June 17, 2024 – The Blog Pros

June 17, 2024September 8, 2024

Useful Email Newsletters For Designers

Struggling to keep our inboxes under control and aim for that magical state of inbox zero, the notification announcing an incoming email isn’t the most appreciated sound for many of us. However, there are some emails to actually look forward to: A newsletter, curated and written with love and care, can be a nice break in your daily routine, providing new insights and sparking ideas and inspiration for your work.

With so many wonderful design newsletters out there, we know it can be a challenge to decide which newsletter (or newsletters) to subscribe to. That’s why we want to shine a light on some newsletter gems today to make your decision at least a bit easier — and help you discover newsletters you might not have heard of yet. Ranging from design systems to UX writing, motion design, and user research, there sure is something in it for you.

A huge thank you to everyone who writes, edits, and publishes these newsletters to help us all get better at our craft. You are truly smashing! 👏🏼👏🏽👏🏾

Below you’ll find quick jumps to newsletters on specific topics you might be interested in. Scroll down to browse the complete list or skip the table of contents.

AI
business
career
content strategy
design
design systems
ethical design
Figma
front-end
information architecture
interaction design
leadership
product design
sustainability
user research
UX
UX writing

Design & Front-End

HeyDesigner

🗓 Delivered every Monday
🖋 Written by Tamas Sari

Aimed at product people, UXers, PMs, and design engineers, the HeyDesigner newsletter is packed with a carefully curated selection of the latest design and front-end articles, tools, and resources.

Pixels of the Week

🗓 Delivered weekly
🖋 Written by Stéphanie Walter

Stéphanie Walter’s Pixels of the Week newsletter keeps you informed about the latest UX research, design, tech (HTML, CSS, SVG) news, tools, methods, and other resources that caught Stéphanie’s interest.

TLDR Design

🗓 Delivered daily
🖋 Written by Dan Ni

You’re looking for some bite-sized design inspiration? TLDR Design is a daily newsletter highlighting news, tools, tutorials, trends, and inspiration for design professionals.

DesignOps

🗓 Delivered every two weeks
🖋 Written by Ch'an Armstrong

The DesignOps newsletter provides the DesignOps community with the best hand-picked articles all around design, code, AI, design tools, no-code tools, developer tools, and, of course, design ops.

Adam Silver’s Newsletter

🗓 Delivered weekly
🖋 Written by Adam Silver

Every week, Adam Silver sends out a newsletter aimed at designers, content designers, and front-end developers. It includes short and sweet, evidence-based design tips, mostly about forms UX, but not always.

Smashing Newsletter

🗓 Delivered every Tuesday
🖋 Written by the Smashing Editorial team

Every Tuesday, we publish the Smashing Newsletter with useful tips and techniques on front-end and UX, covering everything from design systems and UX research to CSS and JavaScript. Each issue is curated, written, and edited with love and care, no third-party mailings or hidden advertising.

UX Design Weekly

🗓 Delivered every Monday
🖋 Written by Kenny Chen

UX Design Weekly provides you with a weekly dose of hand-picked user experience design links. Every issue features articles, tools and resources, a UX portfolio, and a quote to spark ideas and get you thinking.

UX Collective

🗓 Delivered weekly
🖋 Written by Fabricio Teixeira and Caio Braga

“Designers are thinkers as much as they are makers.” Following this credo, the UX Collective newsletter helps designers think more critically about their work. Every issue highlights thought-provoking reads, little gems, tools, and resources.

Built For Mars

🗓 Delivered every few weeks
🖋 Written by Peter Ramsey

The Built for Mars newsletter brings Peter Ramsey’s UX research straight to your inbox. It includes in-depth UX case studies and bite-sized UX ideas and experiments.

NN Group

🗓 Delivered weekly
🖋 Written by the Nielsen Norman Group

Studying users around the world, the Nielsen Norman Group provides research-based UX guidance. If you don’t want to miss their latest articles and videos about usability, design, and UX research, you can subscribe to the NN/g newsletter to stay up-to-date.

UX Notebook

🗓 Delivered weekly
🖋 Written by Sarah Doody

The UX Notebook Newsletter is aimed at UX and product professionals who want to learn how to apply UX and design principles to design and grow their teams, products, and careers.

Smart Interface Design Patterns

🗓 Delivered weekly
🖋 Written by Vitaly Friedman

Every issue of the Smart Interface Design Patterns newsletter is dedicated to a common interface challenge and how to solve it to avoid issues down the line. A treasure chest of design patterns and UX techniques.

UX Weekly

🗓 Delivered weekly
🖋 Written by the Interaction Design Foundation

The Interaction Design Foundation is known for their UX courses and webinars for both aspiring designers and advanced professionals. Their UX Weekly newsletter delivers design tips and educational material to help you leverage the power of design.

