Managing Criticism in Design Exploration Nearly all successful teams understand and value a design exploration approach to solving problems, but how do you productively critic designs when so many options are being explored regardless of job titles or seniority? Design decisions should always be based on what’s appropriate for the task at hand. If you find your design is being beaten down, the best way to fight back is to counter with “Well, when would my design be appropriate?”. Conversely, before you take pleasure in destroying someone else’s hard work, first make sure that you can answer “When is this solution great?”. […] Lastly, always remember the golden rule of critique: don’t be a dick. Read the full post from Intercom and check out their slick new “customer relationship management and messaging tool for web app owners”.

Managing Criticism in Design Exploration

Nearly all successful teams understand and value a design exploration approach to solving problems, but how do you productively critic designs when so many options are being explored regardless of job titles or seniority?

Design decisions should always be based on what’s appropriate for the task at hand. If you find your design is being beaten down, the best way to fight back is to counter with “Well, when would my design be appropriate?”. Conversely, before you take pleasure in destroying someone else’s hard work, first make sure that you can answer “When is this solution great?”. […]

Lastly, always remember the golden rule of critique: don’t be a dick.

Read the full post from Intercom and check out their slick new “customer relationship management and messaging tool for web app owners”.

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Style Hatch Refresh Just a few hours ago we debuted our fresh, new branding for Style Hatch along with a taste of our full site launching in April.  After over a decade of creating sites, campaigns and brand strategies for large brands from Activision to Microsoft, we have shifted out entire studio to create fresh designs for individuals with the goal of helping you show off your inner genius. We can’t wait to show off everything we have lined up!  Now for a few fun facts, since our first theme Backburner we have launched 15 themes, pushed live 109 updates to the themes, and answered 27,697 support emails as of yesterday morning. A part of the refresh we even had fancy new letterpress cards created just in time for SXSW.  Check out a shot of the cards on Dribbble.

Style Hatch Refresh

Just a few hours ago we debuted our fresh, new branding for Style Hatch along with a taste of our full site launching in April.  After over a decade of creating sites, campaigns and brand strategies for large brands from Activision to Microsoft, we have shifted out entire studio to create fresh designs for individuals with the goal of helping you show off your inner genius.

We can’t wait to show off everything we have lined up!  Now for a few fun facts, since our first theme Backburner we have launched 15 themes, pushed live 109 updates to the themes, and answered 27,697 support emails as of yesterday morning.

A part of the refresh we even had fancy new letterpress cards created just in time for SXSW.  Check out a shot of the cards on Dribbble.

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Basecamp UI Preview

37signals have come up with some very unique although simple user experience patterns that should make using Basecamp easier than ever.  Jump into the video at 3 minutes to see a demonstration of how they are allowing for you to easily navigate into a project.

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Looks pretty awesome. That’s some smart “text as an interface” UI.

Preview of the new Basecamp UI (by 37signals)

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Design to Inspire Confidence

Inspire confidence with instructions that help users make the jump from one service to another. These need to be rooted in the user’s current knowledge of the system, not their future behavior.

The key well received design will always come from a perspective of empathy for the viewer, user, client or culture.  More on the topic of design and empathy:

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Valio Con 2012 I’m excited to announce that I was invited to speak at Valio Con 2012 in San Diego this summer.  Drew Wilson and the Valio Con team have put together an amazing line-up of speakers that I am looking forward to hearing. Rich Thornett, co-founder and developer of Dribbble  Cameron Koczon, behind Gimmebar and co-founder of Brooklyn Beta Ian Collins, designer and Javascript developer for Simple Kyle Neath, director of design for GitHub Garrett Murray, founder and creative director of Karbon Krystyn Heide, senior product designer at Squarespace David Desandro, front-end developer at nclud and creator of the popular Isotope Dom Leca, ceo and co-founder of Sparrow More to be announced soon Last year’s Valio Con was by far the best web and design conference I have attended in quite a while.  This year the conference takes place June 7-10th at the Hyatt Mission Bay resort in San Diego.  The $999 conference pass includes three nights hotel stay, beach bonfires, breakfast, local catered lunches and a chance to hang out with some of the best designers and developers our industry. Check out the Valio Con 2012 site for more details.

Valio Con 2012

I’m excited to announce that I was invited to speak at Valio Con 2012 in San Diego this summer.  Drew Wilson and the Valio Con team have put together an amazing line-up of speakers that I am looking forward to hearing.

Last year’s Valio Con was by far the best web and design conference I have attended in quite a while.  This year the conference takes place June 7-10th at the Hyatt Mission Bay resort in San Diego.  The $999 conference pass includes three nights hotel stay, beach bonfires, breakfast, local catered lunches and a chance to hang out with some of the best designers and developers our industry.

Check out the Valio Con 2012 site for more details.

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Coco Theme Check out our latest Tumblr premium theme Coco!  It comes in three beautiful styles, but you can always customize it like the comic and art blog Magical Game Time with a few tweaks in the appearances menu. Digital shop, Style Hatch and designer Regina Casaleggio, are pleased to welcome the latest arrival to the scene, Coco, a sweet, charming, sophisticated, theme with lots of heart and soul. This beauty is “out of the box” ready to enjoy and be shown to the world. To keep this one-of-a-kind masterpiece from being altered from its original state of beauty the customization features are limited.  Buy Coco for $49 and take advantage of our stellar support - coco@stylehatch.co Really this post was a good excuse to try out Tumblr’s new KILLER highlighted post feature.  You guys are pretty brilliant!

Coco Theme

Check out our latest Tumblr premium theme Coco!  It comes in three beautiful styles, but you can always customize it like the comic and art blog Magical Game Time with a few tweaks in the appearances menu.

Digital shop, Style Hatch and designer Regina Casaleggio, are pleased to welcome the latest arrival to the scene, Coco, a sweet, charming, sophisticated, theme with lots of heart and soul. This beauty is “out of the box” ready to enjoy and be shown to the world. To keep this one-of-a-kind masterpiece from being altered from its original state of beauty the customization features are limited. 

Buy Coco for $49 and take advantage of our stellar support - coco@stylehatch.co

Really this post was a good excuse to try out Tumblr’s new KILLER highlighted post feature.  You guys are pretty brilliant!

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