For as long as I can remember, Creative Market has used Museo Sans as it’s main typeface. In fact, if I look back, way back into the archives, Museo was indeed used in some of the original mocks!

If you’ve followed me for a while now, you may remember when I lamented about the lack of soul in web design over 4 years ago. It’s no coincidence now that when our team at Creative Market was looking to shape an acronym to help us remember our newly defined design principles, I came back to this word, soul.

The secondary definition of soul is:

soul /sōl/ noun — the essence or embodiment of a specified quality

How meta of us.

It Starts With Our Principles

Gerren Lamson did an amazing job detailing out our principles, of which you can dig into here, but I’ll briefly list them here as well. …

Hi. I’m Noah and I’m on the Product Design team at Creative Market. The product I work on is a website that supports tens of thousands of independent creatives, giving them a marketplace to sell their creative assets. In short, we help creators around the world turn passion into opportunity. It’s one of the most rewarding products I’ve ever worked on. If you’ve never checked it out before, I encourage you to do so. Ok, let’s talk about how a little something we call the UX Plan changed our product design process for the better.

Product Design Is Hard

Product design is hard. Right?! Some of you are probably like product design isn’t hard. I could design that stuff I see on Dribbble. I can do product design. I design products in my sleep. I’m a unicorn. Yeah, yeah I hear ya. Pixels are easy, but pixels are the last thing you should think about when you’re doing product design. The challenge of making sure that every instance and action has been considered, every user journey has been thought through, and the entire experience fits in with existing design patterns, that product design starts with writing — in Dropbox Paper. …

A few weeks ago Dustin Senos shared an idea: creating dialog between newcomers and people working in the tech industry. The idea became known as Out of Office Hours. If you haven’t read Dustin’s original post on the impetus behind the idea, take a moment to do that before you read on.

All caught up? Good!

Why I Volunteered

I signed up for a number of reasons of which I could write long boring essay’s about and maybe turn them into think pieces with subtle jabs at mobile phones and millennials, but I’ll just summarize them instead to save us both the pain.

Reason #1:
I had read Jacob’s original tweet storm and had honestly been thinking about just tweeting that I had some time to talk if anyone was interested. …

This must be what it feels like to rob a bank. I’m walking as slow and steady as possible muttering “Be cool” to myself as I make my way to my pickup. Have I been spotted? Is that guy looking at me? Man, these guitars are getting heavy.

Thirty minutes prior I was rummaging through a garage full of tools, somewhat organized on racks, in a so-so neighborhood of the East Bay. I came looking for tools. Not that I had a need for them, but more for the idea of them. Every man needs tools, so I came to get mine for cheap. I picked up a skill-saw and a belt sander when I noticed a toolbox sitting in the corner. I popped it open to find a collection of wrenches and screwdrivers along with a nice torque wrench. …