I’m assuming this is an April Fools joke. Or is this real?

It's a tough question, because things are changing every day.

I'm a designer in the insurance industry, and honestly, despite everyone working from home and everything shutting down, my team and my work has gone up, not down. I expect it's going to stay steady for a while. Projects that are already active, that involve customers working on completely digital products will probably stay steady or slow down a little.

I think over time, as companies adapt to the new reality of soooo many people stuck at home, they're going to figure out ways to sell their products to those people And the companies employing those people are going to figure out ways to make it work. As we designers learn these new rules of engagement, we'll hopefully figure out how to adapt to them and get new work, or keep our existing projects going a little bit longer.

In the meantime, we'll have to figure out a way to help those in our design community that are less fortunate and don't have the luxury of a steady job.

This is fantastic. Another fantastic resource is the Scrimba.com online interactive tutorial site. The instructors are amazing and the ability to literally pause the video and mess with the code the instructor just typed in the video blew my mind.

Here’s the Design Details podcast episode where they talk about their concerns about illustrators devaluing illustration by giving their work away for free: https://overcast.fm/+EPsK06yBg

Flashing animation alert! If you’re sensitive to flashing lights and might suffer from seizures, please don’t click the link.

Otherwise, it’s an interesting idea. A little hard to evaluate because of the speed of the animations. Also, Brutalist design. I guess I’m too old to appreciate it. :-)

Ia it weird that whenever I see illustrators giving away artwork for free, my knee jerk reaction is “No! Don’t do it! You’ll devalue illustration.”

Although in this case, the artwork is offbeat enough, I don’t see a lot of people taking advantage of this.

There was an interview a few months ago on The Design Details podcast with a couple of Dropbox illustrators where they explained why giving away illustrations for free was problematic.

The funny thing is, the people on my team are genuinely some of the most caring people I've met. However, there is enormous pressure to release products faster. A lot of people on my team easily put in 60-70 hours a week, every week. So they fall back to what they're comfortable with, relying on intuition rather than observation. :-(

But you are right. It might not be the right place for me. :-\

Thank you. What you said in 1. and 2., that makes a lot of sense. I hadn't looked at it from that perspective. And I love what you said about user research being risk management. I simply had not approached UX research from that angle. But it might just help me sell the value of user research, where ever I go next.

Wow. Thank you all for the incredibly thoughtful comments. I honestly wasn't expecting any comments on this post. I just needed to let it out so I could give form to what I was feeling.

Thank you Wouter for your comment. What you said -- "user research is risk management" -- I've never thought of UX that way. But it makes so much sense.

You guys rock. Seriously rock. Thank you for everything you've said.