Month: April 2024

If I randomly had $25,000 of spare cash on hand that I had to donate to a local non-profit, I would give it to the OutdoorsForAll Foundation. I’m biased because I used to work there, but I think it is a really great organization that provides opportunities for folks with disabilities to enjoy a wide range of outdoors experiences such as skiing, mountain biking, rock climbing, hiking, snowshoeing, or kayaking. They also run outdoor summer camps for youths and adults. While working there, the biggest bummer was that many of their programs had financial barriers to participation, and grant funding was only able to support a small number of participants, meaning that many of the people who got to participate in this nonprofit’s great programs had to come from families with enough disposable income to afford. That is especially a bummer because it is clear that experiences with different outdoors activities have an incredible impact on folks with disabilities and it would be really amazing if everyone who could benefit from these services and programs could access them.

It seems like many nonprofits kind of exist to fill a social need that really the government likely ought to provide, depending on your point of view, and in this way I think OutdoorsForAll is particularly special. While I believe that everyone deserves the opportunity to participate in outdoors experiences, it doesn’t feel like a most essential need for life in the way that housing or food security does. There are nonprofits doing their best to try and meet those needs, but it’s my opinion that the government should be structured to meet all of its citizen’s most critical needs like healthcare, housing, or food security. For that reason I’ll be giving my hypothetical $25,000 to OutdoorsForAll, and keep hoping for a more progressive government.

Stanley Dog Bowl Moodboard
The stanley 32oz dog bowl is the perfect bowl for the healthy, happy, social, hydrated dog. The robust bowl is built to travel, and has plenty of room to share with friends and stay hydrated all day.
The moodboard I created for the stanley 32 oz dog bowl is meant to reflect that of a happy, healthy, social, and hydrated dog. It highlights images of dogs acting like humans, taking a camping trip and hanging out.

For this week’s blog assignment we are looking at design systems.

I chose to begin by looking at Google’s material design system. This system is packed with information. Some things I focused on was their emphasis on accessible design, adaptive design, and interaction states. I appreciated them saying that accessible design is not at odds with expressive design, I agree. The material design system recognizes that products need to work in a variety of different devices, so components easily adapt for designers- cool. I think the focus of interactive states was interesting. It’s clear using a product with interactivity how that increases the intuitiveness of using that product.

The second design system I looked at was Apple’s Human Interface Guidelines. This felt very similar to material design; they seem to agree on many principles of UX design. Some interesting take aways from this site included: embrace simplicity, ensure that buttons clearly communicate their purpose, and to replace colloquial expressions with direct plain language.

The third design system I looked at was Mailchimps. This system was a lot more straight forward. It was more a collection of the components they used to build their site rather than an extensive course in UX design like Google and Apple’s systems. Maybe kind of interesting, their brand just has 2 typefaces, doesn’t apply rounded corners to their data visualization, and uh.. name their colors after fruit.