This week, we talk about how to overcome skill gaps. What should you do if you are bad at visual design? What if you can't make icons? Should you play into strengths or develop upon your weaknesses? We explore these topics, and more! 

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The Sidebar:

The Sidebar is an exclusive weekly segment for our Patreon supporters. You can subscribe starting at $1 per month for access to full episodes going forward! Sign up at https://patreon.com/designdetails.

In this week's Sidebar we discuss digital gardening, personal knowledge management, and learning in public.

Follow-up:

• Divya Tak added another point of wastage in low quality software: wastage through over-processing.
• Yuyang Luo shared their first app design that shows how safe your local area is.
• Jordan Koschei shared his college startup / side project, Shadoodle. See the pixels.
• We turned last week's episode into a blog post: Quality Software.
• Marshall has been tinkering with our audio balance – so far, nobody has noticed...until now?

Tweets:

• Vincent van der Meulen built a very neat recommendation engine on top of the Design Details website – this is so cool!

Listener Question:

• Fabio Giolito wanted us to talk about something we said on a recent episode, "I'm not a great graphic designer."
  • Design is a visual medium but there's a misconception that all designers should be good at making pretty things (marketing pages, illustrations, icons, logos…)
  • I love systems and flows, solving problems and designing interfaces. When I try to make a marketing page or logo I feel frustrated and impostor syndrome kicks in.
  • I guess I'm not comfortable with the subjectiveness of visual stuff. You know when something is bad, but the gray area of taste and trends is way too big. While in UX there are more rules and logic involved.

Cool Things:

• Brian shared We Are the Weather, a book by Jonathan Safran Foer about climate change, the food industry, and our role in the world.
  • Jonathan did a great interview on Armchair Expert where they also discuss this book.
• Marshall shared Notion, a wildly-flexible and powerful tool for writing and organizing information. This week they expanded the limits of their free plan, so it's a good time to give it a try!
  • Joey Banks wrote about his personal Notion setup.
  • David Hoang also outlined his method to use Notion as a workspace.

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  • 🎙 Marshall is @marshallbock
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BYEEE!