The first rectangle
We all know that feeling.
You open your favourite design software.
You create a new file.
You haven’t even named it, but you jump right in and add the very first rectangle.
Your layers panel looks completely lifeless, all except for that one “Rectangle 1” layer.
You look over to your canvas, and it’s just sitting there, all dingy and grey with no life, no soul, no personality.
Your first rectangle.
“This is the beginning of a masterpiece”, you think to yourself.
And then you just copy Linear’s landing page all over again.
Sorry if I just outed your design process.
On a related note, isn’t that stage of the design process beautiful? It kind of reminds me of the butterfly effect. From the first gradient to the first shadow, any small change can have a huge impact on the way your design plays out.
Anyway, that’s where we’re at with the newsletter, we’re one rectangle in.
I just hope you’re here to witness Rectangle 982 Copy.
A personal thank you
I want to thank each and every one of you who subscribed, it means a lot.
I want to thank you especially, {{ first_name }} (just kidding, I don’t know your name)
This has been something I’ve wanted to launch for a while now, and I was pleasantly surprised with the interest, so thank you again.
I was planning to post the first edition next week, but I couldn’t hold off writing this up after over 1,000 of you subscribed in less than 24 hours.
I don’t have any format or schedule planned right now, I’m still figuring things out.
Thanks for being a part of the journey.
Is AI going to take your design job?
Right now, no.
Without being too mean, these look like they are pulled from Dribbble in 2012.
Maybe that was a little harsh, but the sad reality is none of these are usable in the real world. They don’t follow any basic design patterns and they’re definitely not accessible.
While some of the illustration work does look pretty, once you dig into the finer details you realise that it’s highly unlikely any of this gets approved on the App Store.
Personally I don’t see AI taking jobs from web or product designers anytime soon, but I definitely see it being used as a helpful aid.
A good example use case is Magician.
Notable website
In each edition of Rectangle, I will feature one website I believe is spectacular in some way or another. Since I run Godly, I discover great websites all the time, so this won’t be too difficult.
This is Motto, a global branding design agency. What I love about Motto is how smooth everything feels. From the scrolling animation to the transitions, everything just feels so nicely put together.
Link dump
A random collection of links that you might find interesting.
Magician
The team at Diagram are doing bits with AI integration with Figma. Magician enables you to insert icons, images and copy generated by AI.Ellie
Ellie is an email AI assistant, it learns from your writing style and crafts replies as if they were written by you. It’s currently free in beta.A thread on pricing psychology
Came across this interesting Twitter thread about pricing psychology, it contains 5 actionable tips that you can test today. Worth checking if you’re in the product or SaaS space.
ChatGPT
I’ll be surprised if you haven’t heard of ChatGPT already, it’s blowing up like crazy right now, but I had to include it. It’s a new AI chatbot that can answer basically any question. I find it better than Google for a lot of things.Linears
A collection of websites that are inspired by Linear. Somewhat controversial, but interesting to see how much Linear has had an effect on landing page designs recently.Much like traditional advent calendars, the team at Framer are currently counting down to Christmas but with design gifts. These gifts range from heavily discounted icon packs, apps, wallpaper packs and more.
So excited for this! Can't wait to read more. :)
So much fun! thank you for writing this! Ughhh the Linears link is so so good.