Being a designer is an unfair advantage

Hey everyone 👋, I hope all is good.

Things are really shifting all around me. I've been realizing lately that there are so many things worth paying closer attention to (and maybe you should to the same).

In the past week, I’ve found a lot of new resources and people that inspire me and I can see them having a great impact on how I do things from now on. Pretty exciting!

One of these was Andrew Wilkinson’s newsletter, podcast, and his design work (for big names like Uber, Headspace, Slack, and Atomic Habits), and I've been really fascinated by his design philosophy and personality.

Right now, he seems more like an entrepreneur than just a designer though.

You should check him out.

Anyways, back to the actual newsletter: for the time being, I will try to cover more topics in each weekly mail, so that I can balance UI bits with deeper design topics and other casual stuff. So let’s dive in:

1. We don’t get the most out of being a designer. When I was in college, I had lots of side projects – mostly on Instagram – that were quite successful because, as a designer, I could present anything in a flashy fashion.
   
   People are drawn to things that look good. We all know this well; it's how design hooks people in.

   
   But that’s so far from our full potential. A nice interface is only a hook, again. There’s so much more we can do to be successful. Being a designer is an unfair advantage. You can play a key role in improving a product, you can make it look awesome, and even boost its sales!!
   
   And if you also understand business (key point), you can become a strong leader or a fascinating founder. Understanding business processes is not too different from creating awesome user experiences. I’m planning on discovering this topic in the future, I’m convinced it will help me bring more to the table.
   
   Step out of your comfort zone.

   
   

2. Cutting through all the noise about GPT-4o, not using it as a designer is a mistake. We can (and have to) talk about the ethical implications at some point, but it makes everyone so much more competitive that it cannot be ignored.

   
   From fine-tuning microcopy to restructuring content or conducting quick research (especially with internet access—I use www.perplexity.ai for this), GPT-4o is incredibly powerful. Just remember to provide context before asking questions; don't be lazy about it. You can also create your templates to streamline tasks (I might share mine in a future post).
   
   Seems like a no-brainer.

   
   

3. Figma released a feature we didn’t know we needed, and everybody loves it. I guess most of you used to use (hmmm) these empty pages with lots of dashes ‘- - - - - - - - - -’, but it’s so much cleaner with the new native dividers. I’m loving it, I’m sure you are as well.
   
   

   

   Just type ‘- - -’ and hit ‘Enter’

   
   On the flip side, I hope they will roll out a few updates to the Dev Mode too because it can still be pretty overwhelming—not just for developers, but for me too.

That’s it for this week. If you're liking this, could you do me a favor and pass it along to a friend? Thanks!

Have a pixel-perfect day!

- István

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