JUNE 2018

Hello

Welcome to the first issue of Rounding Third, the once-a-month newsletter from the folks behind Ballpark. As a product, Ballpark solves the problems we’ve had to overcome as a growing creative agency, and this newsletter is meant to reflect our commitment to help growing agencies like ours learn faster and get better at running their business.

Since this is the first issue, allow us to give a short explanation of the categories (I hope you enjoy our heavy-handed jokes):

Inside Baseball is where we'll share what we worked on this month on the product side of life.
Water Cooler is company culture and other fun stuff we're talking about at Simple Focus.
Moneyball links are about running a business (and usually about running an agency in particular).
Tools of the Trade is a spotlight on apps and digital products we use at our agency on a daily basis.
Pushing the Pixels and Git Push, Git Paid are straight from the designer and developer team Slack channels.
Inspirational Things are exactly what they sound like. More specifically, these websites are inspirational in their UI, UX, or they're just downright pretty to look at.

Alright, enough explanation. Onward!

Inside Baseball

Dashboard Activity Feed

This month we worked on a new design to bring back the Dashboard Activity Feed. You can read all about it on the Ballpark blog, and we also included a short list of bug fixes in case you're curious.

Water Cooler

Words and the design process

Sketching with words! There's value in thinking about what words you're going to use (and where they go) early in the design process. If you use real content in your sketches, you and the entire team will have a much better understanding of how content is going to work in the final designs and what actions you want your users to take. - Calvin

Syncing Company Culture As A Remote Team

Having an agency that’s multi-local and/or remote-friendly is awesome for recruitment and individual morale. But, it can make establishing and maintaining company and office culture tough. It’s encouraging to hear from another agency facing the same challenges and meeting them in some obvious ways, but also novel new ones (animal portraits FTW!). - Patrick

Moneyball

Show Me The Money

If you’re like me, you run an agency because your reputation for doing good work earned you a lot of business, not because you had a lot of business savvy. Like me, you probably have questions about how much to pay yourself, how much money to keep in the business account, when you should hire, and so on.

Turns out, there’s a bunch of math nerds at Summit CPA Group who specialize in knowing the answers to these questions, and they’re entirely focused on creative and tech agencies.

Carl Smith’s Bureau of Digital brings us a 45-minute webinar from Jody Grunden of Summit CPA Group. If you want to know all the answers to your questions about your agency’s money, take the time to watch this now, or at least when your brain is fresh. It’s so good. - JD

GDPR for Digital Shops

The acronym that everyone saw in their inboxes for most of 2018; May in particular unleashed a flood of policy update emails and requests for updated consents. If you somehow missed the train on GDPR, this article is full of links to resources for digital shops. - Calvin

How Coinbase makes decisions

I think this framework is a really neat way to approach the decision making process. I like the problems it tries to solve, and I especially like how it self-documents and "memorializes" the decisions being made. - Caitlin

Tools of the Trade

Curated Newsletters

Here's a fun fact: in addition to Ballpark, Simple Focus owns and operates a handful of other useful tools. One of them is Curated, the service we're using to create and send this newsletter. Curated solves the problem of creating engaging newsletters quickly. If you've used other email marketing tools to make a newsletter, you're painfully aware of how long it takes to turn all the knobs and push all the buttons every week to get your latest issue published. If you run a newsletter or are thinking of starting one, you should give Curated a try. - Calvin

Pushing the Pixels

How to Take Criticism

The Design Critique is a sort of ceremony and memory from design school that you either remember fondly or in abject horror. Giving and taking criticism is also a skill that we tend to forget in the professional world, perhaps because the stakes are, well, just different.

This essay does an excellent job of reminding us of the positive potential of collaboration through thoughtful, kind critique. - Patrick

Design Systems - A resource for learning, creating and evangelizing design systems

The world of product design is quickly realizing that design systems are something that can’t be lived without. - Andrew

Factorio tackles the "OK" "Cancel" button ordering problem

The creators of the computer game Factorio talk about how they are trying to improve dialog buttons in their game. I don't think I have paid attention to consistency in the ordering before, or that Windows does it differently than Linux and Mac.

The article links to another that suggests a nice rule of thumb:

If you're designing a web-based application, the decision is harder, but you should probably go with the platform preferred by most of your users.

Git Push, Git Paid

Cult of the Complex

This gem of a post from the one-and-only Zeldman is going to make you dust off your trusty old version of TextWrangler. And write some semantic, no-frills HTML and CSS just for the fun of it. - Calvin

Three-day no-meeting schedule for engineers

The title says it all, but the important thing I wanted to bring up about the article is that the team that decided to try a no-meeting initiative followed up afterwards and surveyed the team to see how it was going. That's a great move, and now they know that the experiment was a success. - Calvin

Inspirational Things

OGINO

These page transitions are beautiful in every language. - Andrew

Outrider Foundation

Beautifully-designed long-form articles about serious global challenges. - John

The Design Genome Project

Want to see just what CSS Grid is capable of? Look no further than the beautiful execution of InVision’s Design Genome project. And while you’re there, learn about the design processes of some of your favorite companies. - Andrew

Closer

That's it for June! If you have a friend or twenty that you think would enjoy this newsletter, give us a shoutout on Twitter or send them to http://newsletter.getballpark.com.

If you have any links you'd like to see in this newsletter, you can send them our way by filling out this form.

See you in July!