But how do you actually take this realisation and apply it in the workplace. Follow these 3 simple steps.

adamsilver.io

July 2024

Wednesday, 31st

1 link

Useless design

Design is defined by its utility. Unlike art, we expect design to provide us with some useful function in order to accept it into our lives. At least, that’s the story our rational brain tells us. Appealing to this unimpeachably logical side of us we find every product description practically humming with gigabytes, megapixels, thread counts and earnest lists of useful ‘features’.

designlobster.substack.com

Monday, 15th

1 link

On AI and the commoditisation of design

With the recent announcement of Figma’s AI feature-set at the corporate vibe-fest that is Config, there’s been something of a clamour to opine, positively and negatively, on the impact these features will have on designers and the industry as a whole. Now, a lot of these are actually half decent, minor features that might save us a few minutes here and there. As a serial ‘Group 24098’ layer-name-forgetter, the ‘rename layers’ functionality is sound. The enriched search even veers on actually useful.

scott.is

Thursday, 11th

1 link

Great design isn’t pixel perfect

I am a perfectionist, and I admit that. Is this my best or worst quality? Maybe it’s both. It’s a trait that defines a lot of who I am, not only professionally, but also personally. There’s a sense of validation that comes when you get something done to perfection that everyone enjoys. However, how far can you or should you go to get something done perfectly? Also, what defines perfect? It can be extremely subjective.

raffdimeo.com

Wednesday, 10th

1 link

The Magic of Clip Path

clip-path is often used for trimming a DOM node into specific shapes, like triangles. But what if I told you that it's also great for animations? In this article, we'll dive into clip-path and explore some of the cool things you can do with it. Once you read it, you'll start seeing this CSS property being used everywhere.

emilkowal.ski

Thursday, 4th

1 link

Selective Attention

The process of focusing our attention only to a subset of the stimuli in the environment — usually those related to our goals.

lawsofux.com

Wednesday, 3rd

1 link

Decline of web craftsmanship

I was thinking back to the old days of a time where I spent a great deal of time creating a design and building it with so much love and care, thinking of every detail and not being scared to try out new ideas. Everything was unique, it felt personal and was a labour of love. We were daring and had no fear.

dan-davies.co.uk

June 2024

Friday, 28th

1 link

Great animations

A predictable and delightful experience is what makes a product stand out from a crowded market. That's why companies invest in design engineers for example. Animations can play a big role in creating such experiences. Great animations are hard, as there are many aspects to consider. From easing and timing to accessibility and performance. This post is a collection of principles that, in my opinion, make animations great.

emilkowal.ski

Thursday, 27th

1 link

Inside the Redesigned Figma

We’ve made so many changes to Figma since we launched nearly a decade ago, but even amidst new functionality, features, and products, the core Figma layout has remained remarkably consistent over the years. This isn’t by accident. With so many of you spending hours a day in Figma, we know how important it is to expand functionality while also preserving and respecting the workflows you’ve perfected to date. But as those updates compound over time, what once felt simple can become unnecessarily complex. To tackle this complexity and lay the foundation for the next decade of Figma, we’re rolling out UI3 […]

figma.com

Wednesday, 26th

1 link

Colour contrast

Colour contrast makes a big part of the user experience for all users. Accessibility guidelines however, are not always easy to follow. In this article we will see how to meet the requirements with practical examples.

goodpractices.design

Tuesday, 25th

1 link

Can you ever really own an aesthetic? Creatives discuss what happens when your style becomes a trend

We constantly tell young designers and illustrators to develop their own unique style. But what happens when that style becomes widely adopted and even copied? Our US editor-at-large considers the impact on both individual creatives and the industry as a whole.

itsnicethat.com

Monday, 24th

1 link

Setting up typography variables in Figma

Figma finally supports typography variables after teasing us since last June. During the ‘Framework by Figma’ in April, they announced multiple features that made it feel like a mini Config.

uxdesign.cc

Friday, 14th

1 link

Creativity and why we should sleep on it

As someone who has their best ideas when falling asleep, I’ve always been interested in the power of sleep for creative problem-solving. Recently, I’ve been exploring the different ways in which we can harness the power of sleep for creative work.

uxdesign.cc

Tuesday, 11th

1 link

How to price your work as a creative freelancer

There are a plethora of money questions a creative freelancer asks themselves at least once a quarter. Am I asking for enough money? How high is too high? Can I ask for more or less from my regular clients? Is it embarrassing if I accidentally ask for too little?!

wepresent.wetransfer.com

Friday, 7th

1 link

Can you taste design?

Eating is a multi-sensory experience, and the design surrounding food – from restaurant interiors to menu typefaces – can have a tangible impact on that. But with gentrification tearing out eateries with an ounce of individuality, is this distinctive visual experience now being forfeited?

itsnicethat.com

May 2024

Thursday, 30th

1 link

Design Systems vs. Style Guides

Design systems are a set of standards (like Google’s Material Design or IBM’s Carbon Design System) needed to manage design at scale. Style guides (like content or visual style guides) are just one piece in a design system.

nngroup.com

Wednesday, 29th

1 link

Did we fail to develop the next generation of designers?

TLDR: We weren’t always so close-minded to new designers entering the field. We started out as more open. We weren’t always over-focused on visuals. We used to see people’s strengths in other areas…

uxdesign.cc

Monday, 27th

1 link

Willy Fleckhaus & Twen

Twen was a magazine for the first generation of postwar teens and young adults. It was a wild conglomeration of the controversial ideas and blooming freedoms of the 1950s. A big part of the impact came from Willy Fleckhaus’ design: a 12-column modular grid with already familiar blown-up headlines set in Schmalfette Grotesk; psychedelic illustrations; extremely tightly cropped or enlarged black-and-white photos, and, of course, a lot of white space perfectly arranged on the page. Twen was stunning, groundbreaking, sometimes shocking and definitely something that had never been seen before.

readymag.com

Thursday, 23rd

1 link

Robin Rendle on Design interviews

He's been doing a lot of interviews for designers lately so here’s a list of all the questions he’s asking along the way. Maybe this helps someone out there looking for a design gig.

robinrendle.com

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