Fatima Zia’s Post

"Design is a non-linear process and creative solutions don’t always strike like lightning. Sometimes things need time to marinate and several rounds of revision. Remember to respect one’s craft and the time and effort poured into it. Show the product designer you trust they’ll arrive at the best solution through your body language, tone of voice, and positive outlook." Check out Rocco Marinaccio's thought leadership article about "Giving Useful Feedback to a Product Designer". 🔗 https://lnkd.in/e8c-9wWN . . #Design #ThoughtLeadership #Article

Ever received a prototype riddled with typos and formatting inconsistencies? Does it scream "Hold the phone, let's fix the writing before we move forward"? On the one hand, clear and concise communication is crucial, even in early phases. We need to be crystal clear about what we're building, right? On the other hand, maybe focusing on tech functionality first makes sense. Font, color, and copy can be done after we develop it! What are your thoughts? Is it nitpicking to point out formatting errors in an early design or prototype? Or is clear communication essential from the get-go? Let's discuss! #prototyping #communication #design #development #productmanagement

Thanks Farid! This is such a great topic. The key from my experience as a consultant who has established and supported many different client design systems and UI libraries is the nested, modular nature of the atomic approach. Usually an organism is large enough it can make sense on its own within a screen while a molecule needs to be grouped with other components to make sense and be useful. But no matter what you call them, the point is you speak the same language and that updating the text input in one place cascades to all the components and templates where that type of text input shows up. As long as it does that and is less about policing, and more about supporting teams as they work then to me it is a success.

Ever used Atomic Design in your work? I’ve helped many teams build large #designsystems for companies with diverse products. Everyone's initially excited about using Atomic Design. But, it often turns out more complicated than expected. Based on my experience, the most challenging aspect of Atomic Design is both explaining and understanding it, particularly the distinction between molecules and organisms. It often leads to confusion rather than clarification. That's why I prefer using templates, components, and elements over an Atomic structure. By the way, I hosted an open panel with Tiago Almeida, where we addressed these concerns. Tiago proposed alternative naming conventions like elements, modules, templates, and pages, or bricks, sets, templates, and pages. Feel free to adopt any of these structures. When it comes down to organizing components in a design system, three questions can help you guide your approach: 1. How do we group things? It's about creating logical clusters of components that make sense to everyone involved, from designers to developers. 2. How do we name things? The names we choose must be clear and understandable, cutting down on confusion and ensuring everyone's on the same page. 3. What kind of variations do we have? Recognizing and standardizing the different states and events of each component helps maintain consistency. For more on Design System Inventory, check out my profile for the full series. Drop a comment if you'd like access to the Design System Inventory Workshop materials ✌️ #designOps #figma #storybook

Every artifact / deliverable OUTSIDE of hi-fidelity prototypes and working software is created in service of your organization's lack of alignment or lack of guts. The design process can be lean. And surprisingly affordable. But you have to know your user and their pain. At Full Nelsen with brave clients, > we go from conversations and deep thinking > to hand drawn sketches presented over a Loom > to high fidelity prototypes... In under 2 weeks. You've got to be decisive and know your customer.

Ever used Atomic Design in your work? I’ve helped many teams build large #designsystems for companies with diverse products. Everyone's initially excited about using Atomic Design. But, it often turns out more complicated than expected. Based on my experience, the most challenging aspect of Atomic Design is both explaining and understanding it, particularly the distinction between molecules and organisms. It often leads to confusion rather than clarification. That's why I prefer using templates, components, and elements over an Atomic structure. By the way, I hosted an open panel with Tiago Almeida, where we addressed these concerns. Tiago proposed alternative naming conventions like elements, modules, templates, and pages, or bricks, sets, templates, and pages. Feel free to adopt any of these structures. When it comes down to organizing components in a design system, three questions can help you guide your approach: 1. How do we group things? It's about creating logical clusters of components that make sense to everyone involved, from designers to developers. 2. How do we name things? The names we choose must be clear and understandable, cutting down on confusion and ensuring everyone's on the same page. 3. What kind of variations do we have? Recognizing and standardizing the different states and events of each component helps maintain consistency. For more on Design System Inventory, check out my profile for the full series. Drop a comment if you'd like access to the Design System Inventory Workshop materials ✌️ #designOps #figma #storybook

