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For press releases, advertiser requests, or similar sales campaigns you’re sending a small batch of, usually cold, emails out with a specific ask. Finding potential recipients, writing an email that’s helpful, and tracking the results doesn’t need to take all day or be painful. I’ve watched my fellow product people struggle with the pitfalls of outbound; spend all day trying to find emails, copy and pasting boring boilerplate copy, and then never following up. By stringing together Clearbit Connect, Google Sheets, and Streak, you can knock out these outbound projects super quickly, personalize them, and track progress through a funnel. I’ll walk you through exactly how it works using my most recent campaign, a sponsorship request for Hack Design. Researching for the right audience First up, you’re looking for the most likely people to be interested. For a press launch, that may be who frequently cover products in that space. In our example, Hack Design’s sponsor list, I was quickly able to look at who else was sponsoring comparable websites. For me, that meant researching the advertisers on Offscreen, Sidebar, Dribbble, recent design conferences and podcasts. It’s super simple to save your research and move on to finding the right people at those companies. Add companies to your list Start a Google Sheet with the column name Company. Research the companies most relevant to your outbound campaign. Great places to look are Angel List, Product Hunt, job boards (to see who is hiring in a space), Crunchbase, etc. Anywhere that let’s your group and filter through relevant companies. Add the company name to your list. Finding anyone’s email in seconds Now that you have a list of potential companies, let’s find the emails for the best people to talk to there. For my Hack Design list, I was lucky and had about a dozen sponsors from previous years. However, since we haven’t accepted sponsorship in over a year, a lot of my contacts at those companies were out of date. This process made it trivial to find the new people in those roles and be able to reach out. Get the right contacts from Clearbit Connect Add the column names Email and Full Name to your Google Sheet. Install Clearbit Connect if you haven’t already. This is the secret sauce that will allow you to find anyone’s email, for free. Connect does have a limit but for small batches, you shouldn’t have any problems. Disclosure: I’m a small-time investor in Clearbit. In Gmail, hit the Clearbit button in the top nav and then press Find email. Yep, it’s really that easy. You must start with the company and then narrow down by name or title. Copy and paste that into your Google Sheet. More coming soon Next up we’ll write our email and learn how to quickly customize every single one of them. This article is part one of a three part series, released weekly. Subscribe to get access first.
The hanging-punctuation property aims at giving web web designers a finer grained control over typography on the web. The idea behind hanging punctuation is to put some punctuation characters from start (or to a lesser extend at the end) of text elements “outside” of the box in order to preserve the reading flow. blockquote p { hanging-punctuation: first; } Since it only applies to quote marks, you can avoid single purpose classes and trust that your quotes will hang everywhere. Chrome hasn’t yet implemented the hanging-punctuation property, but it works perfectly in Safari. Typeset.js is an HTML pre-processor that adds a lot more functionality and will allow you to get cross browser compatibility.
Live every week like it’s Taco Week. Last year’s articles are now up on Medium.
Full-screen gif mayhem. Worked on this one day last year with CH Albach in order to show it off for a Halloween party. Since the domain is expiring, I’d prefer it live on in the lab. It was truly ahead of it’s time, but now Cochlea and Giphy GJ have surpassed it’s meager feature list. Let me know if you have any feature requests.
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And by LLMS I mean: (L)ots of (L)ittle ht(M)l page(S). I recently shipped some updates to my blog. Through the design/development process, I had some insights which made me question my knee-jerk reaction to building pieces of a page as JS-powered interactions on top of the existing document. With cross-document view transitions getting broader and broader support, I’m realizing that building in-page, progressively-enhanced interactions is more work than simply building two HTML pages and linking them. I’m calling this approach “lots of little HTML pages” in my head. As I find myself trying to build progressively-enhanced features with JavaScript — like a fly-out navigation menu, or an on-page search, or filtering content — I stop and ask myself: “Can I build this as a separate HTML page triggered by a link, rather than JavaScript-injected content built from a button?” I kinda love the results. I build separate, small HTML pages for each “interaction” I want, then I let CSS transitions take over and I get something that feels better than its JS counterpart for way less work. Allow me two quick examples. Example 1: Filtering Working on my homepage, I found myself wanting a list of posts filtered by some kind of criteria, like: The most recent posts The ones being trafficked the most The ones that’ve had lots of Hacker News traffic in the past My first impulse was to have a list of posts you can filter with JavaScript. But the more I built it, the more complicated it got. Each “list” of posts needed a slightly different set of data. And each one had a different sort order. What I thought was going to be “stick a bunch of <li>s in the DOM, and show hide some based on the current filter” turned into lots of data-x attributes, per-list sorting logic, etc. I realized quickly this wasn’t a trivial, progressively-enhanced feature. I didn’t want to write a bunch of client-side JavaScript for what would take me seconds to write on “the server” (my static site generator). Then I thought: Why don’t I just do this with my static site generator? Each filter can be its own, separate HTML page, and with CSS view transitions I’ll get a nice transition effect for free! Minutes later I had it all working — mostly, I had to learn a few small things about aspect ratio in transitions — plus I had fancy transitions between “tabs” for free! This really feels like a game-changer for simple sites. If you can keep your site simple, it’s easier to build traditional, JavaScript-powered on-page interactions as small, linked HTML pages. Example 2: Navigation This got me thinking: maybe I should do the same thing for my navigation? Usually I think “Ok, so I’ll have a hamburger icon with a bunch of navigational elements in it, and when it’s clicked you gotta reveal it, etc." And I thought, “What if it’s just a new HTML page?”[1] Because I’m using a static site generator, it’s really easy to create a new HTML page. A few minutes later and I had it. No client-side JS required. You navigate to the “Menu” and you get a page of options, with an “x” to simulate closing the menu and going back to where you were. I liked it so much for my navigation, I did the same thing with search. Clicking the icon doesn’t use JavaScript to inject new markup and animate things on screen. Nope. It’s just a link to a new page with CSS supporting a cross-document view transition. Granted, there are some trade-offs to this approach. But on the whole, I really like it. It was so easy to build and I know it’s going to be incredibly easy to maintain! I think this is a good example of leveraging the grain of the web. It’s really easy to build a simple website when you can shift your perspective to viewing on-page interactivity as simple HTML page navigations powered by cross document CSS transitions (rather than doing all of that as client-side JS). Jason Bradberry has a neat article that’s tangential to this idea over at Piccalil. It’s more from the design standpoint, but functionally it could work pretty much the same as this: your “menu” or “navigation” is its own page. ⏎ Email · Mastodon · Bluesky
Alexandra Pyzhik is an interior designer from Astana, co-founder of the design studio “A-Studio”, organized in 2009. Alexandra’s main specialization...
Weekly curated resources for designers — thinkers and makers.
Designforth Interiors created a functional and flexible office space in Indore for Avizva, focusing on spatial optimization, collaboration, and cultural...
In her best-selling book, Living Well By Design, Melissa Penfold addressed the basics of interior decorating. Now she turns her attention to demonstrating what a powerful force design can be in boosting our physical and emotional well-being in her newest book, ‘Natural Living By Design’, Vendome Press, launches in April and available for Preorder now, Continue Reading The post HAVE YOU PREORDERED YOUR COPY OF MELISSA’S NEW BOOK YET? first appeared on Melissa Penfold. The post HAVE YOU PREORDERED YOUR COPY OF MELISSA’S NEW BOOK YET? appeared first on Melissa Penfold.
