Closing the gap

weeknotes

Jun 22

Good afternoon, rare Friday scribble from me. This week I came across Erika Hall’s post on making stupid websites and have been obsessed with indieweb experimenting.

What happened

Still designing in pre-election silence
Thinking about my professional goals
Supporting a new proposal for a national contact strategy
Reading this
Designing dumb on html (on Jekyll)

An ode to my first design child

Pre-election silence means I still can’t talk about the incredible progress we’ve been making, but it’s also that time where design activities have been ramping down (ready for build) so I’m due to roll off very soon. It’s a pretty surreal feeling seeing as it’s the first (proper) project I’m rolling off from during my 18 months at PwC.

I’ve gone through hills with the team: from witnessing the passing of one GDS assessment (private to public beta), to seeing one whole release into life, and taking part in the making of a brand new gateway service. Coming at 12 months, I’ve come from scrambling on Figma to prototyping with the gov design system as a true GDS interaction designer. Some noteworthy moments:

Learning from our ex-Service Design Lead, whose patience and trust played a huge role in nurturing the confidence I needed to defend my craft
Owning my first workstream for 3 months and building my first gov.uk pages from scratch. I’ll never forget how long I spent on thinking about accordions and faffing about with auto-layout…
Taking my first-born designs to UR and getting to sit through the entire process from planning to decisions
Mastering the compliance of WCAG to design a seamless spreadsheet experience on Excel
Being a part of the GDS community, learning from assessors, accessibility advocates and the wonderful weeknote community

It’s been a long week but I’m really optimistic for the future work in store. Watch this space!

Reads

Why Designers Need To Speak Business, Anton Sten

If your organisation is revenue driven try using phrases replacing phrases like ‘inconsistencies’ with ‘design debt’ to describe the situation. People in revenue hate debt.

It’s just a blog, Annie Mueller

small unknown complex life, Rebecca Toh

I don’t know if it’s just me but I always get a warm and fuzzy feeling in my gut whenever I stumble upon an interesting blog written by someone who is living their small unknown complex life God-knows-where. I feel connected by our common humanity. We’ll never meet, but I can picture them sitting on their sofa writing on their laptop or using the computer in their kitchen, writing when the kids are asleep, writing in the morning, writing when the first snowfall arrives, writing about their new job, about losing their job, about moving to a new city, about this film they just watched, about their husband who died a few years ago. A blog is a small and beautiful thing and I am grateful it exists.

Cognitive bias cheat sheet, Buster Benson

Public luxuries, Kuba Bartwicki