This week, we talk about the skills and tools that designers can learn to become future-proof. In The Sidebar, we share our impressions, tips, and best practices for using Figma Variants.

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The Sidebar:

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In this week's Sidebar, we do a deep dive into Figma's recent release of Variants. We talk about the interface itself, best practices, and tips for making the most of Variants.

• Followup: Gabe Valdivia's tweeted a thread with more points about how to think about job tenure in tech.
• Figma Variants
• Cartesian product
• Not yet live, but this preview of a Figma plugin to generate missing variants looks fantastic.

Follow up:

• Katherine tweeted some solid praise for our Patreon - thank you for supporting the show!

Main topic:

This week's listener question comes from Loucas Papantoniou on GitHub: Design has matured as a discipline, there are a lot of good people in the industry, we've design systems, better processes, but it also becomes more commoditized. In what skills do you think an experienced designer should invest now to be 'Future-proof' in the next few years? For instance 3D and AR/VR are expected only to get more and more popular, AI and machine learning are already very much in demand, etc. What do you think? On what do you invest yourself in nowadays?

Cool Things:

• Brian shared Talking to Strangers, the newest book from Malcolm Gladwell. Here's your teaser: Something is very wrong, Gladwell argues, with the tools and strategies we use to make sense of people we don't know. And because we don't know how to talk to strangers, we are inviting conflict and misunderstanding in ways that have a profound effect on our lives and our world.
  • Spaghetti Sauces video
• Marshall shared Dr. Garuda on YouTube, a fascinating channel of montage-style videos of clay masterwork. The creations are wildly good and the videos showing the process are inspiring.

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Bonsoir!