Design Life

Thanks to Webflow for sponsoring this episode! Webflow gives designers the power of code in a visual interface, and both of your Design Life hosts love using it for their personal sites. Get 10% off any new annual Webflow plan using the code “designlife” at http://wfl.io/designlife

Thanks to Webflow for sponsoring this episode! Webflow gives designers the power of code in a visual interface, and both of your Design Life hosts love using it for their personal sites. Get 10% off any new annual Webflow plan using the code “designlife” at http://wfl.io/designlife   Join the design life community Support the show by buying a Pin! Submit a topic

Thanks to Webflow for sponsoring this episode! Webflow gives designers the power of code in a visual interface, and both of your Design Life hosts love using it for their personal sites. Get 10% off any new annual Webflow plan using the code “designlife” at http://wfl.io/designlife

Join the design life community Support the show by buying a Pin! Submit a topic

Join the design life community Support the show by buying a Pin! Submit a topic

The inspiration for this topic came from Charli’s new series ‘Inside Marketing Design’ where she speaks with marketing designers working with the biggest Tech brands from around the world. A listener noticed a theme that many designers mentioned working with freelancers and we wanted to dive deeper into this topic and share our own experiences and insights of how to establish the freelancer/client...

In today’s episode of Design Life we talk about future proofing your skills to help you establish a long lasting career, by leveraging new technology to boost your creative thinking and using problem solving to develop innovative design solutions.  Join the design life community Support the show by buying a Pin! Submit a topic

Have you ever felt that you have so many meetings in one week that you don’t have time to get your work done? If this is the case finding focus time at work can be a struggle. In this episode of Design Life we discuss how to evaluate if you have control over your meetings and how to maximise your meetings so they are as productive as they can be.

Charli's new series - Inside Marketing Design Get Femke's advice through Superpeer Join our Patreon!

We spotted a tweet recently that said instead of working from home we’re living at work, a sentiment we can agree with. If your self worth is attached to your work, now more than ever you might be experiencing feelings of being unworthy, but you are worth more than your work. In this episode we talk honestly about our jobs, side projects and attaching self worth to our work. Join the community on...

Today on the Design Life podcast, we’re talking about processes and design operations. Writing briefs, developing processes and reviewing workflows are all part of the job, but sometimes it can feel like that’s all we do as designers! If your daily to-do list has shifted away from design, it might be time to start delegating. In this episode we discuss how to use your initiative to accelerate your...

In this episode of Design Life we ask the question why are there so few women in design leadership? When Femke tweeted recently wondering why there is a disparity between men and women in design leadership, the replies showed this message resonated with a lot of people. In this episode we discuss why female design leaders are the exception rather than the rule, and what can women, and men, do abou...

Grayscale - Charli's font! Glyphs font software Teela Cunningham font course

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Although we work for companies of different sizes and on vastly different kinds of projects, there are more similarities between our QA reviews than there are differences. A QA is a process that every designer implements as the project comes closer to completion, as a designer you need to check everything is good to go for your launch date. Hitting snags at the end of a project is common, we discu...

Jonathan has worked with companies like Lego, Twitter and even the UN, running sprints to make design decision making easier. Following on from our recent topic of design decision making, we ask Jonathan to tell us more about how we can get out of busy work and instead, spend time creating through easier, faster and more collaborative design decision making. AJ&Smart The Workshopper Playbook

As designers, we make a lot of decisions. From moving something two pixels to the left to redesigning an entire website, our decisions range in difficulty. Today on Design Life we talk about how we go about making these decisions and how to overcome decision paralysis. Join the community on Patreon Check out our online store

Design reviews can seem a bit like a holy grail but using them to the designer’s advantage to create a successful project is key. We dive deep into the processes in place for formal and informal design reviews and crits where we work and share what we have learned from giving and receiving feedback. 

On this episode of Design Life we are talking side projects. You might have a few ideas bouncing around in your mind of late, that keep coming back to you. Maybe you want to see if your idea would spark interest in the audience you have in mind, but you don’t know where to start. Using our own side projects as examples, we talk about how you can bring your idea to life and avoid potential pitfalls...

In this week’s episode of Design Life, we have a timely discussion about our motivation while working from home. These are unprecedented times we’re living in. Trying to find and stay motivated while also building a new routine when working from home is a challenge. We discuss our levels of motivation as it changes from day-to-day and why it’s important not to give yourself a hard time if you’re f...

Many people find themselves working from home at the moment as workplaces play their part in helping to slow the spread of the Coronavirus. For those of us who are working from home for the first time, or returning to remote working after some time in the office, we use this episode of Design Life to chat about the benefits of working from home and how we stay productive in our new environment. We...

In this episode of Design Life we discuss how to build your network. Over the course of your career, how can you build a strong, supportive network? We talk about taking the organic approach to creating your network so you can you successfully leverage the support of your colleagues online and IRL. How to network as an introvert 116: An alternative approach to networking 107: Advice for networking

Giving and receiving feedback can be tricky. In this episode we talk about performance reviews, which is quite timely as both of us have just finished or are in the process of having ours. We discuss how feedback works on our teams, how this helps us and what we plan to do with our feedback. Join our community! Buy a Work In Progress pin!

As designers we have very high expectations of our own portfolios. Try to take the pressure off. Don’t overthink it. Build a system so you can easily and quickly publish work and keep it up to date. Identify your own barriers and then build solutions to overcome them.  The temptation to redesign your portfolio can make you lose sight of your goal. Stick with an old design if it means getting the n...

We have both experienced the frustration of being asked to sign off on our designs only to find that either a small part of the project or a large chunk have not been developed as we had intended. In this episode of design life we discuss how to tackle implementation issues between design and development so that company goals are achieved on schedule and within budget. Join the community!