🕶 Not so weird anymore! Opinions, Snyder Cut, WiDesign Fest, book reads, ship gets stuck and freed, memes & more!

Memes are awesome and y’all seem to agree!

9 min readMar 30, 2021

Great response on the previous newsletter so I will continue to drop memes on you fo-sure for the next couple of editions! Don’t worry, we have not drifted away from our core content. We will continue to write, curate about cool stuff in the world of design, tech, biz, crypto and more! Writing and editing this newsletter is turning out to be more fun than it sounds. Lol, I spend so much time digging through my RSS and Twitter feed to dig out memes. Pretty cool!

So, what are we talking about in this edition? Alright, I’m super late to the party but I was finally able to block 4hrs to watch the Snyder Cut of Justice League. The movie is amazing, long… but amazing! Visually stunning, great storyline, cool vision and excellent narration! What was super weird about it was the 4:3 screen ratio in which it’s presented! Man, it sure took a while to get used to that! Why 4:3 for something that was going to be launched on OTT only? Bad UX or a great compromise to retain the director’s vision for cinematography? All-in-all, a great film!

More amazing stuff in this Newsletter- a great reading collection, a greater collection of threads & tweets and yes! there are memes! Late realisation — but what a powerhouse of content Twitter has become — that is, only if you follow the right people! Slightly switch lanes and you suddenly end up reading about conspiracy and that kinda nonsense.

Scrr scrr scrr scroll…!

👩 Last week of WiDESIGN Fest’21

Get started with UX Career at UMO Design School! Click to register- For first 100 women only!

What a great response we have received so far! So many amazing women rocking it in their jobs and talking about it here while inspiring so many. Alas, like all good things this also has to come to an end. So, this week would be the last week of WiDesign Fest for 2021! If you were not able to tune it, catch the recap below! If you have not participated yet, tune in. Below are the numerous ways you can tune in and participate.

What’s happening at WiDesign’21:

WiDesign Fest 2021: Join the live talks, panels, and workshops by established women leaders.
UMO WiDesign’21 Scholarships: Apply to be a part of the first 100 UMO WiDesign’21 Scholarship
A Career in UX Design for 100 women: As A Part Of WiDesign Fest 2021

How can you be a part of this?

Become A Mentor: As a first and significant step, we invite everyone, not just women, from design and related domains who believe in women empowerment to support and celebrate by being part of WiDesign’21.
Register As A Design Leader: UMO WID 2021 celebrates international women’s day by showcasing the stories of grit, determination, and success of women in design. We invite accomplished women leaders in the design and related fields to inspire, influence, and impact with your stories. Your presence will inspire our community, especially women in design to lead themselves and their teams to great success. Let’s bridge the gap, let’s #makeithappen.
Pledge your support: Inviting companies and individuals to pledge This women’s day, UMO.Design is going to dedicate the month of March to all wonderful women with the launch of “Women in Design 2021” on the occasion of International Women’s Day

The mission of UMO’s WiDesign Fest 2021 is to educate and empower a million women/girls with the design skills and confidence necessary to get a job by 2030.

🚨Register for Talks on April 3, 2021 8:30 PM IST — www.umodesign.school

Amplifying Women’s Voices! Witness Women Leaders who have broken down the barriers & achieved milestones across a wide spectrum of their professional careers.

🧢 Recap: Previously at WiDesign Fest’21

✌️Hand-picked bytes

Clubhouse UX teardown: A closer look at homepage curation, follow hooks and other features — TechCrunch — techcrunch.com
UX expert Peter Ramsey and TechCrunch reporter Steve O’Hear discuss some of Clubhouse’s UX challenges as it continues to onboard new users at pace while it strives to create enough stickiness to keep them active.

9 Typefaces Designed by Women | IDEO.org — www.ideo.org
How to support women in design well beyond Women’s History Month

Made to measure: Getting design leadership metrics right | McKinsey — www.mckinsey.com
Setting a North Star and combining qualitative data with quantitative measures can demonstrate the value and effectiveness of design.

Power, Sister! 20 New Books on Women’s History — Goodreads News & Interviews — www.goodreads.com
Happy Women’s History Month! One of the undisputedly good things about modern scholarship is that women’s history is finally getting its due. For dec…

Suez Canal Container Ship Is Partially Freed — WSJ — www.wsj.com
Engineers partially freed a wedged ship blocking the Suez Canal and tug boats were working to straighten its course, an effort that could soon reopen the vital trade route and end days of global supply disruptions.

How to write inclusive, accessible digital products | by Nick DiLallo | UX Collective — uxdesign.cc
Good UX writing invites everyone to use the interface. Here’s how to write digital products that include people of differing backgrounds and abilities.

