Talk to any design system advocate and you’ll hear the word “consistency” over and over. Consistency in customer experience is what has matured our design field, governed UX best practices, and elevated many loved brands and services to the top of their industries.

We all know that consistency is a core principle of good UX and visual design. It provides familiarity, strengthens intuitive behaviour, and establishes a strong brand identity. Consistent experiences help build trust, while disjointed design erodes it.

Design great Massimo Vignelli describes consistency as “discipline”, and the goal of creating “continuity of intent throughout”. …

If you follow my writing you’ll know I’m not afraid to tackle the often-taboo issue of money. I freely discuss what I earn as a freelance designer because I believe it’s not done often enough, and being honest about money can help teach immensely valuable business lessons. There’s also nothing quite as compelling as using specific real-world examples like dollars and cents.

So what lesson did I learn from my 2020 freelancing income report? I made 33% more than the year before, and that’s mostly due to COVID.

The pandemic is a disaster. I don’t want to minimise the hurt…

It’s no secret that I’m not a fan of freelance platforms — Upwork, Fiverr, Freelancer.com and the like. I’ve written about it before. I simply can’t understand why you’d want to leave both your income and reputation at the mercy of a third-party who doesn’t always have your best interest in mind. Especially if you aim to build a full-time career from freelancing. It’s your livelihood — you want to be in control of it.

When I came across Jon Younger’s recent article on freelance “revolution” predictions I found myself nodding in total agreement and cringing in frustration in equal…

Artists, designers, writers, and anyone else who produces creative work, this is a must-read essay by David Perell: Expression is Compression.

Some of my favourite passages (emphasis mine):

…people make sense of the world by making it simpler and more beautiful — by making compression progress…creators move towards compression progress not by following their rational mind, but by following their intuition for what’s interesting. In doing so, they compress large data sets into elegant deliverables which are easy to share and remember.

That means to ship something excellent, you have to be willing to cut what may have taken weeks…

If you’re rich, you’re more lucky than smart. And there’s math to prove it.

A new study that claims the predominance of luck over talent in the distribution of wealth has been mathematically confirmed. Two Italian physicists — Alessandro Pluchino and Andrea Rapisarda — and one economist — A. E. Biondo — make the case, and they’ve got a computer model to back it up.

“If it is true that some degree of talent is necessary to be successful in life, almost never the most talented people reach the highest peaks of success, being overtaken by mediocre but sensibly luckier…

“Complexity is like energy. It cannot be created or destroyed, only moved somewhere else. When a product or service becomes simpler for users, engineers and designers have to work harder.”

In Why Life Can’t Be Simpler, Farnam Street brilliantly explains Tesler’s Law as it relates to what we’ve all experienced about digital product design.

Simpler isn’t always better

The first lesson from Tesler’s law of the conservation of complexity is that how simple something looks is not a reflection of how simple it is to use.

“People have an intuitive sense that complexity has to go somewhere. When using a product or service is…

Do you ever wonder why you can exceed your expectations on some projects, but feel no better than mediocre at others? Why sometimes you put in 110% to get the details just right, and on other jobs you can’t be f*cked to do any more than the minimum? It’s the difference between a job done, and job done right.

There’s one word that describes this difference. It’s the single most important factor in determining if anyone will perform their job well.

Pride.

I don’t care how well trained you are or how many years of experience you have. If you…

Remember the good old days when you’d get a stable design brief, have the luxury of “big design up front”, and the time to produce a consistent, well-considered design system in a non-changing, pre-dev vacuum state?

No?

Neither do I. It’s been a while.

The design world has moved past that waterfall process because shipping, testing, and validation have superseded planning and prediction. As a result, our job has become a lot more challenging.

The struggle is real

One of my current clients is a multi-national corporation. But within that corporation is a small team that essentially runs like an agile startup inside the…