Design

Peel and Reveal. From the vibrant hues of an apple to the intricate patterns on a mango, the skin of fruits tells a story of growth and ripening. Ever noticed the unique patterns and blemishes on a piece of fruit? From the speckled skin of a banana to the dimpled surface of an orange, nature's artwork is full of imperfections that add character and charm. Imagine if your packaging could capture that essence, mimicking the fruit's natural markings and aging process? That's exactly what designers are exploring with the innovative concept of packaging that mirrors fruit skins, complete with embossed brown spots. By mirroring these natural markings in packaging design, brands are celebrating the beauty of imperfection, challenging the notion of flawless aesthetics and embracing the authenticity of the natural world. And it's not just about aesthetics. In a society where a flawless appearance often reigns supreme, embracing the quirks and irregularities of fruit skin sends a powerful message—reminds us that beauty comes in all forms, including the unique patterns and variations found in the natural world. Secondly, it enhances the sensory experience. By incorporating texture into packaging design, brands can engage multiple senses, creating a more immersive and memorable interaction with their products. Moreover, it fosters a deeper connection to the source. When packaging mirrors the appearance of fresh produce, it reinforces the idea of authenticity and transparency. Consumers can visually connect the product to its origins, fostering trust and confidence in the brand's commitment to quality and sustainability. Consider Loukas Chondros' packaging for Bananostafido. Inspired by banana peels, it mimics their markings and aging process with embossed spots. Designed for easy opening, it even features a perforated area that mimics the act of peeling a banana. The inner surface of the box resembles the pale yellow of a banana peel, again a nod to the fruit. These small details, transform a simple act like opening a box into a delightful moment of discovery—it's packaging that invites you to engage with it, creating a connection between you and the product inside. From farm to table, the journey of the fruit is reflected in every detail of the packaging, creating a narrative that resonates with consumers. In stores inundated with mass-produced goods and cookie-cutter packaging, designs inspired by nature offer a breath of fresh air. They remind us of the beauty that surrounds us, celebrate the charm of imperfection, and invite us to slow down and appreciate the little things in life. So, the next time you grab that piece of fruit, take a moment to really look and feel its skin—and consider how that same sense of wonder can be captured in the packaging that surrounds it. Think this packaging is spot-on? #packagingdesign #design #productdesign #graphicdesign 📷Loukas Chondros

Embracing a Spacious Lifestyle within Compact Spaces: The Evolution of Small Apartments and Modular Furniture. Would you live there? The modern living landscape is undergoing a remarkable transformation as small apartments and modular furniture redefine the way we inhabit our spaces. The concept of "living large in a small footprint" has become more than just a catchphrase; it has become a tangible reality reshaping our living experiences. Small apartments, once seen as a compromise, are now celebrated for their efficiency and practicality. As urban centers grow denser, these compact living spaces have evolved to maximize functionality without sacrificing comfort. The ingenious use of design elements, multifunctional furniture, and smart storage solutions enables residents to enjoy a comfortable and enriching lifestyle even within limited square footage. Enter modular furniture, a game-changer that perfectly complements the ethos of small-space living. Modular pieces are designed to adapt, transform, and serve multiple purposes, allowing residents to tailor their environments to their needs. From transforming sofas that become beds to dining tables that expand and contract, modular furniture empowers us to customize our surroundings while optimizing space utilization. This trend is profoundly impacting how we live. It encourages a shift towards intentional living, prompting us to carefully curate our possessions and prioritize what truly matters. The focus is on quality over quantity, leading to more thoughtful consumption patterns and sustainable living choices. Moreover, small apartments and modular furniture are fostering a sense of versatility. The boundaries between spaces are blurring as rooms multitask and evolve with our activities. A dining area can seamlessly transform into a workspace, and a living room can transition into a guest bedroom, all at the push of a button or the rearrangement of a few pieces. Innovations in design and technology are driving this evolution, making small apartments not just viable options but preferred choices for a diverse range of people, from young professionals seeking urban convenience to empty nesters downsizing their living arrangements. The convergence of small apartments and modular furniture is reshaping our understanding of space and how we utilize it. This transformation isn't just about making the most of less; it's about fostering a more deliberate, adaptable, and mindful way of living, where every square foot is an opportunity to express our personality and create a meaningful environment. #innovation via @ ori_living #technology

