🔖 What I’ve been reading

Pretty UI won’t get you hired anymore

Love this transcript of a conversation between two designers talking about design, leadership, and the current job market.

I tell my senior designers this all the time. A senior designer won’t get to the next level by “doing more designs” or “getting better at Figma” or “improving interaction skills.”

When we get to a certain level, it’s more about leadership.

Working well across teams. Driving projects forward autonomously. Anticipating roadblocks. Prioritizing options. Rallying people around a decision that’s not perfect. Salvaging a project that lost resources halfway through.

In the real world, projects rarely follow a linear path. The most senior designers need to be able to navigate that effectively when it happens.

Because it always does.

Meta goes MAGA (and I’m done)

Mark Zuckerberg announced he would dismantle the Facebook’s content-vetting machine, thus paving the way for the spread of misinformation, hate speech, and online bullying. He’s kowtowing to Trump, who was once banned by Facebook. Trump of course praised the move and said it “probably” came as a result of his own threats.

Believable.

Facebook and Twitter were my go-to social platforms for over a decade. I developed great communities on each. It’s where I got my news, learned new skills, laughed at jokes, and found my tribe.

But I’m not active on either anymore.

I haven’t used Facebook since 2017 since the site is such a mess (and won’t be getting better anytime soon). After Musk bought Twitter and made it his own play thing, it’s just not the same place. These platforms are becoming a tech libertarian's paradise. I tried getting into BlueSky and others, but after almost 20 years on social media I just can’t fathom starting over.

I might just be done with it all.

I fear it might be career-limiting, but I don’t know if I can do it anymore. If you’re having similar thoughts, I’d love to know what’s going through your mind.

These days I’ll be focusing on where I get the best engagement: LinkedIn (didn’t see that coming), Medium, and this newsletter (forward it to a friend, why don’t ‘cha?).

🧶 Stray Links

I enjoyed listening to this podcast with Andrei Herasimchuk, the first designer at both Adobe and Figma. Interesting to hear what the design tooling landscape was like in the early days.

Watching Never Too Small is a guilty pleasure of mine but I've never seen Simone Giertz's episode. She's so funny.

I love Naomi West’s article on shifting to product marketing. Reading through it reminded me of my own transition from marketing design to product design years ago. A lot of “Oooh so this is what it’s like on the other side of the fence” moments.

Climate tech investors are ready to pour cash into startups whose products relate to AI and to national security.

Another podcast I enjoyed is Claire Vo’s Product Management Is Dead, So What Are We Doing Instead? from Lenny’s Summit. By now we all know Ai will change our jobs forever, and Claire talks about what that might look like.

On the lighter side, Design Crit: Business cards from American Psycho.

🏛️ From the Archives

A favorite article book I periodically re-read.

Last year I re-read Rands’s Managing Humans. My edition is over 10 years old, but its contents still ring true. It’s so good. A great companion to Julie Zhou’s The Making of a Manager.

❝ One Good Quote

One of my mentors casually dropped this gem in one of our recent conversations. As a senior leader, people look up to you and notice how you behave.

All. The. Time.

The best leaders don’t lose their cool in public. You’re only as good as your worst day.

💅 Nice Site

More weird personal sites like this please.

Thanks for reading ✌️
- Ted (@tedgoas)