What's New
New website, course and product updates - April 2024
A lot happened this month. Take a look at what's coming.
Michael Wong
Apr 17, 2024
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7 min read
Whether you’re a budding designer or an established one, Twitter is a great place to learn and connect with the leading experts in the Product (UX/UI) realm.
Along with direct access to expert designers, Twitter is best known for threads—a series of connected tweets posted by one account that can be used to share information or a story over several tweets rather than the traditional 280-characters.
Often, these threads provide valuable educational opportunities, in-depth discussions, and other highly beneficial resources. For example, Sketch partnered with GitHub’s product designer @Gavmm to discuss icon designs, skeuomorphism, and more in this educational Twitter thread.
In the UX/UI design field, the best way to fast-track your design career and master design skills is to combine a comprehensive, from-the-ground-up online course like the Ultimate Figma Masterclass and immerse yourself in the product (UX/UI) design Twitter-sphere.
These educational threads on Twitter are the perfect way to add on and articulate your existing design skills or education, allowing you to enhance your understanding of product (UX/UI) design through the lens of expert designers.
Following other designers on Twitter is beneficial for many reasons, including:
- Access to experts in the UX/UI design field
- Opportunity to troubleshoot and discuss issues
- Gather insights and conduct user research
- Get inspiration from expert designers
- Quick access to industry updates or changes
To help you tap into this invaluable design community, we’ve compiled a list of the brightest minds in Product (UX/UI) design to follow on Twitter.
Mizko
Founder of the @thedesignership, Mizko’s Twitter account shares behind-the-scenes insights into the workings of The Designership and his YouTube channel, offering you the opportunity to be a fly-on-the-wall for design discussions led by a product (UX/UI) design expert.
You’ll get course updates, announcements, and useful insights for students on his feed, such as a new lesson on component properties. Mizko also tweets job and investment opportunities such as this recent Tweet for design-led, early-stage products and companies.
For those looking for insights into the business side of design, including management, scaling, and interviewing, the personal experiences and findings Mizko shares on his feed are invaluable.
Mizko also shares design resource content, including threads where the Designership community discusses design topics such as possible changes to Figma, including variant swapping, and Mizko’s findings, including whether the old credence of mobile-first is always valid.
Figma
The official Twitter account for Figma is a goldmine of resources, industry updates, and educational threads discussing Figma troubleshooting, suggestions, and inspiration. With one of the strongest design communities in the space, Figma tweets educational threads that coincide with any updates, such as the recent variable font update and a clear tutorial on what this means for designers.
Along with updates from the design team, Figma hosts a lot of Q&A and thought-prompting tweets. Of particular note is their Office Hours Livestream, where the community can ask the design team questions and get answers in real-time. Along with weekly live streaming sessions, educational gifs, and relatable design content, it’s no surprise Figma continues to be the most used tool in the product (UX/UI) design space.
Dribbble
The creative hub for UX/UI design and digital designers, Dribbble is fantastic for inspirational design tweets and designer spotlights. A self-promotion and social networking platform designed specifically for creatives, Dribbble’s tweets are a great place to get a first-hand insight into how other designers work.
Expect lots of actionable and practical advice for (and from!) designers and along with save-worthy posts such as this tweet on making your portfolio stand out from the crowd.
Rogie
Rogie King, the design advocate at Figma, is a big name in the Figma and Dribbble community. Rogie is also well-known as the creator of one of the most popular plugins for Figma, the Gif exporter.
Rogie often tests new design ideas and updates and conducts user research within his Twitter community.
For example, this thread saw Rogie gathering research to see if “anybody else had issues/glitches pasting your SVGs into Figma? Mind slinging me your svgs for testing?” Following that thread, he also tweeted to announce the release of a plugin to import Illustrator + SVG vectors.
Ran Segall
Ran Segall is the creator of the Flux Academy and is best known as one of the more popular UX/UI design YouTubers.
Ran is incredibly active on Twitter, sharing community updates and access links for upcoming talks. His feed is full of free resources and links related to portfolio building, including this useful free guide to portfolio overhauling.
UX Collective
Created by @fabriciot and @caioab, UX Design Collective curates user experience, usability, and product design stories. Their Twitter feed is awash with troubleshooting, day-to-day experiences, and many design discussions such as the “dark yellow problem.”
Interestingly, the polar bear used in their branding and Twitter display picture references "Information Architecture for the Web and Beyond," one of the most famous books in UX design.
Lisa Angela
A self-described “design evangelist for better process and education,” Lisa uses her platform to provoke conversation around common malpractices within the design community.
Lisa is a big supporter of dismantling “inherited wisdom” and the lazy design decisions that all too often find space in real-world UX practices. Her Twitter feed has become a valuable outlet for industry-based discussion and conversations. Get to know her by reading her industry-shaking article “Undoing the Toxic Dogmatism of Digital Design,” examining the paradoxical nature of UX design practices.
Harry Brignull
Harry Brignull heads up innovation at global fintech company Smart Pension but is best known for coining the term “dark patterns” almost a decade ago.
Dark Patterns, also known as deceptive design patterns, are tricks used in website and app user interfaces that attempt to manipulate users into doing something they don’t want to. Harry is incredibly vigilant in the fight against dark patterns and loves to “signal-boost offending examples,” shared with #darkpatterns.
Harry also doubles as a resource catalog, with lots of user research-related discussions, regular updates, and retweets of dark pattern watchdog reports.
Laura Klein
As the UX manager at Indeed.com, Laura Klein gives incredible insights into the hiring processes from a UX design perspective. With observations from her career journey, including her work with UsersKnow.com, Laura brings her great sense of humor and wit to Twitter when discussing UX, UX research, product management, and how to run a “lean startup.”
