I agree, pedigree doesn't have a 1 to 1 relationship with skill, but a couple other things are probably important to keep in mind.

A lot of these big tech companies at this point don't really have a concept of "junior designer" so there is a difference between the average base level compared to smaller places. At bigger places, to get lower level design roles, you're often looking at candidates with minimum 5-7 years experience already.

Then I think scale of company more often than not speaks to scale of problems. A designer working at a place where their work affects tens of millions of users for instance is building skills at a much different rate and capacity than a designer of similar tenure, say, working at a small agency with local clients. I think knowing that someone has had to design solutions for bigger problems makes me feel more confident in the advice they're giving.

Good advice can come from anywhere, but I think people like to attach caliber and scale of work when it comes to advice they'd prefer to follow.

What's the difference between the flowchart tool and the mind maps tool? It seems like both uses would generally benefit from the same functionality.

Am I crazy, or does every illustration in this article have more than 4 colors?

I don't know, I think it's worth noting that paid impressions are no substitute for engaging content. Looking at your account, all of your thumbs are promoting UI kits for Figma. They're not new or inspiring designs. Maybe it's worth considering that the primary use case for users on Dribbble isn't to shop for UI kits, and that's why your click-through rate is so low.

Totally agree, I felt the same way. I think humans should have the capacity to understand that a symbol with 6 colors can adequately represent more than 6 concepts. The rainbow itself is supposed to be an overarching symbol for inclusivity. It's not supposed to act as the literal representation of an enormous acronym.

This is my thought exactly. It seems to come in cycles, but every so often designers notice how far to one side design has gone towards usability and away from "art" and they suddenly feel like they aren't creative people anymore. But for me it's such a selfish spin on why you're designing, because ultimately your main goal should always be to help the user to accomplish their task, and that really shouldn't be compromised just because a designer wants to try some new layout or pattern that essentially discriminates against users who aren't super savvy and can't pick up quickly on things that aren't standard and discoverable. And then there's accessibility, which doesn't get a mention in this article. What you don't see in a lot of these "outside of the box" designs is a framework that doesn't support screen readers or alternative navigation methods in a logical manner because the markup has to be non-standard to match the non-standard layout, making the experiences completely unusable for people with different levels of access.

I feel like this makes a lot of assumptions about how everyone is executing the Design Sprint methodology. In reference to coming up with solutions for multiple personas or features, the author writes, "To add additional content, you'll have to do several Design Sprints." That's a self-imposed limitation, really. You could organize your sprint such that one group tackles one persona, and another group tackles another, and so on. This even helps for internally validating between the groups on top of validating with users on the last day. There are examples of sprints being run with dozens of participants, allowing them to tackle the gamut of use cases while all benefiting from being on the same page when it comes to initial research, focus, and stakeholder buy-in. Ultimately, it's a framework that's meant to be flexible, not exhaustive. Don't have a "style guide" for visual execution? Not a problem. The goal is to come up with validated solutions quickly and cheaply, not design and build a launch-ready product. Knowing that going in, of course it doesn't suit your needs if your need is to have final designs done in a week.

Just a heads up, a lot of the text on this page is inaccessible. The yellow green headline on the blue background is below minimum contrast. Same for all white text on that blue color.

Ha, it's true, that's basically what I've come down to, but it gets harder when you're designing for a brand. If their illustration guidelines are something like grayscale with pops of color, how do I make sure their illustrations will show up on screen, ya know?

Completely. It looks more like a lifestyle blog than it does an attempt to share design work. You can't even see the work most of the time and every shot becomes exactly the same. I'm not sure as a designer why I'd want to follow that Instagram.