You can build the best product in the world, but if nobody knows it exists can it really be the best? Getting discovered can be as important as creating a great product nowadays. This has lead to many startups creating products the other way round: instead of ‘build it, and they will come’, it’s become: ‘go to where they are,… Read More ￫

There’s a lot of pressure on designers to be excellent right from the start. But that’s just not realistic. When you start a project, you don’t know what the right solution is yet. The power of early sketching and realisation of any problem’s complexities is best explored and understood in the very freedom of mapping out everything in the early… Read More ￫

After working 4 years in the field of digital design I got obsessed with tidying up and sorting information. This lead to the creation of a systematic approach for designing user interfaces. It is an object-oriented, programming-inspired approach, a collection of various ideas that are universal. Use it for working with your favourite design software or for coding. It helps… Read More ￫

Last May, we announced a new look for Instagram, inside and outside the app. We created a new Instagram app icon and a set of unified icons for Hyperlapse, Layout, and Boomerang. We’ve also refreshed the user interface with a simpler, more consistent design that helps people’s photos and videos shine. Inspiration When Instagram was founded, it was a place… Read More ￫

I spoke this week at a General Assembly Q&A session with 25 freshly minted graduates from their UX course. Many of the questions centred around how to structure portfolios ready for interview, how design at Atlassian works and how to break into the UX and design industry. 1 question really stood out to me. “As a designer, what’s the hardest… Read More ￫

I was born in the age where people still wrote on paper for their school homework and back then I was obsessed with handwriting. Honestly, it was kind of a problem and I might have looked fairly psycho to anyone who flicked through a notebook of mine as I’d test a new one out every two weeks. Computers stole this… Read More ￫

We have been living in a world of ‘clean and minimal’ for quite some time, so what’s next? Over the last several months, some of the leaders of innovative design have taken ‘minimal design’ to the next level. Facebook, Airbnb and Apple have followed a similar blueprint to simplify prominent products in a way that reflects this new trend of… Read More ￫

It is clear that intelligent algorithms such as deep learning, machine learning, artificial intelligence, etc. will have a major impact on the world. However, what isn’t clear is how these technologies can be used to solve real problems for people. At Philosophie we work on experiences that help humans in their day-to-day tasks. We hope to join the benefits of… Read More ￫

In its first era, design was seen as a problem solver; it has now moved into a second era where it’s seen as a creator of meaningful experiences. “The design discipline, similar to its industry, has undergone a specialization process.” From Design to Experience Design The design discipline, similar to its industry, has undergone a specialization process. Numerous job titles… Read More ￫

Empathy is a buzzword in the tech industry. Although it’s important to work to understand the needs of the humans using our products, sometimes it seems like we talk about empathy more than we actually do it. “Empathy is the ability to understand and share the feelings of another.” Silicon Valley is a notoriously insular place to work. During the two… Read More ￫

Being pretty self-taught as far as UI design goes, I’ve always wondered why so many articles and books talk about color theory and palettes. In my experience, using a “split complementary palette” is about 0% predictive of me making nice-looking designs. I have another word for that sort of thing: useless. “So if color theory doesn’t provide a solid basis… Read More ￫

I am a product designer. I design products thinking about how the person that will use them will experience those products. I could have chosen different paths but this is what I love to do…and here are a few reasons why: It is a service for others The design process, the creation of the product, what features it should have,… Read More ￫