📝 Issue #428: Design in the Time of Covid-19, Underestimated Soft Skills, Colors.lol, Figma’s Design System, and more…

It was April Fools’ Day this week, but with millions of people around the world struggling with the effects of the coronavirus outbreak, we decided not to pull a prank this year. Instead, we’ve collected this roundup of the companies offering assistance to help designers through the crisis.

Code Time is an incredible open source plugin that installs directly in your code editor — Atom, Sublime Text, Visual Studio Code, and many more are supported. The plugin tracks your coding day, from the time you spend, to the number of lines added, and even your total keystrokes.

It’s easy to list the hard skills that designers need, but we often overlook soft skills and in doing so we undervalue ourselves. Soft skills can be anything from embracing creativity, to being supportive of your peers, to a sense of humor, Lucia Bustamante offers some great advice.

Hopin is an all-in-one events platform that was developed to tackle the environmental impact of real-world conferences and trade shows by moving to digital. From networking events, to meetups, and workshops, it’s ideal in the current climate. Sign up for early access now.

Design app Figma has taken the industry by storm, offering collaborative design with a modern workflow. However when the team carried out an audit on their marketing site they found countless inconsistencies. In this detailed case study they explain the steps they took to correct the problem.

Around the world thousands of startups are being forced to let people go. Colleagues are often friends, and firing staff is the hardest part of any leadershop role. Switch is a timely initiative to help you find awesome new positions for the staff you can’t afford to keep employing yourself.

Atlassian-style illustrations have been a huge trend for the last few years, but even though they come in a vast range of skintones, from yellow to blue, they almost never feature people of color. Black Illustrations aims to change that with a set of free illustrations good for use in any project.

In this engaging article Tobias Foster looks at 6 techniques for engaging customers’ subconscious decision making. With tips that can be applied to any online presence, from consistent branding, to implementing anchoring, and easily scannable content, it’s a must-read for UI designers.

Colors.lol is a fun new take on color palettes. Similar to many color palette collections already online, colors.lol distinguishes itself by assigning hilariously obtuse names to its hues. From “inhaling peacock blue” to “snail-paced soft pink” the swatches are addictively browsable.