Laura also runs a UX design industry podcast called What is Wrong with UX?, discussing topics such as working in larger teams, management, issues with inter-office design, and other day-to-day UX design topics.
Andy Budd
Design founder, speaker, start-up advisor and coach Andy Budd is best known for co-founding the U.K-based agency Clearleft. A UX veteran, Andy is also an ally of calling out “dark pattern” practices, just like this example here.
Andy shares a wealth of UX advice and insights, focused on correct practices for managers, aspiring managers, and senior-level designers. He also shares endless tips on UX leadership, long-term product vision and strategy, design entrepreneurship, and aligning with business demands.
Doug Collins
Author of “The UX Design Field Book,” Doug shares a lot of well-executed fundamental knowledge resources and has made a name for himself in the design Twitter-sphere for his humorous and relatable design memes and captions.
Anna Cook
Anna Cook is a senior accessibility designer at Northwestern Mutual and a huge advocate and voice for #a11y Twitter.
Her Twitter feed provides links to resources about the accessible web, hardware, gaming, and other digital designs, and contributes to important accessibility-related conversations across the platform.
One of her more recent Tweets for example was to highlight a much-needed industry update: “a cool case study from the Sonos design team around robust accessibility for VoiceOver users! #Config22”
Brad Frost
Brad Frost is a design system consultant and web designer who is best known for his creation, Atomic Design Framework, which has become a super popular framework for design systems the world over. Brad is also the author of Atomic Design, where he explores creating and maintaining design systems.
Along with relatable design memes, funny tweets, and his musical talent, Brad's tweets include design discussions about hardware and monitors, design system mistakes, and job opportunities.
KA McKercher
Ka is a designer and design leader with a breadth of experience across co-design, service design, strategy, human-centered design (HCD), user experience (UX), infrastructure, and communication design.
Author of Beyond Sticky Notes, Ka is incredibly active in the design community, with a strong focus on promoting co-design and seeking different patterns and principles that ensure the “genuine and safe (enough) involvement of people with diverse backgrounds and lived/living experiences.”
Their social account is almost an extension of the book, with lots of well-designed graphics and infographics and the incredibly useful “co-design test,” which you can use to assess if a project is co-designed or a thinly-guised consultation.
Jared Spool
Jared Spool is a researcher, speaker, and educator on the subjects of usability, software, and everything design-related. He is the founding principal of User Interface Engineering—a research, training, and consulting firm that “specializes in website and product usability.”
Titled the “famed creator of the $300 million button”, Jared shares daily resources, open job postings, and other design musings such as research frameworks and how to deliver research insights.
Julie Zhuo
Former design VP at Facebook, author of The Making of a Manager, and a renowned angel investor, Julie shares lots of product and UX insights from her many years in the field.
Often sharing prompts and questions and routinely getting lots of UX-related discussions going, you can expect lots of conversations and threads about crypto, UX, and design in web3, blockchain, and decentralized apps.
Julie has a very useful newsletter: Looking Glass blog and newsletter which you can sign up for via her Twitter bio.
Tanner Christensen
Head of Design at Gem.com, Tanner has an impressive CV having previously worked for Lyft, Facebook, Atlassian, and more. Tanner also runs a UX design podcast called New Layer.
Tanner shares a lot about hiring designers and gives great advice on how to stand out from the crowd and how to handle interviews. He has lots of save-worthy threads including this advice thread for interviews and aspiring designers, and the 10 questions you should ask in your next interview.
Lily Konings
Lil Konings is the Product Design Manager for @messenger and @instagram. She also has an incredibly bi-weekly newsletter for those looking for a career in design and where she collects questions via Twitter and answers them.
Lily offers lots of career advice to designers, especially for women in tech, and has a treasure trove of useful resources on her Twitter page, including how to word self-reviews properly and how a good manager does interviews.
She is very active in the community and often shares lots of inspiring stories from the design community, including this tweet of a 52-year-old successfully changing careers and getting a job.
MDS
Matt D Smith is the founder and CEO of ShiftNudge, an online course covering the visual side of UI through the lens of UX.
Along with his YouTube channel, Matt shares a lot of interesting posts about Figma and design, poses questions, and is incredibly interactive with other designers in his feed.
Femke
Another leading name in the UX/UI design YouTube community, Femke is a senior product designer at Wealthsimple who also runs a podcast called @DesignLifeFM.
Femke offers some great design insights and details on the day-to-day process of a product designer. She also shares key points from design panels and talks that she has given in the past with other expert designers.
Luke Wroblewski
Luke Wroblewski is the Product Director at Google and was previously a co-founder of Polar (acquired by Google in 2014), and Chief Product Officer and co-founder at BagCheck (acquired by Twitter in 2011). His Twitter feed is a goldmine of expert design insights, Google updates, and even critiques and suggestions on other global companies’ UX/UI designs.
Luke gives you direct access to the experts and processes behind Google, sharing updates, changes, and all the design choices made by his team in creating Google-related products. His Twitter is great for those looking for industry updates, without the need to trawl through Google’s official blog.
Why Your Career Needs Immersion in the UX/UI Design Space
As a product (UX/UI) designer, honing key skills is just the first step. To really fast-track your career and become a stand-out designer, you need to have a combination of the right training plus immersion in the industry.
For training, there is a multitude of free online courses to choose from, plus a long list of the Best Product (UX/UI) YouTube Channels to learn from. However, to get a solid education in design, and master Figma, the best option is to enroll in a paid course such as the Ultimate Figma Masterclass. You’ll get Figma-training from the ground-up, and exclusive access to The Designership community, helping you to become a better designer.
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