The financial case for brand strategy: Why CFOs should care. Branding isn’t just about looking good.* It drives real financial impact (* if done strategically) Yet, many companies still see it as a cost rather than an asset that increases enterprise value, reduces waste, and boosts profitability. Here’s what most businesses get wrong: - They see branding as expense, not an investment. - They focus on short-term lead generation over long-term equity. - They underestimate how much a strong brand lowers acquisition costs, improves pricing, reduces churn and attracts talent. Here’s how: 01 - Brand Strategy Increases Market Value: Brands are intangible, but they drive real financial value. Today, 80–85% of the S&P 500’s market value comes from intangibles like brand equity. Corporate reputation alone is worth $16 trillion globally. Companies with strong brands deliver 2× higher shareholder returns over 20 years than the MSCI World Index. Why? A strong brand builds trust, reduces risk, and increases pricing, partnerships, and M&A leverage. 02 - A Strong Brand Lowers Marketing Costs: Weak brands must pay to be noticed, they have to keep buying attention…spending millions on ads and lead gen. Strong brands generate attention. Tesla, for example, spends $0 on traditional ads, while competitors spend $495 per vehicle sold. Tesla’s brand, combined with a touch of Elon, drives WOM, earned media, and loyalty...saving hundreds of millions in marketing costs. (And yes, I know it works both ways, for better or worse) 03 - Branding Improves Profit Margins & Pricing Power: A strong brand lets you charge premium prices and avoid price wars. Apple sells iPhones at 40%+ gross margins, while competitors struggle, even with similar hardware. Why? Customers aren’t just buying a product, they’re buying into a brand. Data shows: - Consumers pay 11% more for trusted brands. - Brand-loyal customers pay 38% more, even price-sensitive ones pay 14% more. - Without strong branding, companies must compete on price alone. 04 - Strong Brands Retain Customers Longer: Retention is one of the biggest profitability drivers. It costs 5× more to acquire a new customer than to retain one. A 5% increase in retention boosts profits by 25–95%. Brand loyalty reduces churn, increases lifetime value, and creates repeat buyers without ads spend. 05 - Resilient Brands Outperform in Crises: In downturns, weak brands suffer revenue losses and resort to discounting. Strong brands hold their value & recover faster. During 2020, while most businesses struggled, the top 100 most valuable brands grew by +5.9%. A well-built brand acts as financial insulation, stabilising revenue. The Hard Truth: A strong brand isn’t a luxury, it’s a financial strategy. If your CFO still sees branding as a cost center, send them this. Sources: McKinsey, Interbrand, BrandZ, Bain & Company, Nielsen, Kantar, Invesp, Unilever, Tesla, industry reports on brand valuation, CAC, and shareholder returns.

7 out of 10 of my projects start with fixing what most people ignore. This includes: - making copy easier to read - making images informational - making product name impactful Simple, but yet forgotten. In this post, using URturms example, I'll be sharing 11 underestimated changes that can increase your website sales. 1. Adding breadcrumbs. Important if you drive ad traffic to the PDP directly. They take shopper to the parent category page. Reducing bounce rate. 2. Adding a badge. Like "Bestseller", "Most Loved", "Few Left". This reassures the shopper that they're making the right decision. 3. Making images easier to swipe. Add a sneak peek of the next image along with navigation dots that show the count. Cap them at 8. 4. Making the product name impactful. Add key USPs. Show your current product name to 10 people. Do they understand what it is? 5. Add a short description below product name. Keep it in 1 line. Highlight it's most important feature here. 6. Consider adding an offer close to price. This motivates the shopper as they see some potential savings or benefit. 7. Highlight key product strengths in bullets or with icons. Avoid sentences. Keep this before the add to cart CTA. 8. Keep your add to cart CTA full width. Don't combine it with quantity or another CTA next to it. Make sure it's readable and prominent. 9. Highlighting shipping time or return policy below the CTA. This solves for common questions - when will I get it? can I return it? 10. Cross-selling complementary products. Like bottoms with tops. Earrings with necklace. Do this close to the add to cart CTA. 11. Adding 'Benefits' to your accordion. This gets a higher click through rate, while helping shoppers understand why they should buy this. Other UX/UI changes I did: - Removed quantity button - Made the information bar non-moving - Removed log-in, moving search next to cart - Changed the font for product name and CTA - Increased font size in places for better readability Found this useful? Let me know in the comments! P.S. If you want to maximize your PDP’s potential, start by understanding your visitor's behavior and the gaps. Get heat maps for your site (Microsoft Clarity is free). Observe what they like to (and don't like to) interact with.

