While it’s important to keep upskilling our craft, we don’t need to forget that there’s more to our work than our primary skills, and here’s a list of my suggested secondary skills that will make you transcend as a designer
Over the last more than 10 years I’ve worked in plenty of different work environments: on my own as a sole designer for a startup, as a freelancing designing and building websites as well as designing whole mobile apps, as part of a small distributed team and finally for the past few years I’ve been designing while managing a small team of product designers.
That, I believe, has given me enough perspective to know how to adapt myself to different companies and team dynamics to easily spot the weak points as well as how to adapt myself to make sure…
When the average definition of an idea starts with “the Airbnb of X” or “think about it as the Uber of Y” it’s a sign that it’s time to bring some radical ideas to the table.
In a world focused on solving everyone problems and massively competing for seeing who solves the same problems in the most efficient, cheapest, and fastest way, we need to rethink our approach in the same way that in the early 1850s artists started to challenge the perception of beauty and the arts to bring a movement that would change the way society approaches life.
What’s the Avant-garde?
The term avant-garde comes from the French vanguard or advance guard (the part of an army that goes forward ahead of the rest) and it’s the name given to an innovative approach to the making of…
Learning and insights of helping a company evolve its mission, values and visual identity in a forced remote work environment from an in-house perspective.
Backstory
Following my previous post about how I helped migrate the design tool stack and how we organise design at Florence, a company I recently joined, this post is about how I helped shape a rebrand for the whole company identity, going from a single-product marketplace provider to being a SaaS company offering different products for different audiences, taking into account the customer-facing side as well as the company and enterprise aspect.
Before I joined Florence, one of the exercises of the hiring process was to present a proposal of how would I unify and bring clarity to the product offering…
With my process and some of my learnings for other people thinking of making the transition
If you are reading this, means that you are interested in how and why to move your designs projects to Figma. Don’t expect a detailed guide on what’s the most optimised way of doing it, but rather the whys and hows of how I did it recently and why I believe it was a successful move.
In November of 2020, I joined the talented team at Florence to lead a group of passionate, motivated and very creative designers. As part of my initial work, and as a way of getting onboarded I suggested trying Figma as part of our tool…
How getting back into drawing thanks to buying a tablet helped me recover my passion for creating art and dealing with the pressure of my daily life.
Early last year I decided that, while I very much enjoyed drawing on paper with a pen or a pencil and waste pages and pages on my notebooks taking notes, drafting sketches or drawing wireframes from the ideas I was working on, there must be a way to make it in a more sustainable way. That is why I decided to get myself an iPad Pro, with one of those pencils that when you draw on them it feels like real inc getting into the paper when it touches the screen.
What I wasn’t aware is that getting that additional…
Come along and discover my journey of exploring the land of the Rising Sun with my obsession for diving into why things work that way.
A couple of months ago I had the opportunity of visiting Japan for the first time, and although I already knew most of the things I was gonna be facing, I left a blank on my expectations to see if visiting a non-Wester country and how different their culture is could impress me and help me shape a more defined vision of what mostly TV and internet helped me define.
Every time I travel somewhere new I tend to switch my mode and although I will still enjoy things as a tourist, and try as much as possible to integrate…
How using sci-fi author’s robotic rules can help set up the right framework to design effect and user-friendly products, services and more.
If you are reading this you are have probably heard of Human-Centred Design, a methodology used to solve problems that put the user, in this case, human beings in the centre of the issue, and validates every finding, hypothesis and concept with them.
Trying to aim for a solution that only solves every user’s problem is more likely to end up being an impossible mission, but as user experience designers is our task to ensure that no matter how it ends up implemented and what constrains and limitations we face in the process, the user’s problem is covered as wide…
How to collect feedback in a fast-paced environment in the gambling industry with users that won’t reveal their identity and remain anonymous
As a designer, I like to think that my job is not only to solve users problems but also improve and solve problems within the process in the development and design of projects and how to get closer to our users, from a holistic point of view and always applying design principles.
Not that long ago, I was challenged with the mission of improving the user experience of an online fantasy football platform that had been online since 2012, with an average of 20.000 users online every day building their ideal teams and betting on them to see who was…
My take on how having a background in industrial design engineer helped me boost the way I work as a UX designer developing digital products.
My career as a product designer started helping friends, small companies and startups go digital by building their websites, apps and creating brand identities for them. But by the time I was doing that, I was also studying industrial design engineering from where I would graduate after four years. This knowledge gave me enough background information to improve and optimise the projects I was working on at the same time.
Industrial design has always been considered the le field where all tangible or physical products are conceived and build. …
In the same way that you find a desk that fulfils your needs and an ergonomic chair that doesn’t hurt your back, it’s equally important to take care of your virtual work environment to ensure it’s healthy and comfortable.
My take on the virtual work environment
As someone dedicated to solve problems and come up with solutions via, most of the time, digital products, my work involves the use of many tools that I need to have close to me at all times during the day. I’m not only talking of tangible objects like my laptop, a mouse or a notebook but also software and tools that I have on my laptop or smartphone that help me get the most of my time and improve my productivity, quality of my work and also make of my work environment a healthier space.
On this post, I’m gonna…
