Kevin Smith

🚀 Big News: OpenDesignDocs.com gets a makeover! As we step into 2025, I’m thrilled to unveil the redesign of www.opendesigndocs.com — a platform built for the design community. 🎨✨ Imagine a space where designers of all levels can share knowledge, exchange ideas, and learn from each other. Whether you’re a seasoned pro or just starting out, we all have something to give and something to gain. 🔥 What’s new: • A fresh, scalable site built to support this growing vision 🌟 What’s next: • Content from other leaders in the industry • Features that make sharing your expertise seamless • Profiles, analytics, audience ownership 👉 Let's build this together: If you’re interested in partnering to help build this space or have ideas on how we can make it even better, I’d love to hear from you. Here's to 2025!

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Way back in March I ran a workshop for designers to discuss the potential impact of AI on our roles, and on the people who run and use the services we design. I finally, FINALLY wrote it up here: https://lnkd.in/eHfr-gCD

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Had to share this thoughtful article about the conflicting feelings we have as designers with new AI tools.... made me consider the threat of too much standardization over innovation, or letting your own creative instincts atrophy. Check it out and lmk your thoughts

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Incredible!🤯 I fed my site, opendesigndocs.com, to Google‘s NotebookLM and had it generate a podcast about it. It took the context of the site and created a surprising amount of relevant content that sounds quite natural. Why is Google not advertising this! Take a listen: https://lnkd.in/gDQxxBCJ I imagine the next step would be to add different voices, tone, etc.

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I really enjoyed this conversation with Alex Smith from Fuego UX on value of designers learning to code, team collaboration, culture, and thoughts for new designers entering the market in the age of AI. Plus, it's short and sweet - just under 12 mins! If anything peeks your interest that you'd like to hear more on, let me know as I may be able to go deeper in future talks or blog posts :)

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It's interesting to me that, while engineers are seeing a massive explosion in productivity from AI, product design has yet to see any real progress. Where are the tools from Figma/Adobe that 2-3x the output of a designer? Where is the AI-driven design system, etc.

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interesting study of the common user patterns for scanning content https://lnkd.in/dBmTf2dA

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🎨 Color is hard. As our team leverages variables to apply themes across a design system, things break. Maintaining accessible color contrast across multiple components with various states is a beast of task. - Brand colors can vary from light to dark affecting foreground contrast. - State changes across various components require independent contrast checks for foreground text. - Yellow. (Do I need to say more? Whether its a brand or system color, yellow and orange demand special attention) 🌈 Color for brand designers working with product teams by Katie Cooper I dig everything Katie Cooper writes about color for design systems. The approach outlined offers a great perspective on how to evaluate brand color viability. It includes considerations for secondary colors and color ramps as you develop proper contrast ratios. https://lnkd.in/gna4CGCV 💛 The dark yellow problem by Lodestar Design via UX Collective I know a lot of folks have touched on this, but I like how succinctly this writeup spells out the problems when designing with yellow while trying to maintain some form or brand consistency. Mustard anyone? https://lnkd.in/gsA4FZgQ 👏 Color in design systems by Nathan Curtis A classic write up on color in design systems and considerations for theming. Big takeaways for our team included limiting how themes cascade through various components like links and buttons, as well as ensuring any “changes” to brand colors to meet the needs of the UI get approval first. If you haven’t read everything by Nathan on Medium on design systems you’re missing out! https://lnkd.in/gYXVCY2e ✨ So grateful for all the resources out there and hope some of this can be useful to your team. From our research, the team has established a few best practices: - Start by auditing color contrast options across all brand colors through color ramps and component states - Ensure a consistent lightness ramp across all steps of each color in the palette to help with predictable contrast - Pay special attention to your yellows to balance brand consistency with accessibility - Limit how brand colors cascade into critical elements such as forms, buttons and links to ensure usability - Continue to use plugins and manual review to check color contrast ratios across the system, components and patterns as you go #ui #design #designsystems #color #branding #theming #accessibility

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Feel like this is the future use cases for AI. Despite all the fear mongering about AI taking everyone's jobs (and of course, legitimate copyright questions), I think it'll ultimately boil down to a great toolset that augments existing tools and platforms, enabling us to make better work. Just because there's a camera in every phone, doesn't make us all photographers. Sure, everyone might be able to make a video in Sora once they release the public version, but great work will still require taste, experience and skill. Exciting times ahead, once the initial mainstream hype dies down. #ai #adobe #sora #runway #pika https://lnkd.in/eP2aYxx8