From Carnegie Mellon InstantStyle Free Lunch towards Style-Preserving in Text-to-Image Generation https://lnkd.in/ewvyC2Xe Tuning-free diffusion-based models have demonstrated significant potential in the realm of image personalization and customization. However, despite this notable progress, current models continue to grapple with several complex challenges in producing style-consistent image generation. Firstly, the concept of style is inherently underdetermined, encompassing a multitude of elements such as color, material, atmosphere, design, and structure, among others. Secondly, inversion-based methods are prone to style degradation, often resulting in the loss of fine-grained details. Lastly, adapter-based approaches frequently require meticulous weight tuning for each reference image to achieve a balance between style intensity and text controllability. In this paper, we commence by examining several compelling yet frequently overlooked observations. We then proceed to introduce InstantStyle, a framework designed to address these issues through the implementation of two key strategies: 1) A straightforward mechanism that decouples style and content from reference images within the feature space, predicated on the assumption that features within the same space can be either added to or subtracted from one another. 2) The injection of reference image features exclusively into style-specific blocks, thereby preventing style leaks and eschewing the need for cumbersome weight tuning, which often characterizes more parameter-heavy designs.Our work demonstrates superior visual stylization outcomes, striking an optimal balance between the intensity of style and the controllability of textual elements. Our codes will be available at https://lnkd.in/eKh2SBsv.

The Power of Visual Hierarchy in Design! 🎨 At SATUVISION, we understand that in the digital world, how you present information is just as important as the information itself. By mastering the art of visual hierarchy, we ensure that your message gets noticed, read, and remembered. 💡 Key Insights: Grab Attention: Use bold and contrasting colors to highlight key points. Guide the Reader: Structure your content to lead the reader through your message effortlessly. Prioritize Information: Ensure the most important information stands out.

Sometimes I find myself resisting the norms in the design industry. In this case specifically how product and service designers use personas. While I don't mean to be prescriptive in nature about this work, I think people should be aware of the shortcomings and harms that can manifest in the "personas" we create in an effort to be more actionable or concrete.I see this a lot in what gets called out as a pattern or trend or has "confirmations" or "agreement" from other participants in research for example. While there is weight to this and shared sentiment holds value, so do the outliers, the edges and those who are pushed to the margins. The determinant of statistical significance has direct and real repercussions on human representation and discoverability. This can lead to more inequity due to the importance/relevance weighted to insights from members of underinvested communities. This influences the narratives that might be communicated, the message that gets shaped and the actions that product and service teams take. My take, feel free to take it or leave it 🌱 Personas are static, rigid snapshots that do not hold space for nuance, complexity, change, or understanding. Personas are often figments of reality. They are often built off of stereotypes of users and in some cases extend to creating harm around representation in various communities. They also tend to oversimplify and exclude diverse voices in order to hold more space for dominant narratives.I have not used a persona in more than 5 years. Archetypes and mindsets are more in line with how I approach this work with an equity lens. This allows more space for behavioural insights, community driven research efforts, and can be more reflective of real-life complexity. So if you are going to use personas please keep these concepts, thoughts and potential impacts in mind. Much luck and support for all you learn and do. Keep growing. 🪴

Diagrams are the table around which we gather. Do you know about the “cones of uncertainty” diagram? It comes from the speculative design space, and is effective in getting teams to think about how likely things are in the future, and in time frames longer than they normally do. Visual frameworks—and diagrams—can help designers explore a problem space more effectively, and represent codified knowledge that can be applied equally well when engaged in divergent and convergent thinking. Read more about: ☑️ diagrams ☑️ visual frameworks ☑️ card decks for designers ☑️ design fiction and speculative design ☑️ the cones of uncertainty …in my latest article: https://lnkd.in/g-pC6xyv #design #designfiction #speculativedesign #diagrams #designthinking