Pilcrow #19
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Hey friends! What’s up?
I spent the whole week in the south of France with the Specify team for our bi-annual offsite — it was a pleasant transition from my vacation to getting back to work. I spent my weekend recharging my social batteries and improving my Figma plugin, more about that just after today’s edition menu.
Here are today’s topics:
What I’m working on
Thoughts on giving credit to your peers
Interesting works of the week
What I’m working on
I didn’t expect such a warm welcome for my plugin: numbers and reactions were just crazy, and I can’t tell how much I’m thrilled to give back to one of the communities that help me grow so much these last years, thank you Figma!
This weekend I added a feature that a lot of people asked for when I published the initial version: being able to use their first-level groups as a way to split their variable values between modes. After a few hours and a lot of debugging, it is now possible.
I also added some missing states for both potential errors and success messages. I will publish this new version tomorrow around 03:00 PM CEST, stay tuned!
Thoughts on giving credit to your peers
TL;DR
Mention your colleagues in your portfolio/project launches
Mention your inspirations and references
Be honest with yourself
Essay
I will not re-open the debate around inspiration vs. copy, even if I genuinely think the design community could really benefit from being more honest with itself on this topic.
Here I’ll focus on the use case “A designer just created a work, by drawing inspiration from multiple sources, finding additional references, and creating a unique yet tenable visual direction. The work achieved its goal and stands out from the rest.”
Each of these 3 exercises is especially difficult to do well, and as with any exercise that requires a lot of effort, this is where their effectiveness and incredible outcomes reside. If one of our goals as a global design community is to grow together, I think we need to help each other way better and do our best to be exemplary.
In our example, I think the designer has a great opportunity to be even better, by revealing the inspirations and references behind the work, by mentioning the designers and the original work link/tweet/post/whatever.
This also works when the same designer publishes a case study on a portfolio website, Twitter, LinkedIn, Dribbble, etc — I think mentioning the peers involved in the work will actually bring another dimension to it.
Interesting works of the week
That’s all, friends — have a great Sunday! 🖤