By Simon in Members-only — Apr 22, 2023

Issue 44: Typefaces as if they were jewelry

100 Great Designs of Modern Times; How to build a conversion landing page; Research on how to design italics in fonts and so much more!

Hello, dear readers! 👋

In this issue, among other things:

100 Great Designs of Modern Times
How to build a conversion landing page
Virus Visualization
A comprehensive list of UX design methods & deliverables
An interactive and very visual introduction to probability theory
Analysis of color schemes of vintage geographical maps
Research on how to design italics in fonts
Free collection of templates and checklists for self-UX audit
Multiple mockup libraries
Quotes from "Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World" book by Cal Newport

Enjoy reading!

📌 This is worth noting

Irony in the packaging design of canned wine

📚 Book quotes

This week I suggest you another book by Cal Newport "Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World" Review the quotes and decide whether to read or not:

If you don’t produce, you won’t thrive—no matter how skilled or talented you are.

Clarity about what matters provides clarity about what does not.

Who you are, what you think, feel, and do, what you love—is the sum of what you focus on.

what we choose to focus on and what we choose to ignore—plays in defining the quality of our life.

Two Core Abilities for Thriving in the New Economy 1. The ability to quickly master hard things. 2. The ability to produce at an elite level, in terms of both quality and speed.

As the author Tim Ferriss once wrote: “Develop the habit of letting small bad things happen. If you don’t, you’ll never find time for the life-changing big things.

To simply wait and be bored has become a novel experience in modern life, but from the perspective of concentration training, it’s incredibly valuable.

If you can’t learn, you can’t thrive.

Ironically, jobs are actually easier to enjoy than free time, because like flow activities they have built-in goals, feedback rules, and challenges, all of which encourage one to become involved in one’s work, to concentrate and lose oneself in it. Free time, on the other hand, is unstructured, and requires much greater effort to be shaped into something that can be enjoyed.

Efforts to deepen your focus will struggle if you don’t simultaneously wean your mind from a dependence on distraction.

We tend to place a lot of emphasis on our circumstances, assuming that what happens to us (or fails to happen) determines how we feel. From this perspective, the small-scale details of how you spend your day aren’t that important, because what matters are the large-scale outcomes, such as whether or not you get a promotion or move to that nicer apartment. According to Gallagher, decades of research contradict this understanding. Our brains instead construct our worldview based on what we pay attention to.

Less mental clutter means more mental resources available for deep thinking.

Human beings, it seems, are at their best when immersed deeply in something challenging.

The task of a craftsman, they conclude, “is not to generate meaning, but rather to cultivate in himself the skill of discerning the meanings that are already there.

Cal Newport, New York Times Bestselling Author of Seven Books

Learn about the writing history of Cal Newport, New York Times bestselling author of seven books. Also, learn about his books.

Cal Newport

🗞 News and articles

100 Great Designs of Modern Times, 2020

In 1970, Jay Doblin, then head of the IIT Institute of Design (formerly the New Bauhaus School of Design), published "100 Best Examples of Modern Product Design". The book was the result of a large study, which was attended by leading designers, architects and teachers of the era.

Since then, the concept of the product has changed significantly, so the institute decided to repeat the study and re-formulated the criteria for evaluating the design.

A product can become a design icon if it:

Adaptive and extensible. Adapts to user needs
Helps to solve social and environmental problems
It works well and brings pleasure from using
Has success in the market. Successfully implemented, scaled and growing
Transforms and re-creates product categories

Step-by-step guide to designing conversion landing pages

Detailed and thorough, with diagrams and examples, but without water, an article about a proven design scheme for product landing pages. There are two parts in it: about the first screen (above the fold) and everything below the first screen (below the fold).

Briefly about the key elements of the first screen:

Explain the value of the product (title)
Explain how you create value (subtitle)
Help a person present a product or show it in action (visual)
Social proof (rating, reviews, customers)
Simple next step (call to action)

Key blocks of the rest of the landing page:

Explanation of value (functions and objections)
Social Proof (detailed)
Answers to frequently asked questions
Repeating a call to action
Founder's message (explains the mission of the product and helps to remember it)

⚡️ Briefly

A comprehensive list of UX design methods & deliverables. Fabrizio Teixeira has compiled a list of the main methods of UX design and links to study them.