Permissions

It is very safe to follow where other people are going. If they are going to find a treasure, you may get a share of that treasure. If they are going to walk into a catastrophe, everyone is going to be impacted, which means that everyone will suffer and no one is going to be better off than the other.

Not everyone may be going to the right destination, but going with them is the safe choice. There are other paths that could be safer, more fun, more enriching, but those are not the paths that people take.

The people who have found these better alternative paths may sometimes find the time to share how they found these paths and why it is better than the paths taken by the status quo. When we encounter these people, we respond by evaluating two criteria:

• Do they know what they are talking about?
• Do I have the skill and courage to try what they suggest, even if it is against the popular, safe path?

When both criteria are met, we unlock new perspectives and see new horizons.

I remember such a recent moment. Last year, I watched my mom making crepes and pancakes without measurement, just by balancing the batter consistency with different heat intensities during cooking. Until that day, I treated crepes and pancakes with high respect, so they had to be made with precise measurements and technique. My mom's approach was very haphazard. She didn't memorize the weights or anything like that, she was just adding ingredients to reach certain viscosities. Then she would adjust the heat to get a temperature that worked for the viscosity of the day.

I was amazed. Seeing her make a crepe that is 99% as good as a culinary school technique crepe made a shift. In essence, she gave me permission to use a different approach that is not popular at all and still get good crepes.

Why better? Because it freed up my time, it freed up my attention, it simplified cleanup, it relieved me of the culinary pressure and gave me better results.

Since then, I eyeball crepes and pancakes unless I am hosting a special event. Today, I want to humbly give you permission to do three things differently when you are designing.

Do not use AutoLayout in Figma

AutoLayout is a wonderful feature that helps Figma users create rules that automate flexible layouts. It takes care of much of the manual grunt work that the Figma user needs to do in case there are significant layout changes in a design, or when they want to see how their layout will behave under simple responsive conditions.

It is a very useful feature for Figma users, especially frontend developers or frontend prep personnel that are mislabeled as designers.

Designers who start designing by laying out objects using AutoLayout voluntarily bind themselves into layouts that are easiest to implement. They do this without really taking time to explore if other, non-boxy, non-Tailwindy layouts would make much more sense to the screens they are designing.