I’ve been looking forward to speaking with Cennydd Bowles for months and for Unfinished Business 113, Cennydd joins me and my other special guest, product designer Noah Stokes. We kick off by talking about Richard Rutter’s web typography book, but soon the conversation switches to whether, and why, current web designs are lacking ‘soul.’ This is something Noah and I have been speaking and writing over recent months and something that I partly blame on our fixation with user-experience and product design. Does Cennydd agree? You‘ll have to listen to the show to find out.

Podcast sponsorship

From now on, I’m going to mention products or services because I really like them, not because they are paying for sponsorship. These may be from our industry or from outside, for example the people I buy my shaving supplies from. If you have a product or a service or something that you think I might like enough to talk about, let me know. Email me, send me something and if I like it, and I think that listeners would like it too, I’ll talk about on the show.

Some links from this episode

• Cennydd Bowles and on Twitter
• Noah Stokes and on Twitter
• The Elements of Typographic Style Applied to the Web
• Visual Essentials for Product Design workshop
• A tweet from Mat Hill @matthillco
• Why web design is losing its soul
• Creativity over predictability:’ Video from my talk about why web design has lost its creative soul
• Why have today's designers stopped dreaming?
• Letter To A Junior Designer
• A Different Letter to a Junior Designer

I really like Shopify and they have just released a book about how to grow your design or development business. The book’s called ‘Grow’ and it has eleven chapters by industry experts about how to attract clients, draft contracts, close deals and more. Even my Contract Killer contract gets a mention. Download your free copy of Grow.