Aja Shamblee

Friday fun... The last post in motion 1 of 2. From last post... "Sharing some detail 3D work highlighted in the FY24 Studio reel I recently shared. Utilizing the new color palette from the Microsoft Brand these metaphors created for the Microsoft Cloud visual identity celebrate fluidity, harmony, diversity, transformation, and imagination. Waveforms showcase the human element, expressing these ideas organically with texture, imperfection, and inherent optimism." ACD's Juliet Park Tierney Cunningham 3D Artists Steve Lee joseph andrade Handel Eugene #Microsoft #BrandStudio #CreativeTeam #BrandIdentity #VisualDesign #Teamwork #Grateful #Brand #C4D #MicrosoftCloud #creativedirector #creativedirection #visualidentity #promotion #motion #motiongraphics #motiondesign

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Most designers are trained to present work to our peers, but as your career matures, your audience expands to include many other departments who don’t speak “design”. This article resonated with me and offers some sage advice about the use of storytelling and a “business lens” to craft more compelling presentations. #ProductDesign #Storytelling #UserResearch #BusinessObjectives

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✏ Here's a really rough map of Design-related career clusters that I've been sharing in some recent high school visits. Some of these students are aware of design, some are not. Most are wondering where art and design will take them. I'm trying to get across that there are a lot of design-related careers and interesting paths for them to follow. What would you add to this map? What would you change? - - - I zoomed in on the clusters in the comments below. - - - #designeducation #careerpaths #creativecareers #design #arteducation #artcareers

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Really annoyed at Figma's price gouging here. There is no reason other than greed: https://lnkd.in/gfdrEiWH Oh, and I emailed them about it and this line from their reply was particularly poignant: "Additionally the minimum for enterprise is a $5k invoice minimum. 6 enterprise seats or made up with other products." To put that in context... our monthly Adobe bill (for 8 CC, 7 PS, 6 Acrobat licenses) is ~NZ$2k... Amazing how quickly enshittification sets in... #Figma #Design #SoftwareLicensing

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Anotha' day, anotha' person discovering how OOUX (Object oriented UX) can make their lives easier... Last Friday, I spoke at 200OK Dev Conference hosted by Techlahoma Foundation with my talk "UX in a Bottle: Intro to Object Oriented UX for Web Devs. We walked about: • What OOUX is • How it works • How to apply to any project My favorite part about OOUX, which is why I shout from the roofs is that ANYONE (not just devs) can do it to better understand a problem, breakdown requirements in a thorough way, and make something easier to understand. Phenomenal job by all the speakers: Kristy K. Boone:  EI + AI = The Human Side of Tech Camille Hall: The Frontend Revolution: Building Seamless AI-Driven User Experiences with React.js Rhia Dixon, MBA: Getting Good (or Better) at Code Reviews Joel Tosi: Blending Product Thinking with Architecture If you want a copy of my talk, or any of the other speakers - comment below and I'll link you when the playlist comes out! Shout out the Techlahoma team, led by Queen Emily Harden, Geoffrey Harden, Maxx Crawford and the rest of the volunteers and Atlas School for sponsoring and hosting us. And of course, Sophia V Prater for bringing OOUX into my life. I'm ramping up my OOUX posts, so follow me so learn how to apply OOUX into your projects and life. #ooux #webdevs #ux #productdesign

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Built an AI chatbot running Gemini API, using SwiftData so conversation is saved and persists across sessions. Styling and text formatting next. #ios #swiftui #iosdev

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Remember when people couldn't connect *enough* with others in the beginning of the pandemic? We hopped into virtual groups so much that we experienced zoom fatigue. And now, in 2024, connection feels like it's the new ankle sock?? Iykyk. I met Rachel, indirectly, in one of those networking zooms, and we didn't really speak after that because, life, but when I saw her posting about a design book club meetup, something inside me said: "Hm... you love reading, maybe you should go to that." SO, I didn't sign up and forgot about it. But, then, the day of, she posted about it again and I bit the bullet. I am SO glad I did— I got to turn someone from being a stream of linkedin posts into a 3D human being, I got to meet other cool people, have cerebral and intellectual conversation around design and the state of the world, and I discovered that Johnny Pastrami is actually amazing?! (Also, why didn't my team ever tell me about this place when we talk about food all the time?? Performance reviews will now include: met all expectations but failed me in the UX of our bonding.) If you're on the fence about going outside of your comfort zone, I hope this post reminds you of how exciting and rewarding even the smallest steps over that line can be. And great food is probably waiting there.

