41: A Stark Difference in Design
đ Hey there! Here are the week(end) reads. Our goal is to provide quality sharable content to help move us forward as a community. Got your coffee or tea ready? âď¸
Tidbits
1. Understanding Assistive Technology: How Do Legally Blind People and Others with Low Vision Use the Internet?
âIt is also important that app developers do not overwrite a userâs platform settings. If someone needs large text or high contrast to be able to use your app, they understand that it wonât look quite as nice as the designer intended. Their main goal is to be able to use the app, and if they canât do that, they will have to delete it and seek out a more accessible app.â
2. An exploration of visual indicators IRL
âVisual indicators are used to make certain items stand out from the crowd. They donât require the user to take action, but act as communication tools to cue something noteworthy.â
3. How one musician is reimagining hospital sounds
âThe beauty of our sensory experience is what makes us humanâÂ
I can recall many a time being in the hospital, visiting others and a fair share or two, there for myself. And I count the large number of times Iâve witnessed other patients startled or discomforted by the various, continual alarms or sounds that went off in a station or room. From the low beeps that become ingrained in your head to the emergency alarms, this video highlights how a hospital can become extremely overwhelming from an auditory perspective, and run antithetical to the healing process.
Most importantly, it brings to light how sound design plays an equally critical role.
4. How complex systems fail
Being a Short Treatise on the Nature of Failure; How Failure is Evaluated; How Failure is Attributed to Proximate Cause; and the Resulting New Understanding of Patient Safety
5. Apollo 11 Mission Out of Control
âThe stress in his voice was audible, but only later would the two men learn how bad things really were. In that critical moment, hurtling like a lawn dart toward the surface of the moon, the Apollo guidance computer had crashed.â
Open Jobs
+ Black Girls Code volunteers (Paid)
For our techy developer readers: Black Girls Code is looking for a few more Bay Area tech folks (professionals, students, teachers) to help teach web development and/or android mobile app development at their Oakland summer camp in a few weeks.
Whatâs new from Stark
+ Hellooo, Figma fans.
This week, we gave a sneak peek around what weâve been up to on the Figma side of things. Weâre stoked to see the love and excitement around it.
+ Switching over to Mailchimp
This upcoming week weâre finalizing the updated newsletter design. While it will look virtually the same lol, itâll leave room to incorporate more branding elements as we pull all fronts of Stark â from marketing and comms to design and development â into a more unified system. And unfortunately, Substack simply doesnât have that (yet). As soon as it does, weâll be back because we truly love it <3
In the process weâre designing the difference between our weekend newsletter versus product newsletters. This makes it easier for you to discern between the two as well â leaving it up to you to read or delete either :)
Having said that, we have two questions:
QUESTIONS:
+ Is there is anything new or different youâd like to see in the newsletter? Can be anything. Toss your ideas our way!
+ Do you prefer Saturday or Sunday for the newsletter?
Join as a Stark PRO for $2 per month to level up your designs, help power this newsletter, and help move our industry forward.
You can find us talking shop on Twitter or our community chat.
â Team Stark đ¤