Do products dream of living forever? — and more UX links this week

A weekly selection of design links, brought to you by your friends at the UX Collective.

Journey: lessons from the amazing journey of being a designer →
About two years ago I set myself the goal of writing articles that invite reflection more than anything; topics that can help newcomer designers step back from the day-to-day craft and think about our discipline at large.

Food for thought

• On business & craft →
  Finding the balance between profitability and the passion for your craft.
• On paying attention →
  It’s hard to see new things if you don’t know how to pay attention and cut through the noise.
• On sharing insights →
  Shopify UX team on delighting your UX team with a design system contribution.

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From the community

Do products dream of living forever? →
A designer’s dive into longevity in software products.
By Preethi Shreeya

Dungeons & Dragons & Design Thinking →
Role-playing games are also about developing empathy.
By Ploy Buraparate

Design principles are dead →
The more obscure, the more they are misused as an alibi to hide behind.
By Francesco Bertelli

Visual hierarchy: design principles in action →
Contrast, whitespace, proximity, symmetry, and more.
By Harper Atlas

More top stories:

• How to structure your UX portfolio →
  By Ben Taylor
• How being a salesperson made me a better designer →
  By Richard Andhika
• UX candidates are asking the wrong questions →
  By Chris Feix
• Two types of cost-effective and easy usability tests →
  By Marina Popovichenko
• Strategies in adopting and scaling user research within 1.5 year →
  By Luky Primadani
• Are designers preying on customer anxieties thanks to insights? →
  By George Miles
• What I’ve learnt designing content for a global rider community →
  By Rachel McConnell

News & ideas

• Screenless luxury →
  Screens used to be for the elite; now avoiding them is a status symbol.
• UI bot →
  An experiment on how far one could automate the generation of visual designs.
• Kids, the game →
  A mesmerizing iOS art game about the human collective.
• 3-act structure →
  How to apply the famous structure to art, storytelling, and design.

Tools & resources

• Landing Pagr →
  A free editing tool to write your landing page copy on.
• AMB-1 →
  An automatic mood board creator; just add images to a Dropbox folder.
• Full Stack Open →
  A free course about modern web development in collab with the University of Helsinki.
• Diez →
  A unified design system language across codebases, platforms, and teams.