43: A Stark Difference in Design

👋 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? ☕️

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Tidbits

1. Diversify Tech

A gem resource of Conference Scholarships for under represented groups in tech.

2. Take 1 Design

Really love this initiative from Take 1 Design. Their goal is to curate stories about prototypes and showcase how teams learn through prototyping. The product community doesn't share many stories of the early days in the product process — from Day 1 to Day 100 and beyond — so they’re hoping to change that.

They’re still on the low, but there’s lots to learn about what they’re up to.

3. Feeling Stressed? Pinterest wants to help.

“When you type in an anxiety-related query—something like “work anxiety,” or “dealing with stress”—Pinterest will now display a box above the stream of pins. "If you're feeling sad or stressed, here are some resources that may help improve your mood," it says, above a disclaimer that notes Pinterest’s exercises are not a replacement for professional care. You can click into the box to see more, or scroll down to just look at the pins.”

4. UI Cheat Sheets: Text Fields

From the anatomy of a text field to accessibility checks for it, this post shows you how to go about properly styling text fields.

5. Designing For Voice

Bradley Metrock breaks down the basics with four main areas of focus to consider when designing voice user interfaces.

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What’s new from Stark

🤩 Let the Figma countdown begin to promising plugins!

Stark for Figma launches on August 1st. Get your engines ready! We’ll be launching with the Contrast Checker and rolling out with the Colorblind Simulator not long after.

Big thanks to the folks at Prototypr for featuring us as one of the 10 Promising examples of Figma Plugins 🖤

📣 Resource WIP

We kicked off a resource for you! It’s the Stark Accessibility & Inclusive UI Library. Here’s some of what’ll be included:

• List of diverse names / avatars (folks would contribute their own info)

• Personas with a range of differences in abilities

• Accessibility friendly color palettes

• Accessible Design Checklist

• Educational information

And much much more. In every design platform you love. Aside from the above, what else do you want and need in this?

⭐️ Spotlight on our CTO!

Our CTO Michael gave insights on documentation, aspirations, and the importance of practicing as a junior in his interview with Beyond the Pixel.

📞 We need your help

Do you use Stark? If so, would you be up for a chat?
We’re planning out some [major] stuff and we’d love to know how you’re using Stark, and what your needs are going forward.

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You can find us talking shop on Twitter or our community chat.

– Team Stark 🖤