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FigJam is an online whiteboard tool made by the creators of Figma. A bit more straightforward than Miro, it’s a great tool for ideating and brainstorming with your team and I’ve been using it a lot in the last few months.
This is just a small collection of templates and diagrams that I created for FigJam. If you are a Figma user, please feel free to take a look and duplicate them if they work for you too.
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Firefox has been my default browser for the last few years, but recently I’ve been getting tired and frustrated with the direction it’s taking. There are design issues like those new disconnected tabs that irritate me. The lack of support for Progressive Web Apps is also a big issue: I might be part of a minority of users, but I use PWA for work all the time. Even the new design tools, like Figma or Miro, are web-based! And then we also have several controversies like this one.
The good news is that there are so many great options out there! And after testing a few browsers, I think I’m making Vivaldi my new daily driver.
Vivaldi is a browser created by some former employees of Opera (Opera was bought by a Chinese corporation in 2016), and it shares the same vision: plenty of options and features for power users, but flexible enough to accommodate beginners too. Some other things I like:
It’s 2022 and there’s probably room only for three players in the browsers war (Google, Apple, and Microsoft), but I’d love to see Vivaldi gain some traction.
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Some personal news. After more than six years working at Goldstar Events, last October I joined Trimble. Goldstar was home but I felt it was time to try new things. Trimble is an international company specialized in products (hardware and software) used in Construction, Civil Engineering, Transportation, Agriculture, Geospatial, and other industries.
I’m working at the construction division, helping companies manage projects and human resources. This is a new industry for me and a challenge, and I’m also excited to be part of a big and diverse design team with a lot of talent. My goal is to keep learning and growing as a designer, and I’m happy to say that I think I found the perfect place for that.
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21TB of GitHub’s public repositories have been printed in film and buried in the Arctic, so they can last a thousand years. And you know what? Since this blog is hosted in GitHub, it has been included too! I guess now I don’t have to worry about backups for a while…
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In 2010 I was living in an apartment in Valencia and working from home, something not that common back then. But I didn’t like it, at all. My work day wouldn’t end until 6 or 7 or 8 pm, and I decided that working from home wasn’t for me because I needed to put some boundaries between my job and my personal life.
And here we are now, in 2020, in the middle of this horrific pandemic. I’ve been working from home since mid March and I have the feeling this is going to last a long time. Do I love this? Well, not really, but I’m doing a lot better. I have a 9 to 5 schedule that I follow strictly and my productivity has been more than acceptable. The first days were more difficult because I didn’t have a dedicated office room at home, but I ended up with a pretty decent setup… in the laundry room. Let me show you.
I borrowed an LG 34” ultrawide monitor and a Herman Miller Sayl chair from work, and after a bit of tinkering I managed to install a wired internet connection. I also use my Sony MDR-V6 headphones and a cheap webcam that I bought on Amazon because all the Logitech ones are currently sold out. It’s a comfortable spot and that laundry room has great natural lighting. My only issue is having the washing machine and dryer in the background of my zoom calls!
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A whole industry trying to figure out how to make live entertainment work, and here comes Wayne Coyne and The Flaming Lips with this thing he’s been doing for 20 years. Genius!
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Have you ever read a reference book and thought “Welp, this could have been a Medium article”? If that’s the case, some new online services offer a solution for this: book summaries that promise to give you the take-aways and nothing else. I tried getAbstract and I found it pretty useful, but of course sometimes you will want to read the full book.
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Bustamante Perkins, el documental sobre la vida del músico valenciano Julio Bustamante, está disponible en Vimeo gratis. Julio, además de ser una figura fundamental de la música popular valenciana de los 70-80, es un personaje muy singular. Recomendable.
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The Friends of Rachel Worth was the second Go-Betweens album I bought back in 2000. A year before, I discovered this Australian band thanks to a compilation CD called Bellavista Terrace, and they immediately became one of my favorite bands ever.
Last week I was listening to this album for the first time in a long time while at work, and after doing some quick online research, I discovered it was recorded in Portland, only a few blocks away from my office, and Forster and McLennan were joined in the studio by Sleater-Kinney! Then I thought of how random it is that so many of the albums I loved in the early 2000s were produced in the Pacific Northwest and how I ended up living here almost 20 years later.
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Frog Design is turning 50 and they have put together an exhibit of iconic designs. If you’re not in the Bay Area (I’m not), you can always take a look at this online gallery.