“Practice safe design: Use a concept.” Petrula Vrontikis

Art_ndDesign XII – Deutscher Werkbund

Today it’s been a year since I’ve been writing articles, so this time I want to get out of «my comfort zone» and make one more related to design than to art.

That’s why I’m going to talk about the Deutscher Werkbund, which was a group formed in Munich and funded by the state to unite traditional crafts with industrial techniques of mass production, with the intention of putting Germany in a competitive place against other powers like Britain, making itself known through exhibitions.

This group, made up of architects, critics, artists, industrial entrepreneurs, economists, art theorists, whose most prominent members were Theodor Fischer, Peter Behrens and Richard Riemerschmid, based its principles on promoting intellectual debate on design, improving the quality of consumer goods, improving the competitiveness of products and promoting contacts between entrepreneurs and creators.

These principles are very much in line with the Bauhaus, but this group was created in 1907, so it is considered its precursor; in fact, it exerted a great influence on the early careers of Le Corbusier, Walter Gropius and Mies van der Rohe.

His motto was «*from sofa cushions to city building*», indicating his wide range of interests; thus he quickly spread to Austria, with the formation of the Österreichischer Werkbund, and to Switzerland, where the Swiss Werkbund was founded.

Although it has similar traits with Arts and Crafts, there are two key features that I would like to highlight about this group:

– The separation of aesthetics from material quality, seeking functionality and comfort.
– The adoption of the abstract form as the aesthetic basis of design, not ornament.

To this day, the group is still active, so I leave the official website here so you can take a look at it: https://www.deutscher-werkbund.de/

Products

butter
Virtual workshops as smooth as IRL. Introducing the first all-in-one tool to help you put your energy back into facilitating. Your participants are going to love it.

Cards for Humanity, A practical tool for inclusive design
We’ll deal you two random cards, a person and a trait. Your challenge: work out how you can meet their needs.

Stratum UI Design Kit for Figma
A Figma library with ready-made consistent UI elements, helpers, and widgets. Build your UI design on the best practices and well-crafted states. Fast and fun. 

Design Encyclopedia
The Design Encyclopedia is a vast collection of meticulously documented design tokens, components, page layouts, interaction patterns, and visualizations.

Paletter
The Fastest and Easiest Way to Create Professional Palettes from a Single Color

Mockup Generator by Pixeltrue
Free and Simple Device Mockup Generator Create beautiful product mockups in just a few clicks!

Notea
Self hosted note taking app stored on S3. Notea is a privacy-first, open-source note-taking application. It supports Markdown syntax, sharing, responsive and more.

Articles & Ideas

Climate Tech Guide for Designers
We have seen designers not only make new, sustainable innovations possible, but also make them engaging and more adoptable. Whether you’re a product designer, brand designer or UX writer, there’s a place for you in climate tech. But, how can you find the right opportunity? Enrique Allen

Operational efficiency and operational efficacy: defining DesignOps’ metrics
As an efficiency-focused transformational function, DesignOps needs to be able to quantify and measure impact and results. Identifying the right goals and defining the right KPIs are therefore essential steps for every DesignOps strategy and roadmap to ensure impact and progress can be objectively assessed. Patrizia Bertini

I studied the fonts of the top 1000 websites. Here’s what I learned.
I crawled over a million homepages and saved their HTML and CSS files to analyze every aspect of a website, from images and layout to font and color. For this article, we are looking at the top thousand websites when viewed as desktops. Renee Fleck

What’s in a name? Introducing Content Design at Uber
In 2010, my job title was Content Strategist. At the time, I worked with information architects, interaction designers, graphic designers, web designers, illustrators, animators, and a slew of other talented folks to create digital experiences. Mike Stumpo

33 Activity Ideas for Remote UX Workshops
Save this page to reference later when you’re planning your next workshop. Each exercise has a description, an explanation of what circumstances you’d use it in, and a quick tip to make sure things run smoothly. Jordan Bowman

Four types of potential survey errors
When we conduct a survey, we want the truth, even if we can’t handle it. But standing in the way of our dreams of efficiently collected data revealing the unvarnished truth about customers, prospects, and users are the four horsemen of survey errors. Jeff Sauro, PhD and Jim Lewis, PhD

How To Start On Design Systems
I’ve always loved the idea of approaching design systematically, with global styles, rules, and guidelines. In the beginning, this concept was curiously intriguing to me. But, like many designers working on their first design system, I underestimated the feat of the task at hand. Josh Cusick

Remote Jobs

XSplit – Lead UX Designer
XSplit is a remote-first SaaS company that is pioneering the use of video for communication. Over 15 million people around the world have used an XSplit product and we’re looking to bring on motivated team members to help us continue to scale our company and products.

tl;dv.io – UX Designer
Meetings with more than 4 people – a thing of the past. Our vision is to end meeting fatigue. tl;dv records and transcribes your meetings from any popular meeting provider like Zoom or Google Meet. More importantly, organizers love tl;dv to highlight the key meeting moments as they happen.

Bitcoin.com – Graphic Designer
Bitcoin.com’s vision is to provide the next billion people with access to products that exemplify the ideals of Bitcoin and support economic freedom. We see the key features of Bitcoin as being decentralization, censorship resistance, and permissionless. Our games provide trusted and top quality entertainment to the world.

You are receiving this email because you opted in at our newsletter from User Experience Database