Happy Friday ya’ll!

Welcome to the inaugural issue of this week in design™ (s/o to @svlleyy for the name idea).

For anyone that’s somehow reading this without any context – yesterday, I tweeted a few highlights covering some ✨ d r a m a ✨ that unfolded this week on “design twitter.”

I thought it would be funny to summarize some of the many discussions & hot takes that took place, and a lot (literally dozens) of people seemed to really enjoy it. So … here we are, another newsletter. Awesome 🙃.

While I don’t have any serious plans for TWID, I’m surprisingly excited to give it a go (at least until I get bored & add this to an ever growing list of abandoned projects).

Anyways, thanks for being here, let’s get into the sauce 🥫

WK28

Invisible Details of Interaction Design by @raunofreiberg 

Rauno published an incredibly well thought out essay on his observations of “the invisible details” in interaction design, complete with some juicy examples and videos.

Not much to say, other than this masterpiece is a must read for everyone.

@dannpetty gets an espresso machine

This storyline began with Dann looking to barter his design services for a new espresso machine. To pull this off, he teased a launch of a design subscription service called “Goodnight Dad,” - “Just a dad staying up late to make extra money for the family doing a little extra design work before bed.”

Dann secured his espresso machine after Contra (a freelance platform) agreed to trade an espresso machine for 10 portfolio reviews.

To make this story even better, Contra now allows its users to accept payment via espresso machines.

@joshpuckett shares some hard “truths”

Ya, so that happened. This “hot take” generated a lot of controversy last week (and briefly became a meme).

Not going to get into it here, but telling designers that are struggling to land a job in this environment that their "work is bad” is probably not the move ..

On the bright side, we got to talk about naming layers again. Yay!

Everyone offers a design subscription

Seems that almost everyone running an agency (or freelancing) is pivoting to the monthly subscription model.

Interestingly enough, everyone also seems to agree that it should be priced at precisely $4995/mo 🤨

@xai logo is controversial

Everyone’s favorite billionaire (lol) launched yet another venture called xAI. Design twitter couldn’t care less about its mission of “understanding the true nature of the universe,” but instead engaged in discourse surrounding its logo.

Personally, I don’t think it’s winning any awards, but I also think that it definitely could have been a lot worse (like c’mon it’s not that bad … right? right??)

That’s a wrap for week 28.

Will keep these shorter in the future, and continue playing around with the format. If you have an idea for how I can improve TWID or want to suggest something for next week’s issue, use the suggestion box.

If you actually read any of this, please let me know (I want to make this better (and I also want the dopamine))

Love you all, have a great weekend

- @aleksliving