April 2025: Studio Twentyone Newsletter
Thanks to SXSW & Bitcoin week at the newly-renamed Bitcoin Park Austin, ABDC was only a couple weeks after the last one. Not a ton of time to gather new links & news, so short and sweet again, this time.
- SAHIL
Studio Twentyone Show #6 w/ Stephen DeLorme
Last month I published episode 6 with Stephen DeLorme, a designer at Voltage.
You can watch on YouTube, Apple Podcasts, or subscribe wherever you get your podcasts (click on the Twitter thread below).
OpenSecret: New brand identity
OpenSecret, pivot from Mutiny Wallet, recently launched a new brand identity in partnership with Finite Supply, Skyler’s design agency. I think everything comes together really well, from the typography to the bold color choices to the little motifs & accents (see the “plus” icons).
The website has some nice, simple illustrations that seem very flexible and can be scaled easily to future icons. I feel like Skyler did a great job building a brand that can evolve with OpenSecret for some time!
Joshua joins Fold as Head of Design
Congrats to Joshua, who recently joined Fold as Head of Design! He was previously head of design at Strike, and championed their redesign and rebrand. He was also kind enough to be a guest at an Austin Bitcoin Design Club a year ago-ish, around the time of the Strike rebrand, to walk through many of the key decisions made.
Linear: Balancing vision and customer feedback
Linear recently wrote this great piece on a new feature they built called “Customer Requests”. More important than the feature announcement was the context behind it. In this piece, Sagan from Linear talks about finding a balance between building based on direct customer feedback and the builder’s intuition.
He talks about how customer feedback is critical, but you rarely want to take it literally. “Users rarely articulate their core problems directly”: you need to use your product intuition and read between the lines to build what they really need. That’s our job.
This reminds me of a quote (can’t remember who to attribute to), something along the lines of “its the customer’s job to bring the problems, and its our job to bring the solutions”. We often don’t want to take their solution suggestions at face value, or we risk building a bloated product that’s just a mess of feature requests.
“Develop your product intuition by immersing yourself in customer feedback while trusting your ability to see patterns and needs they cannot articulate. Treat customer requests as input, not instructions.”
Beautifully put.
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Austin Bitcoin Design Club
ABDC is a monthly gathering of bitcoiners, designers, engineers, and more, from all walks of life. We are building a space for fostering connections, idea development, and most importantly creating a strong sense of a design community from which we may all draw support.
RSVP for the next meetup using the link here: https://www.meetup.com/austin-bitcoin-design-club/
Austin Bitcoin Design Club: recorded!
This is the first time we recorded an edition of ABDC. This was during Bitcoin Week in March, and was a great time. Paul was out of town, so we had special guest host Nate from Zaprite! Give it a watch, and hopefully you can make it out to a live session sometime.
Writing useful error messages
This is a useful post reminding how to write useful error messages that don’t blame the user. The note about “inappropriate tone” makes sense - I’ve always found it frustrating when something goes wrong and the app I’m using gets too cute with me. But I guess that depends on the brand voice & tone of the product. I’d be much more OK with Cash App going “whoops”, than Unchained, for example.
Nate, guest co-host of ABDC, also pointed out how this is a similar structure to colored diagrams of a bitcoin transaction. It’s a useful way of breaking down and understanding a structure!
See you next month!
Thanks for reading. Let me know what you think on Twitter or Nostr. Feedback is welcome!
Love u,
- SAHIL