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🤿 blurrific

🤿 blurrific

+ new resources for design inspiration

Ridd
December 07, 2024

Happy Saturday 👋

Let’s take a second and imagine that you’ve just been asked to lead the design of a new project.

It’s complex, open-ended, and full of interconnected problems…

How do you attack that ambiguity and get momentum quickly?

Well… I created a mini episode to answer that question by unpacking tactics used by designers like:

Jenny Wen (Original designer of Figjam)
Michael Wandelmaier (Former head of design at Metalab)
Alex Cornell (Director of Design at Meta AI)
Rich Arnold (Design leader at Vine, IG, and Coinbase)
Andrei Herasimchuk (first designer at Adobe and Figma — episode coming soon 🤫)

🤝 WITH RAYCAST

Raycast notes have already become a staple part of my workflow (especially while recording interviews).

There’s markdown formatting, keyboard shortcuts, multiple notes, etc.

You can even create a Quicklink to a specific note and assign a hotkey to it! That way you can open it from anywhere with a single keystroke.

It’s just another way that Raycast helps me stay in flow while I work 💪

So if you’re not using it already I can’t recommend the product enough…

🔗 FEATURED RESOURCE

Founders are constantly asking me who they should hire for web design… and over the last ~year one designer has risen to the top of my list:

👉 Benten Woodring

So for this week's featured idea I asked him to shine a light on his practice by sharing a few insights from his hit course Next Level Web Design.

If you want to learn where (and how) the best in the biz gather inspiration then this is the article for you 👇

🤝 FEATURED RESOURCE

New design inspiration database

Speaking of inspiration… I came across Refero recently and it‘s pretty legit 👀

Think Mobbin only with a ton of web designs too. I’m still digging in but the quality was high enough that I immediately saved it to my inspiration short list so I figured I’d share it with you 👇

🔗 FEATURED RESOURCE

Background pattern tutorial

James McDonald shared a pretty rad background pattern tutorial a couple of days ago. He uses a plugin I didn’t know about called VGA Blurrific and it’s pretty much a cheat code 😅

Also note how he’s just using the logo for visual interest! I wrote about this in my article “Simple visual technique used by the pros”

🧃 INSPIRATION JUICE

3 designs I saved this week

1️⃣ Multicolored icons

This actually comes from the Refero site above! It’s rare to see multi-colored icons like this so they immediately stood out to me. This might be the best “Fonts” icon I’ve seen yet 👀

See it live →

2️⃣ CTA section for mobile app

Anthony Hobday shared this CTA section and I immediately saved it to my taste library.

Strategically breaking the frame is my love language (something I broke down with Erik Kennedy). But what really makes this design unique is the different heights for each container. I’m not sure I’ve seen this exact pattern before and I’m probably going to steal it :)

See it live →

3️⃣ Playful card hover state

Take a second to really study all of the different transitions happening in Dave’s card animation. Pretty great right? The UI is so simple but it feels fantastic.

I’ve taken somewhat similar approaches but I don’t think I’ve ever shrunk the icon on hover before 🤔 It adds a nice touch!

See it live →