Andrei Herasimchuk

I'm joining Femke for a 60-minute live event about building a culture of design in a startup as a team of one. Early-stage startups often have engineering-heavy teams with room for only a single designer or none at all. In an environment like this, designers need help to have their voices heard. It's challenging to build a design culture in companies like this and it presents the designers with a unique set of challenges. But it doesn't have to be like this. Designers can build a culture of design within a company by finding design champions in non-designers. These champions can be engineers, product managers, or other team members. They can help move design forward by their active participation in design. Join us live on Jun 5th ↓ https://lnkd.in/e6kExFqY P. S. 137 designers have already signed up.

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Figma’s ConFig ’24 released several new features that caused many to continue to sing their praises. However, there is a trend their business model that is problematic. New features are initially available to all in beta. Once the feature goes into production, there will be a charge to use the new feature. Figma seems to be building an a la cart feature menu creating a nickel and dime growth strategy. The problem is that Figma has already surpassed the exorbitant pricing of Adobe products. Has Figma considered the full spectrum of their user base? While some enterprises may be able to float that price tag (For managers, it still can be a hard sell for budget approval), small businesses and independent designers will find the cost to be challenging or prohibitive. While Figma may generate some initial profit, it may not work in the long-term once the romance is gone.

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"Your design system isn't just a store of rules and constraints." ✨ Phillip Maggs, Superside's Director of New Horizons, spoke about how to build AI design systems at scale during Figma's #Config2024. Check the full talk: https://lnkd.in/dduYtTts

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You could try phrasing it like this: "Investigate Creative.ai to see if it has become the new benchmark in design and study its AI benefits compared to Figma!" https://creatie.ai/

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I 🖤 the (physical) metaphor used by OpenAI for design their offices. Library as a place of knowledge and homage to the written word. PS: this interactive article by NYTimes is amazing 😍 https://lnkd.in/e2cFvY2J #chatgpt #openai #nytimes #nyt #ai #artificialintelligence #design

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From Mia Blume's latest "What Figma AI Means for design" newsletter: "The actual risk is one that many design leaders have been working on for decades, trying to shift the narrative and perceived value of design to include more than craft. And we’ve made progress, but clearly not enough. In a world where anyone can easily create things that look like our work product, the question arises: what is the role of designers? ...I still believe Generative AI can help us build more quickly and efficiently, leaving us more time to hone in on the right ideas, direction, vision, and strategy.Every designer would have their own team of “AI Interns” ready to produce, enabling the designer to focus on the most important challenges and tasks. And if we’re not wrangling changes across a thousand artboards or documents, we could finally become the strategy partner we’ve wanted to be." I love this aspiration for design as a discipline. As an experienced early stage startup designer, shaping strategy is one of my favorite, engaging aspects of my role. Figma and any other design tools are there to simply help me execute or experiment; with the trajectory of AI-powered design tools, this would only help me explore, strengthen, and experiment with strategy more quickly and with more options. If this is the way designers would like to grow, I would say AI helps raise our voices in the war room. In terms of figuring out what we can do to help junior designers make the leap— I imagine that inter-disciplinary collaboration and exposure is more important than ever. Exposing designers to all aspects of the business to encourage a more holistic approach in design thinking would only serve to increase our value to the team. Forcing new designers to think literally outside of making literal ‘boxes’: redesign the experience of a restaurant. Redesign the experience of reading a book. Of scheduling chores. Redesign the checkin process at your latest (horrible) Airbnb. If you’re able to gather the constraints, contexts, and render obvious the assumed limitations— the assessment is ripe for creativity. AI isn’t going to replace the discovery and creativity of how to innovate on an existing / fragmented workflow, precisely because it has no personal preferences or experiences to relate to where the usual processes can improve or not. So how do we teach the next generation of designers to shift their focus from just workflows and aesthetics to deep learning and continually questioning the status quo? 

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Why did we never take a leap in designing banknotes? The same old typical portrait inscribed notes will hardly come to your notice. This genius of a man Ootje Oxenaar changed the banknote design game forever in the late 60s. #banknotedesign #design #visualdesign #graphicdesign #visualcommunication

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Backlash is gathering. Publishers, writers, coders, artist, and just human beings in general, are starting to mobilize against their humanity being chum for giant tech companies used to fuel their AI. I have previously posted about the dangers of model collapse for designers and others who work in technology. This article lays it out a greater length, and with fairly decent nuance. https://lnkd.in/dvm6zTy4

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Interesting to read about Figma's intent to use some customers' de-identified data to and content to train its AI design models while protecting privacy. Worth reading the links below particularly if you are using a starter or professional package as AI content training is on by default from August 15, 2024 unless you opt out.  Admins can control customer content sharing with a new setting, as of August 15, 2024. Building Figma AI - details on approach https://lnkd.in/erviXS2Y Control AI features and content training settings https://lnkd.in/eaUJBVnK

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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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The GUI of generative AI isn't chat. Think of chat as the command line interface of the PC revolution—essential, but just the start. Embedding AI within existing workflows, like how Figma does it, makes more sense. Why? 1️⃣ It’s familiar and less disruptive, leading to better adoption. 2️⃣ It opens up endless opportunities to embed AI in various ways, not just through a chat interface. This approach makes AI more versatile and deeply integrated into our everyday tools and tasks.

