In 2020, we worked with AllThingsSmall to design their online magazine, FiftyTwo, an online long-form journalism platform publishing one story a week from the Indian subcontinent.
written in collaboration with Tanya George
The prefix long in long-form was defined fluidly. The shortest long-form article would be 6,000 words, while the upper limit could be as long as…you’d better sit down for this…30,000 words. A throwback to the heydays of magazines and supplements where one would indulgently spend time with the editorials, FiftyTwo aimed to modernize a classic, in-depth journalism and writing style.
We expected a fairly cosmopolitan reader to interact with the text for extended periods of time and we needed to create a typographic language that would build a rich and distinct hierarchy of titles…
Thanks!! This made my day (and of everyone in the team)!
UX writing and research are at the core of what we do, not add-ons.
Written in collaboration with Manaal, our UX Researcher, Copywriter, and in-house DJ
At 3 Sided Coin, our engagement model is on a time and material basis. For the majority* of our projects, we assign a design team that consists of:
- UX researcher [part-time]
- Creative head-designer who also handles client communications [part-time]
- UX & UI designer [full-time]
- UX writer [part-time]
* We have some projects that focus solely on research.
Often, when clients see this team structure, it is not apparent to them why we have multiple people for what they consider to be one person’s job. …
I started 3 Sided Coin a little more than 10 years ago after losing my job during the 2008–09 subprime recession.
I lost my job in 2009 and started freelancing as a designer from a small room in my parents’ home. I didn’t know how to design interfaces before that. I had to pick HTML/CSS and started designing websites in the browser because my laptop couldn’t run Photoshop well, which was extremely expensive anyway.
After almost a year of freelancing, I formed 3 Sided Coin as a company. In the initial years, the company didn’t make any money at all. We took up projects worth $200-$500. …
A living list of online and offline tools I use for typography
*Updated —10 July, 2020
Scratch my own itch
There is no real story behind this post. Over the years, I have collected a lot of bookmarks across different browsers and apps. While cleaning up I realised there was a Medium post waiting to emerge out of this collection. This one (hopefully the first of many if I have the time and motivation 😝) focuses on resources and tools to create great typography for products.
Selecting typefaces
Some reading before selecting typefaces for your next…
Case-study for WebEngage’s marketing automation product design
Read this article in Chinese, translated by jeremy0417 — https://designtongue.me/data-heavy-ui-design/
If you want to translate this in other language(s), feel free to do so with proper attribution and let me know so I can include your link here.
Onwards!
WebEngage is a marketing automation platform that operates out of Mumbai and US. They service over 38,000 happy customers engage 180+ million users monthly. Their growth demanded they expand to markets in US and Europe.
WebEngage came to us with a clear road ahead charted out. Their use-cases were elaborate and the product offered extensive features. They were taking a different…
You won’t believe the 2nd one! 😛
Whatsapp is possibly the top chat app in India with over 70 million users. But the experience leaves little to the user’s choice and goes more with forceful defaults.
Prologue
For a lot of people in India, Facebook and Whatsapp are the rites of passage to onboard the internet. These are among the first few apps users with no or little exposure to computers learn to use on their smartphones. More often than not, these are the only two apps they ever use, apart from the phone app itself (Is that still a thing?!)
