Highlighting Humane Design ✦ Ai Tools to Help with Design Assets and more
Hey, this was an exciting week! Hope you're having a great weekend, I've got a few great things to share with you, some are entertaining and just right to spend your weekend better, I hope :D (feel free to jump over some stuff)
Desigest update
I've been working actively on a new website for Desigest, and decided to go with Framer sites: the UI requires a lot of getting used to after Figma 😅 but after spending there all of the past weekend - I feel like, almost got used to it 🙌
Now I kinda like it: It's impressive in terms of load speed, switching pages, etc, and, you can define a lot of variables, make interactive components to reuse in the future, set up a CMS - making it very easy to build new pages and content.
The only downside to using it so far I think is the cost, starting from $15 a month/yearly subscription.
The other piece of the stack is the email sending, subscriber managing, and all that fun stuff, found a great new product for that also, built by an indie founder in a humane way - called buttondown. (Starting 9/mo)
Highlighting Humane Design
Since the earliest days of my career, I've always been going for meaning in all I do and seeking it in everything I interact with.
Having worked with corporations and startups, many of which exist out of business problems, not personal or relatable to all humans.
Now I'll be pickier on the humane side of each piece of content I'm sharing.
For example, this week there've been products launched on investment strategies/helpers, etc. to get more funding, which is saying: "With any project you have, buy this guide and you'll be successful in selling it to investors and get rich". You won't see products like this here, even if I got offered 50% of each guide they sell.
Humane design is what eventually wins over the internet and the world over time, products we use, consume, and services we get.
Money and VC just keep it afloat for longer, that's true mostly for non-B2B.
Inside Pixel-1 also thought to come up with sort of design.
Alright, enough copy, let's jump into it 👇
Updates
Product Hunt Launch Guide | Product Hunt
✦ Product hunt updated their launch guide
Game
Isle of Arrows Demo — store.steampowered.com
✦ Beautiful tower defence game from indie dev 🙌 MacOS optimised.
Products
TimeOS by Magical — The fastest meeting notes experience for Chrome
✦ 🏆#1 Humane product of the week.
✦ Humane solution for meetings, simple, has the right feature, #1 on PH this Tuesday - this is the type of product I'm talking about.
✦ Has a powerful Notion integration that saves all your notes automatically and nicely into a great, already built, meeting template.
✦ Chrome extension.
Copilot for Product Development — www.monterey.ai Co-pilot of product development.
snoopForms — the Open-Source Typeform Alternative (and much more)
Dynamic Notion Covers — see live weather, horoscope & much more on your Notion cover
Mubasic — the #1 source for children’s music. — www.mubasic.com
✦ Interesting grid used here + styling
hire the bestproduct freelancers in crypto — www.thirdwork.xyz
Stillgram — AI point&shoot camera that removes crowds from travel photos
Nanonets Automated — Accounting Put the boring part of accounts payable on autopilot
Logolivery - Taking Care of The Logo! — logolivery.com We are a team of designers, and managers, that will help you with logo for your business or startup, and will do it cheap, fast, and qualitative. Check Us!
Two products helping with AI design assets
Poly — Generate design assets in seconds with AI
✦ Only textures available now, but later you could generate icons, illustrations, other graphics and more 👀
Claid.ai — Create great product images in seconds with AI-powered API
✦ With AI makes your untouched images look good to use on the website and in the designs.
Recreational cannabis | Awwwards — www.ollopa.ca
✦ My favourite site of the week, probably of the month as well! Super well executed, whimsical at appropriate times, great UX.
Armin van Buuren - Interview on Spotify
✦ A big fan of this guy, his achievements are truly amazing being one of the best DJs out there, which inspires me to do best at my field of work.
This interview is mostly personal, but the advice in the end makes a lot of sense and we often forget about it:
Always book a time for yourself. Ask "how am I doing", stop for a moment achieving all these external things and looking for external things to solve internal problems, take care of yourself and take a moment of silence each day.
Why ordinary design (almost) always wins — babich.biz
"The ultimate purpose of any product is the ability to solve the problem effectively. As long as it happens, the product doesn't need to have unique details that make it stand out from the crowd." — Dieter Rams
✦ This one has a great timing this week, with my newsletter shifting towards humane design, has a lot of ground-setting principles most forget nowadays chasing investors etc.
"Design is all about problem-solving. And designers should always know what problem they are solving and for whom."
✦ If we take a look at, for example, Facebook. What problem are they solving now and designing for? All I could think about is for: keeping dominance now, try to invest in something no one needs wishing to dominate the future of tech as well.
Product Analytics: The four questions that guide innovation and design | UX Collective — uxdesign.cc
✦ Great foundational read as well, more towards marketing, but interestingly, any investments into actual humane design and user experience will always result in increases in revenue and other metrics with it, which, good products, I think, invest, instead of spending it on marketing.
Best marketing is a well designed and executed product, not the ads you're putting upfront, unless you have almost infinite budgets for marketing - it's a game you cannot win. I also think large companies like Coca Cola won't have as good time, if any, if they didn't spent billions on marketing. With the budgets they have for it, any sweet drink could dominate the world.
Making Users Stick – Amplitude — amplitude.com