Design With Care

🗓 Delivered every first Tuesday of a month
🖋 Written by Alex Bilstein

Healthcare systems desparately need UX designers to improve the status quo for both healthcare professionals and patients. The Design With Care newsletter empowers UX designers to create better healthcare experiences and make an impact that matters.

UX Writing & Content Strategy

The UX Gal

🗓 Delivered every Monday
🖋 Written by Slater Katz

Whether you’re about to start your UX content education or want to get better at UX writing, The UX Gal newsletter is for you. Every Monday, Slater Katz sends out a new newsletter with prompts, thoughts, and exercises to build your UX writing and content design skills.

UX Content Collective

🗓 Delivered weekly
🖋 Written by the UX Content Collective

The newsletter by the UX Content Collective is perfect for anyone interested in content design. In it, you’ll find curated UX writing resources, new job openings, and exclusive discounts.

GatherContent

🗓 Delivered weekly
🖋 Written by the GatherContent team

The GatherContent newsletter is a weekly email full of content strategy goodies. It features articles, webinars and masterclasses, new books, free templates, and industry news.

User Research

User Research Academy

🗓 Delivered weekly
🖋 Written by Nikki Anderson

If you want to get more creative and confident when conducting user research, the User Research Academy might be for you. With carefully curated articles, podcasts, events, books, and academic resources all around user research, the newsletter is perfect for beginners and senior UX researchers alike.

User Weekly

🗓 Delivered weekly
🖋 Written by Jan Ahrend

What mattered in UX research this week? To keep you up-to-date on trends, methods, and insights across the UX research industry, Jan Ahrend captures the pulse of the UX research community in his User Weekly newsletter.

User Interviews

🗓 Delivered weekly
🖋 Written by the User Interviews team

The UX Research Newsletter by the folks at User Interviews delivers the latest UX research articles, reports, podcast episodes, and special features. For professional user researchers just like teams who need to conduct user research without a dedicated research team.

Baymard Institute

🗓 Delivered weekly
🖋 Written by the Baymard Institute

User experience, web design, and e-commerce are the topics which the Baymard Institute newsletter covers. It features ad-free full-length research articles to give you precious insights into the field.

Interaction Design

Design Spells

🗓 Delivered every other Sunday
🖋 Written by Chester How, Duncan Leo, and Rick Lee

Whether it’s micro-interactions or easter eggs, Design Spells celebrates the design details that feel like magic and add a spark of delight to a design.

Justin Volz’s Newsletter

🖋 Written by Justin Volz

Getting you ready for the future of motion design is the goal of Justin Volz’s newsletter. It features UX motion design trends, new UX motion design articles, and more to “make your UI tap dance.”

Design Systems & Figma

Design System Guide

🗓 Delivered weekly
🖋 Written by Romina Kavcic

Accompanying her interactive step-by-step guide to design systems, Romina Kavcic sends out the weekly Design System Guide newsletter on all things design systems, design process, and design strategy.

Figmalion

🗓 Delivered weekly
🖋 Written by Eugene Fedorenko

The Figmalion newsletter keeps you up-to-date on what is happening in the Figma community, with curated design resources and a weekly roundup of Figma and design tool news.

Information Architecture

Informa(c)tion

🗓 Delivered every other Sunday
🖋 Written by Jorge Arango

The Informa(c)tion newsletter explores the intersection of information, cognition, and design. Each issue includes an essay about information architecture and/or personal knowledge management and a list of interesting links.

Product Design

Product Design Challenges

🗓 Delivered weekly
🖋 Written by Artiom Dashinsky

How about a weekly design challenge to work on your core design skills, improve your portfolio, or prepare for your next job interview? The Weekly Product Design Challenges newsletter has got you covered. Every week, Artiom Dashinsky shares a new exercise inspired and used by companies like Facebook, Google, and WeWork to interview UX design candidates.

Fundament

🗓 Delivered every other Thursday
🖋 Written by Arkadiusz Radek and Mateusz Litarowicz

With Fundament, Arkadiusz Radek and Mateusz Litarowicz created a place to share what they’ve learned in their ten-year UX and Product Design careers. The newsletter is about the things that matter in design, the practicalities of the job, the lesser-known bits, and content that will help you grow as a UX or Product Designer.

Case Study Club

🗓 Delivered weekly
🖋 Written by Jan Haaland

How do people design digital products? With curated UX case studies, the Case Study Club newsletter grants insights into other designers’ processes.

Ethical Design & Sustainability

Ethical Design Network

🗓 Delivered monthly
🖋 Written by Trine Falbe

The Ethical Design Network is a space for digital professionals to share, discuss, and self-educate about ethical design. You can sign up to the newsletter to receive monthly news, resources, and event updates all around ethical design.

