💰Weird Edition — NFTs, WiDesign Fest, Hand picked bytes, Cool Tweets, Design Book Reads and Meme dealings!

To begin with, this is a slightly weird one!

Firstly, the weird doesn’t begin until the end. Until then, there is a lot of cool stuff for you to go through, read and learn from. But before we get into it- there’s been a lot of noise in the creative industries about NFT — Crypto art, let’s talk about it!

I’m not going to tell you what it is, by now I’m sure we’ve all heard about it unless you are Patrick from SpongeBob and you live under a rock. Patrick makes an appearance again, god! I love that show! Anyway, the reason these have been blowing up is that they leverage blockchain technology which means they are non-fungible i.e., they are unique and can’t be replaced, unlike many cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin, Doge, Ethereum etc. NFT’s can be anything from a tweet (Jack Dorsey put up his first tweet for sale), music, artwork etc. If you didn’t know this already, Beeple sold his artwork for about $69 Million Dollars as an NFT.

But why pay millions of dollars for something I can right-click and download? True, it’s all digital and you can download anything off the internet these days. But to compare with anything in the real art world, you can make multiple copies but there will only be one original. And an NFT will give you ownership of the artwork. NFTs will sure become a great tale of capitalism!

There’s a lot of chatter about other impacts of NFTs environmental, meme culture, prosperity, security and so much more. Hopefully, soon, more details will be unveiled to us!

Most of our readers are designers so here are some places where you sell your artwork as NFTs Nifty Gateway, MakersPlace, SuperRare, OpenSea, Decentraland, and Rarible.

This newsletter will talk about a lot more stuff, something very close to NFTs is a meme culture we are creating. As a fun aspect, we have included some ‘Meme Dealings’ as Elon says. Wow, this really made it into the final cut of the Newsletter!

Take a look, have fun and let us know if it made you giggle!

👩 WiDESIGN Fest’21 by UMO Design

What’s happening at WiDesign’21:

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

How can you be a part of this?

1. 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.
2. 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.
3. 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 March 27 at 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

Storming the ‘last bastion’: Angst and anger as NFTs claim high-culture status — cointelegraph.com
After Beeple’s $69 million art sale, neither the traditional art world nor crypto will ever be the same.

How to Mine Bitcoin | CoinMarketCap — coinmarketcap.com
While you can’t mine Bitcoin at home anymore, there are still ways that you can get involved in cryptocurrency mining without breaking the bank.

Crypto art isn’t as absurd as it seems — www.fastcompany.com

Why would anyone buy crypto art, let alone spend millions on what’s essentially a link to a JPEG file? For the same reasons, people buy a Picasso: Art is inherently social.

Cryptocurrency Open Patent Alliance — www.opencrypto.org

Empowering Adoption and Advancement of Cryptocurrency Technologies. Open access to patents and freedom from threats on foundational cryptocurrency technologies is necessary for the industry to grow, innovate, and build new products.

Apple Maps now shows COVID-19 vaccination locations — The Verge — www.theverge.com
Apple has added COVID-19 vaccination locations to Apple Maps. Facebook is expanding its COVID Information Center with locations from VaccineFinder, and Google has added a way to message some local pharmacies about vaccines.

Stripe raises new capital, reaching $95 billion valuation ahead of highly anticipated market debut — www.cnbc.com
Stripe has raised a $600 million Series H funding round that boosts its valuation to $95 billion, ahead of what’s become a highly anticipated Wall Street debut.

Squarespace raises $300M at a staggering $10B valuation — TechCrunch — techcrunch.com
Squarespace has raised $300 million in a round of funding that values the company at a staggering $10 billion valuation. New backers include Dragoneer, Tiger Global, D1 Capital Partners, Fidelity Management & Research Company, funds and accounts advised by T. Rowe Price Associates, Inc. and Spruce House. Existing backers Accel and General Atlantic also participated. […]

Inside Facebook Reality Labs: The Next Era of Human-Computer Interaction — tech.fb.com
TL;DR: In today’s post — the first in a series exploring the future of human-computer interaction (HCI) — we’ll begin to unpack the 10-year vision of a contextually-aware, AI-powered interface for augmented reality (AR) glasses that can use the information you choose to share, to infer what you want to do, when you want to […]

Need a better night’s sleep? Meet the new Nest Hub — blog.google
Introducing the second-generation Nest Hub, with everything you loved about the original plus new features designed to help your sleep.

Naming Personalized Playlists at Spotify | Spotify Design — spotify.design
Senior UX Writer, Diane Murphy, walks us through the process the Personalization Team uses to name playlists at Spotify.

