Hi there 👋 I'm Michelle and welcome to Edition 78 of Design Insight. A weekly newsletter for creatives with a focus on design.
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In an effort to help you pop your algorithm bubble, I want to do something different this week and share a long-running interest of mine and that's Dragon Ball Z.
This is a long-running Japanese anime series that's been a part of my life on and off for the last 10-plus years. After some time away from the series I was re-introduced to it via Dragon Ball Kakarot on PS4. The game was so much fun it prompted me to re-watch some of the recent movie releases as well as re-watch the entire Dragon Ball Z TV series (still in progress).
The character designs, animation styles, and the evolution of the main cast of characters has really driven me down a rabbit hole of sketching and animation and I love it! I highly recommend you check out Dragon Ball Z in whatever format you like be it video game, TV, movie, or manga :)
Have a long-running interest that you don't usually talk about? Share it below so we can all expand our pool of interests which will ultimately help us all become more creative!
Let's get started.
📃 Articles
The Creative Switch
The article in 3 ideas:
The key to coming up with great ideas is to operate in 2 modes: idea generation and idea refinement (similar to convergent and divergent thinking).
In idea generation mode, you throw every idea you have out there without any constraints. The goal is to generate a lot of ideas.
In idea refinement mode you look at your ideas with a more critical eye. See what ideas might work and eliminate ideas that definitely won’t work.
Figma is making you a bad designer
The article in 3 ideas:
If you build something with a box of Legos, you're going to build with what you have in front of you. Over time, you'll get really good at building things with Legos but everything will look similar.
Instead, if you sketch out your idea of what to build first, then sit down to build with Legos you might find you need some new blocks to meet your goal. Over time this will be much more effective at building what you want as opposed to building with what you have in front of you.
Use pen and paper to make early sketches. These are great to share with teammates as you can get the idea right first before spending too much time on implementation that will still need to be ironed out.
🔨 Tools/Resources
Color palettes for data visualizations.
A free collection of diverse user-submitted images that can be used in your design work.
🎨 Design Tip
Last week's most popular links:
1. Hand-curated mesh gradients ➜
You’ve reached the end of this week’s edition of Design Insight. Thank you for reading, I truly hope you found value in the design insights I shared today.
Til next week 👋
Michelle
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