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Someone has to say it! Tobias saying it makes it even more legit. Meet and work with a lot of young folks who are looking for mentors at workplace thinking they would be hand held at every step. While guides are there, one needs to walk the path and grind towards a path set by the mentor. Things don’t happen on their own. Blaming is another aspect of design folks where stakeholders are held responsible for what’s happening around them without introspecting why is it happening and what one can do to change that behaviour around by using design frameworks and improving the craft on a daily basis. So much of entitlement will never get us anywhere. #designlife

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So immensely proud of such an amazing group of people who've been working so hard on this big set of launches at Figma for #Config2024. ICYMI what we launched today, this blog post recap covers it well: https://lnkd.in/gX3KSWj3 I wanted to share a couple fun tweets from a few of the fantastic designers/leaders that worked on some of the things you may have seen in our keynote this morning. * This is not even close to an exhaustive list of those who worked on today's launches, but just a quick lil glimpse showcasing a few who happened to post about them today (also linkedin obscures the links for some reason, but they're all just fun behind the scenes tweets not shady sites I promise lol): Figma Slides - Keeyen Y.: https://lnkd.in/gmxBH3wq - Mihika Kapoor: https://lnkd.in/gr54Upnu - Natasha T. / Ryan Reid: https://lnkd.in/gd-v9gE3 Redesigned Figma (UI3) - Ryhan Hassan: https://lnkd.in/g868XAze (can't wait to watch the behind the scenes talk with him and Joel Miller and KC Oh as well as Wayne Sun's when they come online later) - Tim Van Damme: https://lnkd.in/gQyvqzYr - Nikolas Klein: https://lnkd.in/ge_kKyvD Figma AI - Jordan Singer: https://lnkd.in/gXmFeXTM - Oscar Dumlao: https://lnkd.in/gkACVY_c - Marco Cornacchia: https://lnkd.in/gMt3BvVY - Vincent van der Meulen: https://lnkd.in/gCrHvcVu - Jediah Katz: https://lnkd.in/gMxEu7i8 - Giorgio Caviglia: https://lnkd.in/gCNVQrKC And more: - Jenny Wen (pages design by rocky chen ✌️): https://lnkd.in/gd_6RHAv - Soundharya Muthukrishnan: https://lnkd.in/gsnibt-j - Daniel Destefanis: https://lnkd.in/gu6mYBe6 - Becca Ramos: https://lnkd.in/gqM7RGKQ We hope you enjoy these updates, and excited to meet more of the amazing community at Config for Day 2 tomorrow! I'm particularly excited for Marcin Wichary's talk tomorrow at 3:40 https://lnkd.in/gvJNNerg

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Do you want consistency between designers and front-end developers? Use of design tokens. When everyone uses the same terms, it simplifies things for both teams. Here's Google's introduction to design tokens and how you can implement them: https://lnkd.in/gpWMwqVz

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“By the time you come to the perfect solution, the problem has already changed.” great insight from artist Jessie Shefrin in John Maeda's article for Figma's "What product leaders should care about in AI" report. Explaining why AI is perfect for picking up mundane tasks like mockups and retouching, helping free us up for problem solving, for example, why are my customers not using my product.

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Patterns for implementing human-centric design thinking and UX to GenAI #GenAI #UX #AI

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💡"You have to learn to transmute your love for creating through your designs to a love for creating through a design TEAM. Your creative successes will be shown through how successful your team is. This is the key to leading and managing in the creative space." https://lnkd.in/gHMwbEhT Check out my thoughts on leadership in the creative/UX space, and share your own below! What tips or struggles would you share with up-and-coming creative leaders?

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Thoughtful breakdown review about eBay Playbook!

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Yesterday, I had the pleasure of chatting with Nesrine Changuel, PhD about the often-overlooked yet vital role of delight in tech products. Too often, this concept is dismissed as mere eye candy—a superficial layer tacked onto the core functionality of an app or website. But if we look closer, creating an emotional connection with users and customers might just be the key to true success. Borrowing her brilliant neologism, it’s not about B2C or B2B anymore—it’s all about B2H: Business-to-Humans. There’s so much more to explore on this topic! #emotionaldesign #delight #whatpeoplelove

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Really annoyed at Figma's price gouging here. There is no reason other than greed: https://lnkd.in/gfdrEiWH Oh, and I emailed them about it and this line from their reply was particularly poignant: "Additionally the minimum for enterprise is a $5k invoice minimum. 6 enterprise seats or made up with other products." To put that in context... our monthly Adobe bill (for 8 CC, 7 PS, 6 Acrobat licenses) is ~NZ$2k... Amazing how quickly enshittification sets in... #Figma #Design #SoftwareLicensing

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