Whats app'enning at Piccadilly Lights? ➜

As part of a global campaign promoting its revamped privacy and safety features, WhatsApp has taken over London’s Piccadilly Lights with a mind bending billboard advertisement. Leaving aside the incredibly nifty polymorphic technology – expect to see lots more of this, the promotion is a pin sharp example of the magic that happens when creative, message and media are all impeccably aligned! 🎯🎯🎯

Graphics for of the People ➜

The People’s Graphic Design Archive is the brainchild of American designer Louise Sandhaus and the fruition of an ambitious 8 year project. It's a crowd-sourced and continually growing virtual archive of graphic design history. Including everything from complete projects to process, photos, anecdotes and articles. It's set to be a source of inspiration for the design industry as well as an online preservation of design history. Designers, get yourselves dug in.

Laws to live (and UX) by ➜

Non-designers will be familiar with some of these: Pareto's Law, which states that 80% of the effects will come from 20% of the causes, or Parkinsons Law, which states that any given task will inflate to take up all of the time it's allocated, but how about Millers Law, which states the average human can hold 7 (plus or minus 2) items in their short term memory at any one time? Wonderfully interpreted as simple geometric graphics these principles underpin all good UX design. Taking an age to come up with a suitably pithy closer here – guess that'll be Hicks Law in full effect.

The gif that keeps on giving ➜

The article above describes the gif as the funnest filetype and who could argue with that? First appearing on a fledgling world wide web in 1987, the compressed animation allowed information to be perfectly packed into a lightweight, flickering and eye-catching 1-2 second bundle. Today, the humble gif is deployed by millions with seeming impunity across chat and social media streams but with such ubiquity and scope for personal expression, never before has the pressure to give good gif been so real.

A woman's work – making working females over 50 more visible ➜

The charity Ageing Better has added to its free stock image library with a new bank of 200+ images of women over 50 in work. In a bid to challenge negative and ageist views of later life and the under-representation of older women in work settings within image libraries, the new collection addresses the imbalance by recognising their visibility, contribution and resilience. The library is the first of its kind, and the full collection now features more than 2,000 positive and realistic images of people aged 50 and over. More power to the quinquagenarians we say.


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