See the latest posts from Dave Smyth
With a long-term project winding down recently , I’ve been reflecting on some of the takeaways from that engagement. I hadn’t been looking for such a large or long-term project but it turns out I really enjoyed that level of collaboration. It was great to work closely with the Secure Practice team over a sustained period and get into the details. We redesigned their web apps, created their first…
It’s been about 18 months since this site’s last design refresh , and I found a few hours this weekend to iterate again. This is far from perfect, but it’s let me tick off a few things I’ve wanted to do for a while: Rejig the home page to give the newsletter more prominence Better signpost my projects, particularly the Design Process Interviews Migrate the newsletter archive to this site from…
I’ve offered Unoffice Hours for a little over five years. I’m often asked about the experience of running them, and what I get from it. The short answer is: it’s overwhelmingly been a positive experience. Someone I was chatting to in a call recently suggested I write up the experience, so here are some highlights: It’s been the perfect excuse and opportunity to speak with people I’d only…
It’s well-known that LLM usage has changed communication in lots of ways: From slop grenades to automated emails, the erosion of real communication is there for all to see. I’ve noticed another trend: instead of receiving emails that ask “how do we solve this problem?”, there’s an increasing tendency to say “can you implement X, Y and Z?” In other words: instead of opening up a conversation where…
I wasn’t planning on featuring myself on here – there’s something about that that feels a bit gross – but I’m sharing these answers in the spirit of encouraging other designs to talk about their process. Tell us a little bit about yourself I’m an independent designer from the UK. The focus of my work lies somewhere between UX and UI design, accessibility, privacy, ethics and sustainability. I…
Tell us a little bit about yourself I m a UX researcher, specialising in inclusive design and enterprise UX. That means I specialise in making things accessible – or at least designing them in an accessible way – so that developers can continue building them in an accessible way as well. “Enterprise UX” means I mostly build tools, products and services that employees use on a daily basis. At the…
After reading Matthias Ott’s brilliant piece on what the work is , my mind returned to something I’ve felt for a while: the forces that pull towards speed contradict those pushing for quality . In other words: if LLMs are used to increase speed, where’s the incentive to thoroughly review output for quality? Especially given the added complication of cognitive debt. From Matthias: The underlying…
Since my last update on where my work comes from , I’ve started diligently tracking project enquiries. Each potential project is noted with a reasonably comprehensive set of columns: Projects listed in Anytype. Most of the columns are self-explanatory, but here’s a list: Sector Qualified questionnaire Source: where did they hear about me? First contact date Status: Converted, pending or didn’t…
Tell us a little bit about yourself I was the founding designer to a Swedish SaaS company known as Orbi, an event management platform with over 250,000 users across Europe. Even though my title said Lead UX Designer , I would find myself designing the digital products as well as the marketing assets (landing pages, sales assets and etc ). As we grew, I was able to focus on my original title of…
I’m looking to expand my tech/design podcast, newsletter and blog media diet with creators that don’t look at everything through an AI lens. It’s difficult to overstate how little enthusiasm I have for AI (read: LLMs). It’s a common part of the current tech discourse, but I’m just not interested in content that primarily focuses on how to use, or advocate for the use of, AI. Some examples I…
Over recent years, I’ve wanted to write a year-in-review type post, but never seem to find the time. I’m changing that by giving myself 45 minutes to write this as a series of lists: I’ll update this if there are glaring omissions. Work Continued working with Secure Practice : I’m hoping to have more to share about the design system we’ve been building in the coming months Other projects have been…
Over the years I’ve read, watched and listened to tonnes of material about designing and building websites. Information about the technical elements of design and development is easy to come by in a range of formats, but there seems to be much less out there about the design process itself. And that leaves me wondering: what are the steps designers are following in their practice that lead them to…
I can’t remember the last time I undertook a design project where we didn’t use a commercial typeface. I often recommend these to clients because: The world of commercial typefaces is broad and it opens up a range of high-quality options for a project Using a commercial typeface is an easy way to level-up a design (though it won’t fix a bad design) Supporting independent foundries is important…
For personal reasons, I archived most of my side projects in 2023. Wrapped up in this widespread shutdown was my weekly Five Links newsletter . My plan was always for this to be a hiatus rather than a permanent closure, but I haven’t had the time to resume sending until now. So, Five Links will return this week. If you haven’t been previously subscribed, the format is fairly self-explanatory: I…
In the 10+ years I’ve been working on the web, I’ve dabbled with offering various short form one-to-one services to help people with their websites. I’ve always felt the most enjoyable and impactful version of this is an hour-long video call where we can work through a design problem together. I like this format because: The real-time nature lets me get more context and helps us tease at any…
Designing and writing the copy for your own site is a notoriously difficult task. The last few times I’ve done this, I’ve done my best to treat it like a client project, but it’s easy for projects like this to lose momentum for a range of reasons. Earlier this week, I refreshed my studio website . It’s not complete, but it’s a much better representation of where I’m at and what I’m up to. This…
Over the years, I’ve seen my work ‘inspire’ others in lots of ways: everything from design work to copy, uncredited research and lots of other examples. Some of these are more obvious than others, but they were all unmistakable for one reason or another. Wherever the line is on inspiration and plagiarism, these incidents cause me to reflect on my own practice. It’s not always possible to give…
Over the weekend, I migrated this site from Statamic to Kirby . I’d been curious about this CMS for a while, and moving my personal site gave me the perfect opportunity to explore it in a low-key way. There are always new concepts and things to learn when picking up a new CMS, but the Kirby docs are excellent and give many practical examples that I could use out-of-the-box. It’s a testament to…
I’ve avoided using generative AI tools since the start of the latest tech hype cycle. I’ve never used ChatGPT, Copilot, Midjourney, Stable Diffusion, Claude, Cursor, or any other of the household-name generative AI tools. There are many questionable aspects of these tools around ethics, environmental impacts, privacy and security. But putting these concerns aside, it’s curious how popular these…
I do my best to avoid using generative AI tools that have been trained on copyrighted material . There are myriad issues, but my main objection is that the only thing that makes the technology valuable is training data – and that has almost universally been stolen . Today, I came across a couple of techniques to subtly revolt against mass scraping and data: Eric Bailey’s subversive prompt…