Sustainable UX

🗓 Delivered monthly
🖋 Written by Thorsten Jonas

As designers, we have to take responsibility for more than our users. Shining a light on how to design and build more sustainable digital products, the SUX Newsletter by the Sustainable UX Network helps you stand up to that responsibility.

AI Goodies

🗓 Delivered weekly
🖋 Written by Ioana Teleanu

A brand-new newsletter on AI, design, and UX goodies comes from Ioana Teleanu: AI Goodies. Every week, it covers the latest resources, trends, news, and tools from the world of AI.

Business

d.MBA

🗓 Delivered weekly
🖋 Written by Alen Faljic

Learning business can help you become a better designer. The d.MBA newsletter is your weekly source of briefings from the business world, hand-picked for the design community by Alen Faljic and the d.MBA team.

Career & Leadership

Dan Mall Teaches

🗓 Delivered weekly
🖋 Written by Dan Mall

Tips, tricks, and tools about design systems, process, and leadership, delivered to your inbox every week. That’s the Dan Mall Teaches newsletter.

Stratatics

🗓 Delivered weekly
🖋 Written by Ryan Rumsey

To do things differently, you must look at your work in a new light. That’s the idea behind the Stratatics newsletter. Each week, Ryan Rumsey provides design leaders and executives (and those who work alongside them) with a new idea to reimagine and deliver their best work.

Spread The Word

Do you have a favorite newsletter that isn’t featured in the post? Or maybe you’re writing and publishing a newsletter yourself? We’d love to hear about it in the comments below!

June 17, 2024September 9, 2024

Chris Corner: Git it

Julia Evans has released what she’s saying is one of her most popular zines to date: How Git Works.

I don’t think you’d regret reading it. I imagine most of us get by with knowing just enough Git to do our jobs, but are probably using 5% of what it can really do. Being very strong with Git will almost surely benefit you in your career. Imagine helping a superior out of a sticky situation where it might look like code was lost or otherwise screwed up. Being the solution during an emotional time is clutch. Surely this pairs nicely with Oh Shit, Git!, a real classic from Katie-Sylor Miller which I see has been revitalized with Julia here.

Just the other day here at CodePen Headquarters, I saw a co-worker solve an issue with git bisect. Have you even heard of that?! Imagine there is a bug in your code, but you have absolutely no idea when it happened or where in the code it might be. That’s not a good feeling, but it’s exactly where git bisect comes in. As best I understand it, it sets the HEAD of your repo back in time some amount, and there, you test if the bug is present and you can say git bisect good or git bisect bad. Then it moves the HEAD and you keep testing and eventually it gets closer and closer to the exact commit (or at least a range of commits) where the bug happened. Then you can look at the changed files in those commits and figure out where in the code the bug may have came from. So cool!

I certainly know developers who know Git and work with it exclusively at the command line entirely as-provided. But I find it more common among the command line types that they at least have some aliases set up for the most common things they do. Those might be their own aliases, like they’ll make gco do a git checkout, but it’s worth knowing git itself allows you to make aliases within itself, which could be good since they won’t conflict with anything else. (Have I told you how long I had cp aliased to move to our local CodePen project directory? 🤣).

A much more elaborate take on git aliases is called Gut. With it, you don’t git commit anything (with all the params and whatnot you have to also pass), you gut save which launches a little wizard that asks you questions, and then it does the proper git stuff with the information you give it.

I could see that being great for a beginner, but maybe feel a little too slow as you get more comfortable at the command line. Except when it comes to the more advanced stuff and how it looks designed to get you out of binds. The fix and undo commands like awfully helpful and are the kind of things where I can never remember the proper commands.

Paweł Grzybek lays out a classic situation:

Let’s say that we are halfway through the feature, intensely focused on a task, when a critical bug needs to be fixed out of the blue. Happens to us all the time! Should we stash the current changes? Should we quickly smash git add . && git commit -m "wip" and promise that we will sort this mess out later?

His answer is no, it’s using git worktrees. It solves the issue by literally making another copy of your project on disk. And you can open and work on it separately but it all goes to the same repo ultimately. So you can leave your half-done uncommitted work on another worktree while you hop to the other to do work. Me, I’m mostly cool with git stash to tuck stuff away while I go work on something else, or even just the ol “work in progress” or “saving work” commit like Paweł mentioned. It’s not pretty but culturally it’s fine on our project. But I can see how you could get into a groove with worktrees, particularly if your editor supports it nicely.

Phew! We probably talked about Git too much, eh? I know nobody cares. Now let’s go back to just doing the 3-4 commands we know everyday, just with a few more resources in our pocket when we need them.

I gotta leave you with something else. (Digs through bag of hot links.) Ah here we go. This video rules: Flash is dead so I rebuilt it with javascript. Andrew Jakubowicz walks us through building an interface with a pretty modern and lightweight set of tools. Andrew works for Google on Lit, so it’s sort of a big excuse to show off working with Web Components, but it’s a fun ride. At 8 minutes more happens than a typical hour long video.