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O-M-G. Learn how to craft some seriously refined 3D letters using Affinity in the next Creative Session. Especially for those Designers that have recently downloaded Affinity and still running it through it's paces. You'll pick up essential Affinity illustration skills and tricks in seconds. https://lnkd.in/gYvsrdme #affinity #illustrators #canva

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I don't know when or how it happened, but Config has become one of the major yearly conferences in our industry. Given how much Figma plays a role in the practice, it's common for design system teams to watch with anticipation/excitement/dread for what's coming. In our latest episode, Davy Fung and I discuss the reveals from Config and what that may mean for folks in the design systems practice moving forward. Listen here: https://lnkd.in/gRMBzfbJ #designsystems #figma #congfig #podcast

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Had to share this thoughtful article about the conflicting feelings we have as designers with new AI tools.... made me consider the threat of too much standardization over innovation, or letting your own creative instincts atrophy. Check it out and lmk your thoughts

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Happy Global Accessibility Awareness Day! My #a11y engineering teammate Steven Bassett shared Airbnb's work to make larger fonts more beautiful and readable on the web so hosting and traveling can be even more inclusive. #GAAD #WCAG #ResizeText "This post takes an in-depth look at: 1) The problems encountered on mobile web when relying solely on browser zoom. 2) The challenges of introducing changes that would impact the workflow of all frontend engineers. 3) The benefits seen since launching these accessibility improvements." https://lnkd.in/gCYXiaac

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Product designers are busy people. They've got endless folks asking for endless things... endlessly. And then the design systems team is all up in their joint asking them to use components... It's not a surprise that people can get a little fatigued. It seems quite reasonable if you ask me. In our latest episode, Davy Fung and I discuss fatigue, its causes and ways to either avoid or blunt it. Listen here: https://lnkd.in/g7TZWiqv #design #designsystems #fatigue

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Great advice. Remove all friction when sending your portfolio. Keep it simple and remove all restrictions.

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So much to love about this idea of “imperfect substitution” (and a great quote to share on a day #taylorswift releases her newest album) At the core, every product we build or thing we sell is essentially asking a customer to change from one thing to another. That thing can either be from a competitor to our product, from having nothing to having something, from a less efficient process to a more efficient one (ie manual to digital)—or perhaps more deeply, from one emotion to another. Understanding imperfect substitution can answer why adding features no one wants or needs doesn’t help. Why offering buy one get one free doesn’t help. You get the idea.

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"The strategic design gold rush is over." While this might sound like a scary sentiment at first, I'm choosing to see it as an opportunity for design leadership. It's a chance for reinvention of what role design led teams can play in corporate settings. Users are increasing their demand for simple and straightforward user experiences. Every company continues to need more user and customer advocacy and design leaders are perfectly positioned to be the fabric of that advocacy and stitch together the functions required to deliver it to market. Rather than being relegated to a subordinate capability in product-led companies, design leaders can now redefine their purpose, leveraging their skills in user empathy, strategic experiential planning and continue to tie together the often disparate agendas at play in organizations. #Design #Leadership #Reinvention #Innovation

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Andy McBride and I have talked a lot about AI and The Work, and his article linked below is the non-nerdy version - (spoiler: it's fine, and it's just another tool). The nerdy version is this: Language model-type AI can't do design because it's about meaning and LLMs aren't aiming for meaning. LLMs are a rejection of the idea that the system needs to create meaning. LLMs rely on us to create the meaning. For many things, that's fine. But design is about the relationships between people and signs, things, actions and systems. LLM's aren't aware of that. They aren't aware of anything. To paraphrase Dennis Yi Tenen: "meaning resides in the world and changes depending on context. For design to be meaningful, it has to play by the rules of physics and history". And psychology and sociology too.

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If you’re an AI nerd like me you’ll enjoy reading this article about how large language models actually work. If you’re think ‘why should I care?’ about all of this AI models largely work on a black box basis - we train them, prompt them and get something out without having any real idea about how that answer was arrived at. This article opens that black box a little and shines a light on how these models work. https://lnkd.in/gmVA89xE The image is a map of how Anthropics LLM clusters ‘similar’ concepts.

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Last minute, who else is virtually attending VS Code Day today? Registration is still available, it’s free, and it starts at 12:00pm Central Time. DM me if you go so that we can discuss after! // I’ve been using VS Code as I learn JavaScript. It’s a lightweight text editor that, with a combination of the right extensions and Chrome, has set me up with a great (and free) Integrated Development Environment (IDE) as I start writing JS. https://lnkd.in/gXPY_qgx

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Switching things up and adding a full colophon at the end of my deck for Front-end Conf later this week. I love seeing the type and color combinations other design presenters use, so why not make it easy to suss this out? #presentation #slides #inspiration #type #color

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