Newsletter 2.0 (now with links, quotes, memes, videos, and events)


Dear Reader,

Jeff here...Today, we're trying something different with the newsletter.

For the last two years, Hannah and I have been writing this weekly advice column for you and over 5,000 designers.

It's been a wild ride...from late-night cramming to early-morning writing sessions to beautiful feedback and encouragement that makes it all worth it.

This advice letter has been a weekly reminder for us to keep innovating, but the Fountain Institute is becoming more than just Hannah and I...

The community of designers around the Fountain Institute is our real value so we thought--it's time for our newsletter to grow with the community.

Introducing the newsletter2.0...(final_final_but_not_really)

🦾 AI-powered post-its
Today, Miro launched an AI version of its popular white-boarding tool (shared by Jerome Bertrand)
Learn more

🌅 Non-managerial career path
Staff Design explores how individual contributors are exploring careers at the highest level and has some great resources
(shared by Anja Lena)
Learn more

💰 Paid Figma plugins
Figma just launched a section in their resources page with paid items
Learn more

🧠 How to be a facilitator
Hannah Baker just published an article on how and why you should build skills as a design facilitator
Learn more

Apply to join the Guild of Working Designers here.

from Henry Mintzberg, an excellent source for design strategy
Share this quote on Instagram

Source, shared by Rana Fathi in the Guild

Learn to create a winning strategy in UX

Learn how to initiate systemic change within an organization, whether a small team or a large city.

Wednesday, March 15, 2023

Learn how to build a winning UX or product strategy that aligns design with business.

April 17-May 8, 2023

Until next week!

Jeff Humble
Designer & Co-Founder
The Fountain Institute

P.S. We'd love some feedback on the new newsletter. Hit reply and let us know what you think!

The Fountain Institute

The Fountain Institute is an independent online school that teaches advanced UX & product skills.

Read more from The Fountain Institute

OpenClaw Part 2: The 🦞 didn't replace Claude. It made me laugh instead. by Jeff Humble Dear Designer, In Part 1, I spent €590 on a Mac Mini, two days in Terminal, and $3.14 in API tokens I didn't mean to burn. I ended with a list of seven things I was going to automate with my OpenClaw agent 🦞. I only got to one of them. Getting an AI agent from zero to useful takes longer than any article will tell you. Most of the time since then has gone into figuring out how to make it reliable, not into...

The System You Can't See By Hannah Baker Dear Reader, Here's a question I get more than any other: "How do I handle the person who talks too much?" Or the flip side: "How do I get quiet people to speak up?" And every time, I want to say: you're asking the wrong question. Not because those moments aren't real or frustrating. They are. But because treating them as people problems is like looking at algae blooming in a pond and asking, "how do I fix the algae?" You don't. The algae isn't the...

I Bought a Mac Mini to Try OpenClaw, the Most Hyped AI Tool of 2026 by Jeff Humble Dear Reader, You've probably heard of OpenClaw 🦞 by now. 145,000 GitHub stars. Headlines everywhere. "The AI that actually does things." This tool is the O.G. dream of AI...automation, not slop. This was the missing piece to my automation system. I had to try it. So I bought an entry-level, 2024 M4 Mac Mini for €590 (on sale in Germany, but they're reportedly selling out in the U.S.) and spent two days trying...