I once had a model insist that I was a web designer living in Brighton who ran an agency called 'Guerilla Futures' and was the author of a series of UX design for babies books.
Obviously it was a hallucination, but a very detailed and consistent one. Especially as if things had gone slightly differently there's a good chance I could have ended up in Brighton. Plus it's a pretty good name and the books are a fun idea too. Was this my Sliding Doors moment?
Photoshop's interface is getting worse [1] and everyone hates Adobe, so there's a great opportunity for a tool like GIMP to step up and become the default alternative. It's got a lot of features, it's been around for a long time and has reasonable name recognition (for better or worse).
However, unless they do a Blender and make a sustained effort to improve the UI, understand what people want and how it fits into professional workflows, it's never going to happen.
The attitude seems to be: If you don't like it, fuck you. I think they're genuinely happy with how things are. The inscrutable UI and off-putting name are features not bugs, keeping away the sort of people they don't want.
The company absolutely failed the test. If they're not using industry standard tools then it's a sign they don't take the role seriously. That would be a huge red flag to me.
It's like applying to be developer and being told to use Microsoft FrontPage. It's doable, but raises serious questions about the professionalism of the organisation.
Pipedream was an odd bit of software, but the article is a bad take on RiscOS itself.
It was way ahead of Windows at the time and even Mac OS didn’t really catch up until System 8.
I was astonished when going to friends’ houses at how backward and clunky their IBM compatibles with 5” drives seemed in comparison.
From an interface side, what’s interesting (and alluded to in the article) is how file-focused RiscOS is. There wasn’t the concept of an in-app file picker. If you wanted to open a file, you navigated to its location in the file system. To save, you dragged the icon to the folder you wanted to put it.
Programs being folders was useful for mischief. Most people never noticed the ! in the filename, so I’d amuse myself by turning classmates’ document folders into applications that would run a script when clicked. I’d fire scary error messages, load full-screen images or mess with the system settings.
I’m building a new product design app that is made from the start for design systems and agentic collaboration. Tried posting about it a few times in the UX design sub as I thought it might be interesting to fellow designers, but they all got deleted by the mods for unspecified reasons even though I was careful to follow the rules. Gave up in the end.
The company I currently work for is both a B-Corp and an employee-owned trust. The difference in culture, attitude and behaviour to the previous place I worked at, which only cared about quarterly results is stark.
It’s not really, companies like GM used to boast about how well they treated their employees and communities. It was Jack Welch and a legion of like-minded arseholes who decided they should be increasingly richer no matter who or what paid for it.
About as accurate as a horoscope. Sherlock Holmes it is not.
It got the location (exif, I guess) and was able to identify that I was a balding mediocre middle-aged guy, but the more specific it got the more wrong (and insulting) it was.
"He appears tired and introspective. He may exhibit biases such as confirmation bias, anchoring bias, in-group bias and out-group bias. His interests could involve reading, hiking, and programming, coupled with less constructive activities like smoking, excessive drinking, and gambling.
This individual seems to possess low self-esteem, exhibits introversion, a lack of emotional stability, and low self-control, making them susceptible to targeted advertising."
I’m making Bezier, a mac-native vector design app as an alternative to Figma and Sketch.
Unlike those apps it has full support for design tokens and (so far) flexbox layouts. It can also export directly to HTML, rather than a fake preview mode. I’m also working on full code-backed components, so you can go between code and design very easily.
As a designer, I’ve been frustrated for years by the gap between design and code, and despite all the new AI features, Figma still hasn’t got any further in years - design tokens need a 3rd party plugin and responsive designs are a pain in the bum. So I decided to build something that has the ease of Figma while being much closer to live code.
I’ve got to the point where I’m designing the app in itself, tokens are working, html export is working and nearly ready for first betas.