This past month just flew by, the start of it feels like an eternity ago and so much has happened in between. As the last few days of summer wind down and we get ready to start the school year and head into fall, it’s been nice to have some dedicated family time and a small vacation for just us parents.

We headed to Washington D.C. for a little couples getaway and had an absolute blast. It was so much fun walking around the capital, spending our morning in cafes and afternoons in museums. We ended every night with a nice dinner and prepared to dive into the next museum on the agenda.

The kids enjoyed their time camping with Grandma and Grandpa and being outside for a whole week making some excellent memories. I feel like these are things we remember the most, the things that break from our ordinary day-to-day. I still fondly look back at going to my grandparents with my brother every summer for a week and enjoying time with them and my cousins. I hope our kids look back at their summer and have some fond memories as well.

UX Audits

At Headway, we just kicked up a new series of resources and webinars surrounding UX Audits.

Headway @headwayio

UI UX audits are hard work. Your presentations should reflect that. That's why we put together simple and effective UX audit report template to make the presentation process easier for you. We'll make you look good, promise 😉 bit.ly/3TdkmFZ

UX Audits are something I don’t think teams do enough of. It tends to only come up when an entire redesign is happening and doesn’t get folded into the normal feature development process. We’re hoping to empower designers with these resources and guides to really build up an excellent auditing culture in their feature design process.

Classic Roleplaying

I’ve been running a D&D campaign with my wife and some friends for over 2 years now. We’re currently playing Curse of Strahd and it’s been a total blast. I however have fallen down an old-school tabletop roleplaying rabbit hole and it’s been inspiring to say the least.

I’ve been looking at a ton of old resources and newer things that are inspired by the earliest systems and trying to figure out what I can incorporate into my game. I’m really fascinated with the longer dungeon crawls and making dungeons a real threat. If you’re looking for something that’s totally crazy, bleak, and brutal Mork Borg looks like it covers all of those elements. I’m excited to try it out or pull elements into my campaign.

Level 3

I’m slowly adding props to the 3rd level of the game and starting to flesh it out a bit more. I have all of the story bits written but have struggled with focus as new ideas and new projects have started to pull my focus. This is always something I’ve struggled with but I really want to get this game finished and I’m hoping by the next newsletter I send out this level will be about 90% done.

Inspirations

Ian McQue @ianmcque

Burgh in another colour with a horse and a title like it’s a book cover or something look I don’t know

Reid Armansin 🔜 Gamescom @PancakeSamurai_

Here's a bunch of icons I created for @cultofthelamb 🙏🐑 Got pretty good at drawing pentagrams.

Archillect @archillect

Prime Materia @PanelPerDay

Honour can bind a man to his lord, to his country, to its ashes... and long after the wind has scattered even their memory, his honour remains.

luis. @disco_lu

Serious question – when ideating, how often do you use component states? My guess – hover, focus etc are rarely used. So why are we bundling them in the same library? Loading less components = faster files What if we moved states into separate libraries *just* for prototyping?

A screenshot of a Figma button component variant set, with the disabled, focus, hover crossed out

A screenshot of a proposal to split components into separate libraries based on whether it's for ideation or prototyping

Jesperish @Jesperish

Metamorphosis

Alvish 🧙‍♂️ @alvishbaldha

🖍 When I design dark modes I use one shade darker for components like buttons, radios, checkboxes, toggles than used on light modes. The transition feels balanced that way. 🙂

Anthony Hobday @hobdaydesign

Over the years I've landed on some design theories that I believe, and that I've not yet disproved. Here they are.

Tommy Mason @_TommyMason

These ‘Fockups’ templates show what your designs will really look like in the wild 😂😂😂😂😂

I hope everyone had a great August! I’m going to be making some visual changes to the newsletter here and there as I’m unifying some look and feel stuff for the various things I’m doing.

Till then, Cheers!

p.s.

Currently playing Hellblade, can’t believe I missed this when it first came out.
Currently watching Sandman as we wait for the new LOTR show.
I just put down the history books I was reading and started to read Between Two Fires, so far it’s been excellent.

Sweet Newsletter, Man

Ø17 - The Big White House