Favourite Hallowe’en or horror films, round 2:

• Osian: The Blair Witch Project - not much happens, granted. But I once watched this in a cabin, in a forest in the middle of nowhere. It was a viewing arranged by a film club in Aberystwyth. After the film we took a nice walk in the dark forest…

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MBZ-POVsrlI

• Alaw: Can The Woman in Black count? That scarred me from a very young age and haven’t watched a Halloween / horror film since!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dPYMUnJGURI

• Charlotte: The Shining!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WDpipB4yehk

Blog posts – Charlotte

This week we published a blog post about our work with local authorities on content toolkits for School Essentials Grant and Free School Meals and how we worked with Welsh Government to create user-centred guidance.

Gov design system day – Josh

Aloha! Josh here. I spent most of my Wednesday in-and-out of sessions in the GOV.UK Design System Day ‘23. There were myriad workshops and presentations that took my fancy, including How brand design systems offer the power of confidence, The challenges of scaling up a truly user-centred service, and A service designer’s look at human-centred life transitions.

A good example of what not to do with a brand system. Hard to use and lacks the tools for people to get creative on their own terms.

Some of the key things I wanted to get from the day were around how my role – visual design – relates to and impacts service design and delivery, how best to design and build brand tools that people will actually use, and about accessibility as a core component of design; a basic principle that supports everything else rather than an afterthought.

A modified process diagram that forms part of an iterative process when designing systems.

Here are some quotes that stood out:

• “Consider insights in the context of future users – what are the next assumptions we need to test?”
• “Pitch the process, not the product”
• “Disability is caused by a mismatch between the design and the person”
• “Try using multiple MVPs to meet nuances of demand”