Useful Links

• Gestalt Principles in UI design

• Invision Study -"Design Maturity" a research on the impact that design has on an organization.

• The High-Resolution Youtube Channel - . This channel is therapeutic. Listen to 25 Interviews with some of the top designers around the country share their stories.  You will soon see that you are not alone in the excitement and challenges we face every day. And you will see why our contribution as designers and as facilitators of design thinking techniques are essential for the success of the companies we work for.

UX Posters

UX THEATRE  by Tanya S (Twitter @spydergrrl) created this amazing poster that summarizes how many companies fake UX, or at least have the wrong understanding of how to properly practice user entered design. I thought it was worth sharing so other designers can see they are not alone with this common problem. Tanya also gives some good suggestion how to resolve these issues in you organization. Of you use or repost this poster please give credit to Tanya S (Twitter @spydergrrl).

ROI of User Experience by Human Factors International is another favorite that breaks down how valuable UX is to an organization.

Useful Figma Links

• Guess who took the top spot in just about every category of the UX Tools 2020 Survey?

• Figma Youtube Channel 

• An entire series of great videos from Figma's very talented Rogie and his friends and colleagues. This series has tons of tips for managing your design libraries, components, and style guides. Also a lot of great content around using Auto-Layout and constraints for responsive designs. 

• Sign up for Figma live hosted video events like tips and tricks
   

PLUGINS:

• Master - This is a paid plugin but extremely helpful for your component development and maintenance. This is the only plugin that I have found that helps you reconnect disconnected plugins.  The Author Gleb is one of the most active plugin developers in the Figma community and a super nice guy. 

  • ​https://dominate.design/ is Glebs home page for the Master Plugin

• Styler -  help you generate your styles

• Themer - A brilliant plugin created by Tom Lowry that lets you quickly switch your designs between different theme's like light mode and dark mode.  This plugin also forces best practices to set up your design environment in the same way that your dev team would do it if your application offered this flexibility to your users. 

• Nisa Text Splitter -  Ever wanted to convert your paragraph text into a list? How about sorting your list? This plugin is amazing. 

• Autoflow -  Turn any frame into a flow diagram. The most awesome thing about this plugin is that the lines stay connected when you move your frames. 

• Google Sheets Sync - This allows you to populate a Google sheet with data that you can then use to populate your Figma components. Works great on product cards. 

• Sorter - Quicksort by name or layer location, and be able to ever order.

• Remove BG - Removes background of images

COMMUNITY PAGES:

• Shameless plug for one of my contributions - "Auto Layout Form components" - this file has some very flexible forms that really take advantage of different auto-layout capabilities.

Favorite Headphone Music