Documents & videos

First of all, FOSDEM is coming up tomorrow at 11:10am UTC, check it out. Johns and I will present on supporting open design in Bitcoin over the last year.

As for this week, feels like I did two things - write documents and make videos. Lots of planning and coordination happening.

Let’s start with the design guide. We’ll launch the V2 next Wednesday. The last issue is being wrapped up today and the crew started preparing the launch (via newsletter, Twitter thread, Medium post, Bitcoin Magazine article, and community call). This has been 7 months in the making and will be great to wrap up and celebrate. There’s still plenty of refinement to do, and probably always will be, but we finished what we set out at the start and it’s a great time to take a breather and celebrate a little. Super excited about this and proud of the whole group who made this happen.

In this weeks Wallet Design Improvement Call, we talked directly to Hampus, the creator of Blixt. Original creators obviously have a huge influence on their products, both consciously and unconsciously. Hearing their vision and asking lots of questions is a big help in understanding how to best support a project. It’s a really good fit. Hampus really cares about UX, support cutting-edge Lightning features, and wants design help. A really great match for what we are trying to do.

Here’s a brief update on responsive layout logic for the Bitcoin Core App. These videos are essentially also a type of design documentation. Much easier to watch a 5-minute video and hear things explained and visually laid out, than extrapolating them from Figma or code, or reading long texts that explain layout rules and piecing the system together in your head.

This weeks call was about application settings. Man, it’s complicated to identify the right defaults and user options if you want to do it right.

Thursday night I was live with Conor on the Bitcoin Developers Twitch channel for a quick workshop on using the Bitcoin UI Kit to prototype a Lightning Tip Jar feature (inspired by this bounty by the HRF).

And here’s a video you should absolutely not watch. Inspired by Andrew Chow streaming 3-4 hour coding sessions on Twitch, I messed around with live streaming some design work (on Satoshi symbols - as requested). Definitely something to get used to, as live design is only interesting when the designer also clearly lays out their thought process verbally. Was a fun experiment, might do it again. Did not manage to finalize the Sat symbol though, that requires some extremely boring minor tweaks that I would not expect anyone to enjoy watching.

Next week will be about the guide V2 launch, as well as starting to more properly plan out what’s next. I think we’ll have several tracks:

Curious though what the larger group wants to do next and how we can best organize this.

Some other stuff happened this week but I think this update is long enough already. Peace.