June 17, 2024

How to Set Date Time from Mac Command Line

Working on a web extension that ships to an app store and isn’t immediately modifiable, like a website, can be difficult. Since you cannot immediately deploy updates, you sometimes need to bake in hardcoded date-based logic. Testing future dates can be difficult if you don’t know how to quickly change the date on your local machine.

To change the current date on your Mac, execute the following from command line:

# Date Format:  MMDDYYYY
sudo date -I 06142024

This command does not modify time, only the current date. Using the same command to reset to current date is easy as well!

The post How to Set Date Time from Mac Command Line appeared first on David Walsh Blog.

June 17, 2024

Create a Striking Portfolio with These Free Webflow Templates

Are you ready to take your portfolio game to the next level? Let’s dive into the exciting world of Webflow templates for creating stunning portfolios! As a web designer, I can vouch for the game-changing benefits these templates bring to the table. Imagine having access to professionally designed layouts and functionalities without spending a dime. That’s the power of free Webflow portfolio templates.

Webflow templates offer a treasure trove of features that can make your portfolio shine. These templates are perfect for designers who want to create impressive designs with dynamic animations and responsive layouts. With just a few clicks, you can customize these templates to reflect your unique style and creativity. Of course! Webflow templates are a great way to save time and create a professional, polished look for your website. They make it easy to showcase your work without getting bogged down in coding and design details. So, why settle for mediocrity when you can dazzle with a Webflow portfolio template?

Advantages of using free templates for creating a striking portfolio

Using free Webflow portfolio templates for your portfolio website comes with a plethora of benefits. These templates serve as a solid foundation that jumpstarts your design process, saving you time and effort in crafting a stunning portfolio. They offer a wide range of design options, from sleek and modern layouts to vibrant and creative designs. With these templates, you can easily customize colors, fonts, and layouts to match your style and showcase your work effectively.

One major advantage is that free Webflow templates are designed by professionals with user experience in mind, ensuring that your portfolio is not only visually appealing but also easy to navigate for your viewers. Additionally, these templates are responsive by nature, meaning your portfolio will look fantastic on any device, whether it’s a desktop, tablet, or smartphone. This adaptability ensures that your work shines across various platforms, attracting potential clients and employers to your impressive design skills without missing a beat.

Benefits of using Webflow templates for portfolio creation

When it comes to building a standout portfolio, using Webflow templates is like having a secret weapon in your design arsenal. These templates offer a plethora of benefits for creating a top-notch portfolio website. First off, they are incredibly user-friendly, making the design process smooth and stress-free. With pre-built layouts and elements, you can save valuable time and focus on showcasing your work in the best possible light.

Additionally, Webflow templates are highly customizable, allowing you to tailor every aspect of your portfolio to fit your unique style and vision. This level of flexibility ensures that your portfolio stands out from the rest and leaves a lasting impression on visitors. Moreover, the responsive nature of Webflow templates guarantees that your portfolio looks stunning on any device, from desktops to smartphones.

Overall, using Webflow templates for portfolio creation not only saves time and effort but also elevates the visual appeal and functionality of your website effortlessly. With these templates, you can create a professional and polished portfolio that speaks volumes about your design expertise.

Tips for maximizing the impact of your portfolio with free templates

When it comes to making the most out of your portfolio using free Webflow templates, remember to showcase your best work first. Grab the viewer’s attention with a stunning homepage that highlights your top projects. Keep it simple and clean to ensure your designs shine through without distractions. Additionally, personalize the template to match your style and brand identity. Add a touch of creativity by incorporating unique elements that reflect your personality.

Don’t forget to optimize your images for faster loading times, as nobody likes waiting around for a portfolio to load. Use high-quality visuals that clearly demonstrate your skills and expertise. And lastly, make sure your portfolio is easy to navigate. Organize your projects into categories or sections, making it effortless for visitors to explore and discover your creations with ease. With these tips, you can maximize the impact of your portfolio and leave a lasting impression on potential clients and employers.

In conclusion, using free Webflow portfolio templates is a game-changer for any aspiring web designer. These templates provide a solid foundation to kickstart your portfolio design journey without breaking a sweat. With a wide range of customizable options at your fingertips, crafting a visually stunning and user-friendly portfolio has never been easier. The convenience and flexibility of Webflow templates allow you to showcase your work in the best light possible, impressing potential clients and employers with your creative prowess. So, why make things harder for yourself when you can take advantage of these free resources to elevate your portfolio to new heights? Embrace the power of Webflow templates and watch your design dreams come to life with style and ease. Your portfolio deserves to stand out, and with Webflow, that’s exactly what it will do.