21: A Stark Difference in Design
Hey! Welcome to this week’s Stark Difference in Design. Last week’s Edition No. 20 had a 50% open rate. The most popular link was the How to Design for Everyone, in 3 Steps blog post. 💌
Tidbits
+ My struggle with color (part I)
As a designer, building products everyday helped me realize how problematic colors are without a system. Their value diminshes if their application results in constant headaches and confusion. This slows down product development as it directly impacts design efforts. It also reduces the product’s consistency across different mediums for the intended user.
This fantastic primer from Zain Adeel walks you through the understanding of colors, how to properly use them, and how they’re to be applied to accessible design and in creating design systems. He’s convinced that every time a designer questions color, it’s further proof that there is a need for a design system. We all know how easy it is to slightly adjust a gray and end up with 5 different tones and zero clue which the master (or intended) color is.
He also put together a list to determine whether or not you need a system:
Is your product used by more than a dozen people?
Is the product growing in features?
Is your team growing?
Regardless of how you decide to implement your system or when, the colors that live within it, and in turn your product, should be three things: Accessible, systemic and scalable.
+ People think I’m faking my blindness because I use a phone
What they don’t realise is that I’m using several of the built in accessibility features to enlarge the text, zoom apps, and even have my phone read out information to me.
Dr. Amy Kavanagh shares a first hand account of living with partial blindness, the fulfilling life she leads and how the world refuses to see her as whole simply because of her disability.
From knocking canes out of hands, to laughing at a phone being used by an individual that is blind, the mockery (to not just her but others alike) show how necessary it is for an increase in educational efforts for the general public. It sheds light on how unaware folks are about what disability means and the different forms it takes. Not to mention how the advancements in technology and pure will to not let their disability disable them, leads people to powerfully functional lives.
+ A practical guide to accessibility for designers
I love well-written posts that educate in a way that challenges you to think differently, especially on accessibility. Tim’s engaging writing and the examples used had me saying “Oh that’s such a good one” over a handful of times. He touches on points like making a product predominately keyboard navigable and the ineffectiveness of directions (ie. Tap the button on the lower right) for screen readers.
In regards to our responsibility to service the business, he touches on (though it may not be immediately obvious and I like that) how designing for accessibility and our power users are one and the same—even when we silo them.
We’re also proud to have Tim is a Stark fan, though we didn’t know until we read the post! :) Thanks for the shout out, Tim.
For bookworms
+ Small Great Things
Jodi Picoult hits racism, privilege, and justice in America right on the head in the most nail-biting, empathetic and informative way. I experienced a spectrum of emotions reading the book, often angry. But it’s not just a story, it’s a collection of Picoult’s swarm of research done previous to writing the book and that’s certainly evident.
A necessary read for everyone.
From the Stark team
+ Tidying up so the Stark UI sparks joy
Aside from the design tweaks, we also re-wrote the code from the ground up, ensuring uniformity of both design and development across design software. With the updates, we focused on ease of use, clarity of features, ensuring similar if not identical experiences no matter what design tool you use, refining the details that make the house a home :) and preparation for some new (ridiculously awesome) stuff coming.
This was a big release and the feedback has been amazing. With all change though sometimes comes discontent; and although we’re huge fans of the “wait 2 weeks to see how folks like it” method, we know some folks that use Sketch have reached out unhappy with some areas of the new UI—and understandably so. This is because Sketch has seen the biggest re-design.
One thing we want to note: This is version 1 of Stark v2. We hit a ton of constraints from a tech perspective. As a design tool baked into design software, we’re beholden to the APIs. And in order to create parity across design software, we had to make a few sacrifices while we work on significantly better solutions for the long term. Two issues we hear you on:
The re-run of the contrast checker in Sketch
We’ll be pushing out keyboard shortcuts, which drastically helps the ease of use (see below) when it comes to quickly selecting set after set of layers and checking them.The window not being draggable / position lock
We also would prefer to be able to drag the window around. We can see times where it’d be useful for moving it out of the way a bit. But sadly this is not something we can fix until Sketch allows draggable regions on Frameless Windows. With that said, we know the draggable window was something everyone, including us (!) loved, so we have a really awesome solution in the works <3
One of the most exciting aspects of building Stark is that we use it, too. We hit the same snags and have the same wishes. We’re in this for the long haul and take a lot of pride in quickly rising to become one of the best design tools out there. For everyone who shared their love for what we’re up to, thank you! And to those who shared feedback on how or where we can improve, we appreciate you big time.
+ Sneak peek: Keyboard shortcuts
Here’s a sneak peek at keyboard shortcuts for the Contrast Checker in action. For those of you using Sketch and missing our ‘check again’ feature, this makes life 10x easier than when you had it. We’ll be releasing shortcuts for both the contrast checker and colorblind simulator.
+ A brand has no name? Face?
We ran a poll to see which Stark family member from Game of Thrones you think we’d be named after. If, we were in fact named after one. Which we are not. Consensus says: Arya Stark by 50%. We have a name, but no face… Intriguing selection, folks.
Liked this newsletter? Let us know. And we’re always talking shop on Twitter @getstarkco or in our community chat.
–Team Stark