Process vs. Practice | Dropbox Design — dropbox.design

Change management is not about writing a bunch of policies about the process; it’s deep design work to establish new operating practices for our teams.

Take a technology self-assessment | Digital Wellbeing | Google — wellbeing.google
Take the technology assessment to understand your relationship with technology, and get tips and tools to help your digital wellbeing.

8 types of graphic design careers to explore (2021) | Dribbble Design Blog — dribbble.com
8 types of graphic design careers to explore (2021)

A roundtable on Richard Hamming — www.notion.so
Four experts discuss the life and belief systems of computer pioneer Richard Hamming.

What Facebook sees in newsletters — Platformer — www.platformer.news
Hint: it’s all about Groups. PLUS: Substack fumbles

Zoom Escaper: new app allows you to leave meetings by creating fake sounds | Life and style | The Guardian — www.theguardian.com
Tool will play sounds so unbearable on your Zoom call that other people will want you to sign off

Google cuts app store fees for developers on first million in annual sales — www.cnbc.com
Google’s app store change will address some of the developer complaints around app stores and their fees, which have come under scrutiny from regulators.

Kazuo Ishiguro on His New Novel ‘Klara and the Sun’ and Imagining A.I. Produced Literature — time.com
The Nobel literature laureate returns with his eighth novel, a futuristic tale of how artificial intelligence will engage with humans

The Benefits of White Label Businesses (and 11 Product Ideas to Get You Started) — www.shopify.com
Get started with ideas for trending white label products that you can sell today.

The Ultimate Guide to the Founding Designer Role | First Round Review — review.firstround.com
We summarized the most tactical, honest pieces of advice from a group of design experts on what it really takes to be a startup’s first design hire — from choosing the right startup to join to excelling in the role and growing your team.

3 problems you’ll face in your second year of remote work (and how to solve them) | Inside Design Blog — www.invisionapp.com
While the next few months may continue to be rough, we’re still all in this together. Here is some of our best advice to help you get through it.

3 Key Takeaways from International Women’s Day 2021 | Inside Intercom — www.intercom.com
It’s more important than ever to create a balanced, equitable workplace. Here are three things we learned from IWD 2021.

Designing the First All-in-One, Wearable Breast Pump | ideo.com — www.ideo.com
Collaborating with the startup team at Willow that reimagined the breast pumping experience

How Swarovski’s rebrand inspired a worldwide “candy-like” store redesign — www.designweek.co.uk
An octagonal update to the crystal company’s swan logo will be accompanied by 28 new store openings and a brand campaign.

Why McDonald’s Failed to Beat Burger King’s Redesign | Marker — marker.medium.com
Compared to its fast food rival’s full rebranding, McDonald’s packaging redesign shows its unwillingness to fully adapt to the times.

Renault unveils a new op art-style logo — www.creativereview.co.uk

Joining a long list of carmakers like BMW, GM, VW etc. ‘digifying’ their visual identities, Renault has introduced a flat, black-and-white interlocking symbol

🐦 Cool Tweets & Threads

In one of the previous issues of the Xabytes Newsletter, I opined that Spotify will have a bigger platform advantage to house a clubhouse like feature compared to Twitter and Facebook being a huge artist-driven audio service. Recently, Twitter Spaces has rolled out to many active users and is doing quite well! Looks like Spotify wants to finally get in on it too, it’s surveying users to know more! Read more about this here.

✨ Meme Dealings

What the hell are we doing here really? Dealing memes, literally dealing memes. The meme economy is booming and we have some hardcore meme-ers in our team who are ready to create and curate memes for us. Read the newsletter from top to bottom to learn more about NFTs influencing Memes and memes conveying a message better than a visual. Is this going to be a new art form?

📖 Book Reads

User Friendly: How the Hidden Rules of Design Are Changing the Way We Live, Work, and Play by Cliff Kuang and Robert Fabricant

The last book I read was Creativity, Inc. by Ed Catmull (with Amy Wallace), it was a great read, thanks for the suggestion. Although it is a few years old, it still was very relevant and gave so much insight into creativity, the process of developing a new age animated Toy story film, Pixar, Disney, Steve Jobs, running a business with tight budgets, balancing creativity with business goals and so much more. A sure shot recommendation.

On to the next book. This book excites me because I found it as a rare find among all the usual design books people recommend. You know the drill — Design of everyday things, Don’t make me think, Hooked etc. While I have read all of those, I was always on the lookout for more book on user experience and this definitely interested me as it ‘decodes the obscure and fascinating journey of user experience and maps the hidden history of the designed world.’

Super pumped to read this, stay tuned for my notes on this book!

🌎 Happening at UMO

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.

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