High Five #13 - Speeding up the design process 🏎

[4 min] How to enjoy the design craft and keep efficiency in mind

Hey,

What would it look like if you could design your ideal design process?

Tricky question, I know. I asked it myself earlier this year as I started freelancing again. I needed a "bigger review" of my process before I jumped back into daily hands-on design work.

Having a few more years of experience since the last time I ran a similar setup, I felt it'd be a good time to look into how I approach design projects and check for areas to improve.

We all know it. Your process can sometimes feel chaotic, slow, or ineffective. It obviously varies from project to project, but it's good to have a good "baseline" you can refer to. My goal with the review was to redefine what this "baseline" means for me and how I can better support it by adding new ideas.

Not sure how you do things, but for me, I found that besides things I do pretty well, I lack behind in the following areas:

• It usually took me a while to search, curate, and categorize visual inspiration, examples, or resources.

• I often reinvent the wheel, design repetitive things from scratch, and don't focus on reusability that much.

• Some parts of my process could be sped up by using a UI kit/start file or proven solutions that are already validated.

• I save a lot of know-how, but I won't categorize it or make it easily searchable.

Great news for all of us. As I found later, those are relatively easy to fix. Here's how I plan to address them:

1. 🗂 Inspiration Library - I have spent a few months perfecting my inspiration library in Eagle (I wrote about it here). The goal is to store anything visual you can quickly search and filter. It's a starting base for all mood boards, explorations, or to quickly show someone an example of what you mean. I made a habit of keeping it fresh with weekly updates and deleting what was no longer valuable.

2. 📐 Start file in Figma - A single file with a "lightweight" combination of pre-defined styles, colors, grids, sizes, or components that can help kick off a project without worrying about the "basics.” It's simple as a "Right click -> Duplicate" type of thing right in Figma to help you speed up the initial stage of the process. (btw. It can be linked with the UI library as well).

3. 🧩 UI library - I'm also building my UI library with reusable screens, layouts, components, or even presentation slides connected to the start file. It's called "Base," and its purpose is to help me speed up the wireframing and conceptual phases of the process. I don't want to work on repetitive components from scratch but rather spend energy on unique parts.

4. 📖 Knowledge base in Notion - Links, articles, notes, tweets, docs, and more. It all gets stored and categorized by topics in my KB. It's part of my bigger "second brain" operating system in Notion and something I use daily. It almost feels like your own Google Search. You're only a few clicks away from what you may need to get the work done or refresh your memory about what you once saved.

When I first started looking into these, I didn't consider how much fun you can have with the design process if you truly enjoy the craft. I missed it!

Obviously, I knew that improving on these things would make my life easier. But then I realized it's not the speed itself I'm optimizing for. It's doing things more efficiently and making them more fun.

I love chasing new inspiration every morning, perfecting the start file for the next project in line, updating the UI library with new screens and layouts, and constantly educating myself with new articles I save in the knowledge base.

It feels like a great vision for running a successful freelance business, and I can confirm that so far, it’s going pretty well!

Have a great week, and talk again soon!

A.

PS: Many of you may ask if the source file, UI libraries, or even the inspiration board in Eagle would be shareable. The answer is YES. But I want to test those things for a bit myself before I offer them publicly. I don't want to ship something that is "half-baked."

PPS: These tips are also scalable on the team level. A group could quickly adapt these approaches to split responsibilities and make it work (and fun) for all.

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Links & inspiration

Stuff I'm currently digging:

💻 Website - Cash App - New landing page redesign with custom 3D scenes. I like the QR code scanning to get the app.

💻 Website - Scale AI - I love the clean design and “little big details” (hovers on 3D components, custom menu, and quick feature previews.

🎙 Podcast - Rich Roll Podcast w/ Casey Neistat - Happy to see Casey back in NYC! In this episode, he goes pretty deep into multiple topics. I'm quite surprised.

🛠 Tool - iA Presenter - You probably know iA Writer (I use it for these emails). There is a similar tool coming for creating presentations.

⭐️ Branding - 5 Star - Brilliant idea and ad by Ogilvy. Can’t unsee this now.