Reflections on Series and Audience Engagement

This week, we talk about how to have effective brainstorms: what does good prep look like, and what should be done alone or with a group? In The Sidebar, we share our spicy takes about brutalism in interface design.

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The Sidebar:

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In this week's Sidebar, we share our spicy takes on brutalism in interface design.

This comes from a GitHub issue:

hey guys, have you covered the movement of brutalism in design, and how its resurgence can be used to break out of the "design dogmas" in web design which have created a kind of banal /sameness to what we see online. i.e. sites are clearly functional but have lost brand personality. I've recently been thinking about how these new dogmas of web have perhaps led to a democratization of design and less opportunity for more senior designers to flex their creativity. Thoughts?

• This is what a brutalist world would look like on your phone
• Brutalist websites gallery
• Learn more about Jakob's law: Users spend most of their time on other sites. This means that users prefer your site to work the same way as all the other sites they already know.

Follow up:

• It's totally acceptable to like the Lobster typeface.
• macOS Big Sur Beta 9 has an updated QuickTime icon and it's much better.

Listener question:

mlamond asks: Do you prefer to brainstorm solutions with peers or coming up with solutions on your own? Does your work environment encourage one over the other?

• Mural is a nice tool for having remote brainstorms.

Cool Things:

• Brian shared Ted Lasso, a new show on Apple TV+. It's a ray of sunshine in an otherwise dark timeline.
• Marshall shared Better Touch Tool, an indie macOS application that allows you to customize the behavior of your Mac's trackpad.

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