Design loops #1
Design loops #1
Answering the question “why blog?” and what to expect from these newsletters.
Hello,
I hope you are well. Welcome to Design Loops, a (fingers crossed) regular newsletter about design.
If you don't know me already, I'm James, a digital product designer and final year digital media student in Brighton. This newsletter will share personal insights into design and anything I think is worth sharing.
I don't plan to follow a strict format, especially as this is a WIP, but I am pretty certain I'll share highlights of links I've collected and enjoyed. These won't be specific to product design but also cover music, technology, health — anything I'm interested in. I'm confident sharing links will be a consistent feature; so much so I'm gonna call it Linkin' park... enjoy ⬇️
Linkin’ Park
A website with a pretty insane collection of film stills. You can even search by colour, specific to the hex code!
Entertaining animation and motion design via @dreamingvinyl (sound on).
A playful blog post from google design where designers depict their thoughts on 'good design' through physical objects.
Otherwise maybe expect a quote from a book, podcast, or article I've enjoyed (thanks to Readwise):
Or a photo from my camera roll:
Or a snapshot of something I'm working on:
I hope that gives some insight into the work I'm interested in and what you can expect in future. Now for the meat of this post.
Why blog?
This prompt is what I wanted to answer first because it does feel strange sharing writing and personal thoughts. So here are my aims for the newsletter and the reasons behind writing it:
The aim
Discuss things I'm interested in publicly, to increase the chances meet others interested in the same things
Provide value through sharing (hopefully) entertaining things as well as insights and lessons my past self wish they knew sooner
Experiment with and improve; writing, reflection, publishing, SEO and all manner of other useful things
What pushed me over the edge?
I've wanted to share content more intentionally since forever, but, of course, doubt creeps in and it goes on the laterbase. It's taken a new perspective to help me finally just do it. That new perspective is, framing the whole idea using the question "what is the worst possible thing that may happen if I do this?", and conversely, "what is the best possible thing that may happen if I do this?". To that the answers may be, I look silly and people think my writing is shit. Or, something life-changing might happen, like meeting other designers or discovering new opportunities. The best-case scenario clearly already outweighs the worst. The final nail in the coffin is just remembering that if anyone does think less of me for doing this, those aren’t people I should care for.
So this is already getting long. Please do join for the next one by clicking the subscribe link at the bottom of the page. Don't worry, I will never share your email, and I'll do well to publish these more than once a month. Take care until then.
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