Tech in Asia — Connecting Asia’s startup ecosystem — www.techinasia.com

Instagram, TikTok, and Facebook: What is it about these social media platforms that make them so addictive to their 3.6 billion users worldwide?

Ethereum Whitepaper | ethereum.org — ethereum.org
An introductory paper to Ethereum, published in 2013 before its launch.

Introducing a New Spotify Experience Across Desktop App and Web Player — newsroom.spotify.com
At Spotify, we’re always looking for ways to provide the best possible experience so our listeners can consistently discover and enjoy music and podcasts — and that includes look, feel, and functionality. We constantly test, develop, and launch new features, optimize for new devices, and look to expand our content offering. Yet along the way, we felt… Read more »

Dyson’s latest vacuum shoots green laser beams — www.fastcompany.com
More products. More stores. Dyson is seizing the moment to expand and think bigger.

GoPro’s New Quik App Helps You Get the Most Out of Your Photos and Videos — gopro.com
GoPro launched a total refresh of its mobile app and gave it a new name to reflect its purpose. Aptly named Quik, the app makes it quick and easy to get the most out of your favorite photos and videos no matter what phone or camera you’re using.

First space hotel set to open in 2027! — www.dezeen.com
The Gateway Foundation has announced that it intends to open the world’s first space hotel, named Voyager Station, in 2027.

A ‘Pepsi x Peeps’ Drink Is on the Way — www.adweek.com

The beverage giant said Pepsi x Peeps is “a delicious new beverage that combines the crisp, refreshing taste of Pepsi cola with the pillowy-soft and sweet Peeps marshmallow flavour consumers love.”

Millions of Millennials Are Piling Into India’s Stock Market — Bloomberg — www.bloomberg.com
Active investor accounts rose by a record 10.4 million in 2020.

Robinhood building platform to allow users to buy into IPOs, sources say — www.cnbc.com
Robinhood is building a platform to “democratize” initial public offerings, including its own.

🐦 Cool Tweets & Threads

✨ Meme Dealings

Last week Oprah was the centre of all memes and now it’s this huge ship that got stuck in Suez. Whatever is up with this world, we sure are having a field day meme-ing it out. And yes, it finally moved — slightly, reducing the huge billion-dollar loss it was causing the world trade! Hallelujah!

📖 Book Reads

Reading since a week now — User Friendly: How the Hidden Rules of Design Are Changing the Way We Live, Work, and Play by Cliff Kuang and Robert Fabricant

In the last edition, I mentioned that this book ‘decodes the obscure and fascinating journey of user experience and maps the hidden history of the designed world.’ And it all starts at Silicon Valley, when it wasn’t what we know today, as the authors’ quote!

The first chapter starts with ‘Confusion.’ It talks about the 1979 Three Mile Island nuclear power plant accident, where a minor failure in the system destroyed the plant because the control room was so badly designed. Due to the failure, the system was engineered to shut itself down but because of the poorly designed control room and alert system, the engineers misunderstood the message and turned off the emergency fail safe procedure which resulted in a catastrophe!

The author also quotes ‘On a hunch, when you look hard enough at monumental machine disasters, you can usually find a design problem.’ The first chapter also talks about Norman, his book, design thinking, IDEO, Frog, the first mac etc. Great tit-bits!

🌎 Happening at UMO

OK! So WiDesign Fest’21 is coming to an end this week! Tweet to us and let us know what you want to see next at UMO. We have some amazing stuff lined up for you which we know you would love to participate in! Meanwhile, there’s tons of stuff happening at UMO and UXI, take a look and check out if something interest you!

We’ve got Jobs for you! — www.umo.design

Find your dream job, its been curated to post suitable jobs! It’s absolutely free. Recruiters can post jobs as well.

Online Certification courses in UX, UI, Research, voice, & Leadership — www.umodesign.school
Best online UX, UI, UX research, voice, design leadership school for beginners and experts. All the courses are instructor driven and UX certification provided.

Partner with us: WiDesign’21 — UMO Design Foundation — www.umo.design
Inviting companies and individuals to pledge This women’s day, UMO.Design is going to dedicate the month of March to all wonderful women with the launch of “Women in Design 2021” on the occasion of International Women’s Day.

Join The Task Force — UMO Design Foundation

www.umo.design

You could be a passionate individual, from any background, not limited to design. If you can write, sketch, photograph, blog, post on social media, or even take a video then you are gold to us. Join the task force now, contribute and make an impact!

Become A Mentor — UMO Design Foundation

www.umo.design

UMO is a non-profit organization working towards design awareness and exchange of design sensibilities through interaction between designers and design sensitive consumers for over a decade. It is a forum dedicated to discussing, improving, and promoting the work of design communities.

See you soon!

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