Product Design
I published an article last week about doing strategy as a product designer. Quite frankly it’s something I struggled with for a long time, so I tried to write the article I wish I had years ago. Here’s the lede:
Business and strategy are not taught in design school and it’s not something every designer is drawn to, but senior designers should know the basics and be able to communicate the value of design from a business POV.
The idea’s been in the back of my head for a while. Reading a couple articles and seeing a couple tweets motivated me to organize my thoughts.
For me, being strategic and having decent business acumen is something that separates good designers from great ones. And you can replace “designer” with “engineer”, “writer”, or countless other job titles.
If you’ve been through a similar journey, I’d love to hear about it.
Email Geeks
📊 Poll time: How do you feel about each issue having a unique design?
I like it · Meh
One of the reasons I chose Email Octopus was because they treat custom HTML as a first class citizen. One of my newsletter’s goals is to keep my design and development skills fresh.
However another goal is to gradually grow my list and Email Octopus doesn’t offer any tools to help with that. And I’m a terrible self-promoter.
As I look at other ESPs with growth features, I notice most offer only pre-made templates and visual editors instead of direct code access. I’m starting to wonder. “Do I really need code access”?
I know a bunch of y’all are developers, and if you have a newsletter I’d love to hear what you think.
Climate Tech
I love me some good data viz, and the climate tech space is a place where it can have a huge impact. When Data Wrapper dove into a reddit post, downloaded the data, and visualized some of the more interesting results.
In 2020, China emitted more CO₂ than the next 14 highest-emitting countries combined. However it’s a little more complicated than that and these graphs help tell those stories.
In short:
- Per capita, China's emissions look more like Germany's.
- The U.S. is still history's biggest carbon emitter by a large margin.
- Europe consumes more carbon than most charts claim because they export some of their emission to other countries using clever bookkeeping tactics that our planet won’t care about one bit.
When looking at global CO₂ emissions, it's important to consider different ways of interpreting the data. Each approach shows different aspects of the climate crisis and how complex and interconnected the issue is.
For Fun
Alexis Gay with another hilarious sketch on companies trying to get people back in the office.
Thanks for reading, see you in a fortnight ✌️
-Ted
@tedgoas
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