ILLUSTRATED GUIDE
An attempt to figure out the workshop nature once and for all.
We’ll skip the blah-blah about why workshops are important for product teams. Let’s better play a game. How many canvases on the picture below do you recognize? And which of them have you tried in practice?
Not many design projects run without colorful sticky notes and team exercises on the whiteboard these days. But the number of workshop types scares! Empathy mapping, value proposition, customer journey, personas, business model, design sprint, etc. And these are just several “classic” examples without countless derivations and mixtures.
But I’ve got good news: all workshops are atomic — just like design systems. Anyone can…
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Exploring 26 notable buildings in Lviv, Ukraine
I used to hate Baroque. I always associated it with the corrupt politicians’ perverted taste and fussy villas with overwhelming golden decoration. Recently, I tried to understand Baroque again, and it turned out to be an eye-opening experience. Oh, how wrong I used to be…
Baroque flourished in the 17–18th centuries. It emerged owing to Catholic Church and served as its “brand identity.” Striving to compete with Protestantism, Catholics employed emotion in architecture to better appeal to a broader audience. Baroque was the first European style to spread globally (unlike its predecessors: Romanesque, Gothic, or Renaissance).
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How I tried to figure out ancient architectural styles just walking around the city
Tourists admire Lviv as a whole but rarely understand the value of each piece. Besides, half of the oldest buildings are located outside of the crowded center and don’t get the attention they deserve. So, I’ll give the floor to overlooked sites as well as a few popular ones. Plus, I drew schemes to help you recognize the architectural styles of the past.
Byzantine and Romanesque Period
13th century — High Middle Ages in Europe. A time of the Fourth Crusade and the rise of the Mongol Empire led by Genghis Khan. The largest country in Eastern Europe was Kyivan Rus, an ancestor of…
Freebie included: Miro templates for prioritizing workshops. Originally published in Smashing Magazine
When you’re working on a product, what is more crucial than choosing the right features to develop? However, the exercise often turns into a spectacle of team voting. As a result, decisions change many times down the road. Let’s talk about the pitfalls of popular prioritization techniques and approaches to reducing bias and disagreement.
How familiar is this scenario: the team employs modern decision-making methods and performs all design-thinking rituals, but the result remains guesswork. Or this: Soon after having prioritized all features, the key stakeholders change their mind and you have to plan everything again. …
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Overlooked sites of a non-touristic Ukrainian city
Cherkasy, the center-most city of Ukraine, was founded in the 13th century and had a wooden castle, but now the oldest surviving buildings date back to only the 1850s. Locals don’t perceive Cherkasy as a nice destination, but I’ll show you plenty of sites worth gazing at.
Masterpieces of Horodecki
The city’s most valuable buildings are credited to the talent of Władysław Horodecki (1863–1930), an architect of Polish origin, often called “Ukrainian Gaudi.” He contributed greatly to the architecture of Kyiv, Ukraine’s capital, and designed several buildings in Cherkasy.
Hotel “Slovianskyi”
Our first stop is the hotel “Slovianskyi,” colloquially known as the “Blue Palace.” It…
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Ukrainian western-most city feels the best before sunrise.
I’ve been to Uzhhorod just once before this trip, and it didn’t impress me, but the night setting can change everything. How did we get there so late? Well, it was a conscious yet a bit crazy decision. My fiancée, Oksanka, and I — both wild about exploring new places — wanted to order wedding rings from a Ukrainian jeweler based in Uzhhorod. So, we booked a ride via BlaBlaCar and departed after midnight from Lviv.
We wanted “a real adventure” and didn’t plan to stay at the hotel. This was our plan: departure from Lviv at 1 a.m.; around…
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River ports, factories, and a lab like a spaceship
Vintage industrial facilities always stand out from a modern cityscape: textured brick walls, slim tubes, themed sculptures, coats of arms, arched windows — all these details are magnificent. And definitely, this industrial romantics remains overlooked. During summer, I was exploring non-touristic parts of Berlin in pursuit of industrial beauty.
1. Westhafen
District: Moabit. Founded in 1914, major expansion by 1927. Stations: U9, S41/42 Westhafen. Info: Google Maps, Wikipedia (in German).
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How I was collecting old towers around the city, including a cemetery, prison, and gas plants
Elevated tanks had served as water storages since ancient times, but spread worldwide only in the 19th century when pipe technology became more robust. The beauty of a tower is that it supplies water when you cannot rely on pumps, for example, during an electricity outage. Thank god for the gravity! Many old towers are protected historic sites and even repurposed as libraries, apartments, or offices.
1. Wasserturm Gaswerk Mariendorf
District: Mariendorf. Height: 45 m. Built in 1900. Info: Google Maps, Wikipedia (in German).
USER INTERFACES
How trendy charts infantilize business data. Chinese version.
Snakes, seashells, mountains — this is something we, designers, might draw instead of showing data. Just get me right: creative charts are a fair choice when the goal is to entertain, for example, in a fitness app or video game. But if you aim to inform decisions, fanciness is not going to work. We’ll explore seven visual approaches incompatible with business needs and will find robust alternatives.
1. “Snakes”
Have you ever seen a CRM or ERP dashboard design that features juicy 3D tubes as graphs? I call this approach “snakes.”
Although such visualizations might seem visually appealing, they are helpless against…
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A day on Berlin’s magnificent Pfaueninsel
Berlin has 2500 parks, but tourists and locals often limit themselves to the most popular ones like Tiergarten or Charlottenburg. I don’t know about you, folks, but I got bored after two-three visits and decided to search for something new — and found Pfaueninsel.
This journey started on the upper floor of an empty double-decker #218 coursing from the station Wannsee to Pfaueninsel ferry. My traditionally early wake-up was worth it more than usual: I caught the first trip of the bus. Just imagine the first-person view and passing-by joggers and cyclists waving hello to me and the driver.
Slava Shestopalov
Design Manager at Eleks Berlin eleks.com, public speaker, author of the 5 a.m. Magazine medium.com/5-a-m 🇺🇦🇩🇪