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The ONE biggest challenge stopping design teams from the wider adoption of design systems UIUX design teams across companies and agencies have challenges of different sorts. Not all of them have realized the problems in their everyday design work. Not all of them know there could be a solution to their everyday design problems. Not all of them have found their way to using design systems. OR There's something stopping them from building their design projects on a design system. In your experience, what could it be? #uiux #designsystem #uxdesign #websitedesign

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Many designers fall into the trap of getting way too attached to their own designs. David Fano has seen designers get caught up in all sorts of stuff: — Buttons that look cool but don't really do much — Interfaces that are more flash than substance — Design systems that are more complicated than they need to be The thing is that none of that matters if you're not solving the user's actual problem. The best product managers know that the user is king. They focus on solving the user's needs, not just making things look good. It's easy to get lost in the weeds when you're deep in the design process. You might find yourself going down the rabbit hole of pixel-perfect layouts and animations that are super on-trend. But that’s how to lose sight of why you're designing in the first place. Your job is to make the user's life better, not just to make something that looks cool. As designers, we need to be real with ourselves: — Does this feature actually make the user's experience better? — Are we solving a problem that users actually have? — Or are we just geeking out over our own design skills? Always keep the user front and center. — How do you balance making great designs with actually solving user problems? Watch the full episode with David for more talk on user-centered design, now live on our new content series at minimumviablepodcast.com.

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Product designers are busy people. They've got endless folks asking for endless things... endlessly. And then the design systems team is all up in their joint asking them to use components... It's not a surprise that people can get a little fatigued. It seems quite reasonable if you ask me. In our latest episode, Davy Fung and I discuss fatigue, its causes and ways to either avoid or blunt it. Listen here: https://lnkd.in/g7TZWiqv #design #designsystems #fatigue

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Videos from the first week of my UX/UI/AI class are now on YouTube. I’ll be adding to this playlist as I add additional videos each week: https://lnkd.in/e2VAWxND

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This just happened at Config 2024... Figma has introduced some major updates at Config 2024. The updates include a new user interface, AI integrations, auto layout suggestions, Figma Slides, and an improved DEV mode. The new AI tools can create UI mockups, offer visual search, and automate text translation and image background removal tasks. One downside is that Figma will now use our intellectual property to train its AI, which is a concern. Where will this all lead us in the next few years? That's something we'll know when we get there. #Config2024 #Figma #ProductDesign #News #AI

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Designers MUST understand generative AI. And not in theory: you must roll up your sleeves and work hands-on with these tools and materials. This is not a passing fad but a deeply transformative set of technologies.

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Reposting a great report from the Institute of Design (ID). It's an important look at the state of design and technology that provides useful insights for leaders in all capacities, not just design. When we think design we often think pretty visuals, but design expertise is extremely powerful when applied to systems and processes. Especially when adopting technology we need to design a process for adoption, implementation, systemization and customer experience. Without design we risk reckless growth over responsible value as one contributor put it. It's obvious that adopting new technology in the age of AI is vital to the survival of businesses. Your design leaders are going to be vital to adoption that adds value-not just adoption for the sake of adoption. I encourage you to read the whole thing as they break down how design and designers are equipped to contribute to today's most pressing organizational needs from ➝ 1️⃣ Designers make the intangible tangible. We collaborate with different teams in real time to prototype so everyone can see actual representations of the ideas in play. This helps to answers some of the biggest first questions like: What could be? How do we even get this started? 2️⃣ How do we ensure we’re adding value? How do we break down the layers, dependencies, obstructions, and possibilities of the systems that underpin our daily lives—in ways everyone in the organization can understand. 3️⃣ How do we measure and iterate? https://lnkd.in/g8gBEVmb #designthinking #aiandbusiness #aiautomation #uxdesign

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REMINDER: We're LIVE in 40 minutes! Just a quick reminder that Piccia Neri and I will be going live in 40 minutes — 11:00 AM EDT/5:00 PM CET — to show you how to lead with accessibility first, get buy-in from team and bosses more easily, and increase conversions at the same time.   So if you haven't registered, it's not too late: Head here and sign up — at the very least, you'll get access to the replay if you can't make it. ;-) Register here (for FREE): https://lnkd.in/eKcci-wh #a11y #AccessibilityForAll #AccessibilityMatters #WebAccessibility

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