Working on your portfolio but can’t show some projects due to NDAs, irrelevance, etc?

Create your own.

Here are 7 different kinds of real projects you can commission for yourself: 1. The “Gimme Some More”

Every project in your portfolio should be a project you would love to do again.

Love illustrating animal mascots? Have at least one animal mascot illustration in your portfolio.

It’s easiest to get hired for work that you show.

Want a fun, frivolous side project that you can spend a little money and time on as the year winds down?

Improve your webcam quality by setting up a DSLR.

Here’s a list of the gear I use and my steps to set it up: I’ve posted about this before, but I’ve since upgraded a lot of equipment and dialed in the setup.

Ingredients:

• Cheap camera body
• Ample lighting (natural + artificial)
• Most expensive lens you can get away with
• Picking the most advantageous angle of the room

https://twitter.com/799212/status/1301253596705632256

I’m fortunate to receive lots of emails and DMs from people looking for advice or mentorship from me. But 90% of these messages have a major mistake that would have otherwise made me interested.

Here’s the crucial ingredient to getting what you want from someone you admire:

🧵 Many of these messages have this kind of structure:

> Hi Dan, I’m looking to connect with you to learn more about how I can grow as a designer.

or

> Hi Dan, I’m wondering if you’d want to be on my podcast. I’d love to have you on if you’re interested.

What’s missing here?

My post impressions from 2022:

Twitter: 6,824,000

LinkedIn: 2,292,897

I wonder how much this will shift in 2023 from to the combination of my post frequency, Twitter leadership change, and LinkedIn algorithm changes 🤔 👀

Here are my top 3 tweets/threads from 2022 🧵: #3: My top tip about #designsystems (and design, and work, and life): do less.

https://twitter.com/799212/status/1596540916852002822

What is a #designsystem? You’ve probably heard lots about them. You may have even worked on one, but you still struggle to define it.

Here’s how I talk about #designsystems to anyone who will listen: 🧵 There are many great design system books out there. Let’s see what their authors have to say about design systems:

One of the biggest pain points for #designsystem teams is naming (components, patterns, tokens… anything).

Here are my most useful tips for naming design system things (part 1).

🧵 A few years ago, I was lucky enough to help @RFERL with their design system. They had—and still have to this day—this component all over the site. What would you call this? A carousel? A banner? A slider?

Wanna know what they called it?

I’ve worked with #designsystem teams at companies like Amazon, Netflix, Google, and more. The most common blocker about #designsystems I hear from them is, “I never really looked at it that way.”

My biggest tip for reframing #designsystem work to make it more approachable:

🧵 Do less.

Almost every team I work with tries to make their design system do everything. They stress themselves out, trying to tackle too much and end up accomplishing nothing.

Pick a handful of things, and do them really well.

Warren Buffet once famously quipped, “Risk comes from not knowing what you’re doing.” If improving your #designsystem is one of your goals for 2023, make sure lack of knowledge isn’t one of your blockers.

A new resource for you in this thread 🧵 There are so many resources out there now for learning more about #designsystems! A wealth of public information is great, but it often comes with analysis paralysis. Where do you start? How do you separate the signal from the noise?

Many design system teams think their job is to define best practices for the rest of the organization. Excited about being blessed by leadership as the team to enforce these best practices, the team often resorts to their wish list of things they’ve always wanted to have or try: “Let’s reduce our color palette to just the essentials!”

“Typescript might be a great thing to try.”

“This seems like the right time to define some motion guidelines.”

“We’re finally all switching from spaces to tabs!”

Do you love design systems and magic? A thread.🧵 There’s a scene in Harry Potter where he and his friend Ron arrive late to their first class of the year of Advanced Potion Making. Harry tells Prof. Slughorn that they don’t yet have textbooks, so Slughorn sends them into the closet to get books.

I have so many thoughts—and so do lots of other people!—about @kschwabable's article for @FastCompany, "John Maeda: 'In reality, design is not that important'": fastcompany.com/90320120/john-…. The article is a summary and commentary on @johnmaeda's "Design in Tech Report": designintech.report. The phrase that has seemed to polarize its audience is in the title: "Design is not that important."

Reflections from a speaker about doing a new (kind of) talk.

A thread. Over a year ago, Vitaly from @smashingmag asked me if I’d be game to do a conference talk without slides, something more about showing work in action.