Bad design managers, Write like you design, The future of design systems
149: The damage of bad design managers, Derivation of Dieter Rams’s principles to illustrate how writing is often the same as design, Unlocking design theming and logic with Figma Variables.
Welcome to this week's 🔥 Campfire — a subscriber only edition, delivered each Friday, highlighting the most interesting findings on product design, freelancing, career, and personal growth.
Bad design managers
Designers move up on the career ladder as they gain experience. However, the ladder eventually runs out of levels for individual contributors. IC designers have no alternative but to become Design Managers to continue advancing.
The problem most designers who just started their manager roles face is no training for managing people and responsibilities.
Thirty-seven years ago, Steve Jobs said the best managers never actually want to be managers (Source: Inc.).
You know who the best managers are? They're the great individual contributors who never, ever want to be a manager, but decide they want to be a manager, because no one else is going to be able to do as good a job as them.
While what's said by Jobs is true, lots of design managers end up in one of the two extremes, as Hardik Pandya, author of "Bad Design Managers" points out:
Most new design managers end up on one of the two extremes:
Keep operating like ICs, continue doing bulk of the work themselves
Get into an extreme delegation mode, pushing all the work to their reports
Both of these are bad.
In his article, Hardik talks about the cause of bad design managers, what good design managers do, and how to create great design managers.
Read the full post.
Write like you design
Designers are famous for using drawings, diagrams, and mockups to tackle problems visually.
However, visual problem-solving makes it far too simple to chase dead ends on more complex problems. Instead, I believe that beginning projects with writing and using writing as a tool for thinking are pretty beneficial.
PJ Onori, in his article "Write like you design," derivates Dieter Rams's ten principles of design to illustrate how writing and design are often one and the same.
At the end, design is all about communicating ideas. Designers know how to convey emotions and complex concepts through visuals, yet simple, well-written sentence is often more effective.
The future of design systems
During this year's Config 2023, Figma introduced variables – a new way to store reusable values that can be applied across designs.
At first, you might think variables are just like tokens – data bits representing small, repeatable design decisions such as border-radius, sizing, typography, or colors.
But variables are a much broader concept, allowing us to use data and logic to design with fewer screens, more precision, and make prototypes look like real products.
In her article "The future of design systems is semantic," Carly Ayres talks about the origin story of tokens, introduces us to variables in Figma, and how variables help close the gap between design and code.
Read the full article.