Delightful Reveal #25

“Gushers are just American mochi.”

What we did

• Converting Universal Analytics to Google Analytics 4 in advance of a July 1 deadline. 😅
• Kicked off a strategic branding initiative with some urgent short-term priorities and long-term implications for our client’s ecosystem of brands.
• Made some early design concepts and work on a new logo system for a client that has a suite of related products.
• Started up a marketing website design again to get campaign staff to purchase software.
• Pitched an internal experiment to create a coffee brand to raise funds for a cause TBA later.
• Drafted a summative (end-to-end) usability test plan to evaluate a majority of our system’s capabilities with representative users.
• Collated tangential findings from prior research for further review.
• Mentally prepared for starting to teach next week.
• Onboarding a new designer on our team! Welcome Valenzia!
• Onboarded a new designer and developer onto an existing project.
• Visited a potential client on-site and got to learn first-hand about their pain points with their current tech workflow.
• Started working on the Flagrant design portfolio pages and subpages.
• Enhanced existing employee ‘Shift’ feature allowing shift supervisors to receive notifications when shifts complete inspections.
• Wrapped up a 16-month client engagement.

What we’re reading:

• Rappers, sorted by the size of their vocabulary by Matt Daniels
• Muscle Men And The End Of Objective Reality by Ryan Broderick
• “Naming things” by Vicki Boykis
• The Song of Achilles by Melissa Miller
• Why Chatbots Are Not the Future by Amelia Wattenberger
• Qualitative Literacy: A Guide to Evaluating Ethnographic and Interview Research by Mario Luis Small and Jessica McCrory Calarco
• Handbook of Usability Testing: How to Plan, Design, and Conduct Effective Tests by Jeffrey Rubin and Dana Chisnell
• Once the Shore by Paul Yoon
• About wayfinding design systems: Wayfinding at Schipol, Massimo Vignelli’s NYC Subway system, Similar Systems, Different Info Design Decisions

What we’re watching:

• Bloodhounds on Netflix
• The Good Place
• Warrior on Max
• Cinema Therapy youtube
• I Think You Should Leave on Netflix
• A really weird Orson Welles + Paul Newman movie based on Faulkner stories, The Long Hot Summer
• Are you getting these phrases wrong too? – EGGCORNS
• Well There’s Your Problem – Episode 124: Berlin-Brandenburg Airport about the comedy of errors that led to a multi-billion dollar airport and 14 years of construction 

What we’re listening to:

• Shinee - Hard (their newest album)
• Atlas Obscura podcast: The Italian War on Pasta, about fascists trying to kill pasta
• Atlas Obscura podcast: Hunga Tonga-Hunga Ha’apai, about a volcanic island that doesn’t exist anymore
• Atlas Obscura podcast: Museum of Quackery and Medical Fraud
• Bruno Major - Columbo (Visualizer)
• [Sunny War - “Whole” [Official Audio]](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O7GlPPDZp_A)

What we’re interested in:

• Pikmin 4
• Oscilloscopes 
• Toxicology and poison, or: the long human history of putting questionable things in our mouths to see whether we feel a little dead afterward
• Indiana Jones: Dial of Destiny

• [Dune: Part Two

  Official Trailer 2](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_YUzQa_1RCE)

• Playing the password game

What we’re struggling with:

• Strep Throat
• The Google sign-in schedule meaning I get signed out in the middle of editing this doc every week
• Zoom not allowing me to click links
• Heat and humidity
• 120°F heat index, and 95°F heat at 9pm #swamplife
• Air Quality
• The Supreme Court

What we’re buying:

• Book: Draplin Design Co.: Pretty Much Everything
• Book: Principles of Logo Design: A Practical Guide to Creating Effective Signs, Symbols, and Icons
• Book: Airport Wayfinding by Heike Nehl
• Depression glass (and lead test kits)
• Book: Naming Things
• A flight to Costa Rica! A hotel room in Vienna! TRAVEL THINGS
• A nicer ceiling light from IKEA

What we’re celebrating:

• No more mosquitoes indoors
• No more raccoon poop on the porch
• Wrapping up my first week of work 
• Finishing a corgi puzzle that had lots of corgi butts 

If you’re looking for a team to help you discover the right thing to build and help you build it, get in touch.