🪂 How To Make Your Design System AI-Ready (https://lnkd.in/dtnpy7CM), a practical guide on how to reduce drifts, minimize mistakes, maintain context and improve the quality of AI-generated prototypes — with structured spec files, automated auditing and token layers. Put together by Hardik Pandya from Atlassian. --- 🔹 1. Design Decisions Are Infrastructure AI-generated prototypes often don't deliver consistently decent results because of tiny inconsistencies scattered all across a design system. Often it's decisions made but not documented, hard-coded values never cleaned up, or relying too much on AI making sense of mock-ups or design flows on its own. Unsurprisingly, better AI prototypes come from better data — but also from better human guidance. We shouldn’t assume that AI knows how to choose the right component, and how to design with accessibility in mind. It needs priorities, a clear path on how we make decisions, design principles, examples, do's and don'ts. In fact, we should treat design decisions as infrastructure. That means that every time we make a decision — not just a design decision, but even decision on how actually prioritize our work and how we make decisions around here — it must find a path into the spec file that is then consumed by AI. --- 🔶 2. Three Layers: Spec Files + Token Layer + Audit To ensure quality, we establish design principles, guidelines, rules in a form of “spec files”). It's structured Markdown files that include spacing rules, color choices, component usage guidelines, priorities etc. AI is going to read and reuse that spec file every time it's going to generate a prototype. Because the spec files are text files, it's much more cost-effective, but also much more accurate just because we don't rely on AI recognizing or decoding patterns from mock-ups, but gets specific guidelines instead. In fact, extending code is often a more effective way than generating code from mock-ups. Token layer lists and keeps updated all tokens used throughout the design system. AI always chooses from a closed set of named variables instead of inventing plausible values ad-hoc. An audit script catches what AI gets wrong. It scans the prototype and flags every hard-coded value and flags it if necessary. It can be a regular software doing that, with AI waiting for its feedback to come back. Finally, when a design system ships updates, a sync routine flags which spec files need updating. The goal is to make sure that AI always reads up-to-date, current specs, not the ones written against an outdated version. --- 🔺 3. Examples of AI-Ready Design Systems ⌾ Atlassian: https://lnkd.in/dVsGc3Cp ⌾ Carbon: https://lnkd.in/d4zq4WWb ⌾ CMS Design System: https://lnkd.in/dHHzV3en ⌾ Nordhealth: https://lnkd.in/d8C4j2ZA Yet again, AI can’t magically resolve technical debt or design debt — it needs guidance, decisions, priorities and principles.

Today, in Facebook ads, creatives serve as the strongest targeting lever, more so than any other targeting options. In performance marketing, it is famously called soft targeting. Hence, choosing the right type of communication is more important than targeting and bid/budget optimization in Facebook ads. You should have different ads that speak to people at different stages in a manner that best suits them. So, what are these stages and the corresponding ad types? 1. Unaware Ads These ads are for the audience who are unaware of the brand and the problem. These ads should turn an unaware audience into a problem-aware & brand-aware audience. 2. Problem-aware Ad These ads are for people who are well aware of their problems but not the solution or the brand. Ads for these users should talk about their problems and introduce the brand as a solution. 3. Solution-Aware Ads A certain set of audiences is well aware of their problems and of possible solutions, too. But they don't know which solution/product to choose. Solution-aware ads should help in determining which solution/product to choose while introducing the brand 4. Brand-Aware Ads These people know everything about their problems. They also know how to solve it and what product/brand to choose. They are just waiting for the right time and the right offer to buy it. In traditional campaign structuring of Top of the Funnel(ToFU), Middle of the funnel(MoFU), and bottom of the funnel(BoFU), - Type 1 and Type 2 ads should be used in TOFU campaigns - Type 3 ads should be used in MoFU campaigns and - Type 4 ads should be used in Bofu campaigns.

Running LLM-powered applications shouldn't drain your budget. While you're excited about building your next GenAI project, knowing how to optimize LLM costs is essential for long-term success. LLM cost optimization involves multiple complementary strategies to reduce inference expenses while maintaining performance. Input optimization focuses on efficient prompt engineering and context pruning to minimize token usage, ensuring only essential information is processed. Model selection involves choosing right-sized models for specific tasks, preventing resource waste from oversized models while maintaining accuracy. Model optimization techniques like quantization and pruning reduce model size and computational requirements without significantly impacting performance. Distributed processing leverages distributed inference and load balancing to optimize resource utilization across multiple machines, improving throughput and cost efficiency. Caching strategies implement response and embedding caches to avoid redundant computations, storing frequently requested responses and pre-computed embeddings for quick retrieval. Output management implements token limits and stream processing to control response lengths and optimize data flow. System architecture considerations include batch processing to maximize throughput and request optimization to reduce unnecessary API calls. Together, these strategies form a comprehensive approach to LLM cost optimization, balancing performance requirements with resource efficiency. The key is implementing these strategies in combination, as each addresses different aspects of LLM deployment costs. Success requires continuous monitoring and adjustment of these strategies based on usage patterns, performance requirements, and cost metrics. Know more about such LLM cost optimization strategies and techniques in this blog: https://lnkd.in/gMvbg6Se Subscribe to my YouTube channel to know & understand more in-depth concepts on Generative AI: https://lnkd.in/gmAKSxKJ

Exploring the Complex Factors Surrounding Women's Career Choices: The decision for women and girls to leave their careers is a multifaceted issue that cannot be attributed to a single cause. Instead, it involves a complex interplay of personal, societal, and structural factors. In this post, we will delve into some of the reasons why it can be easier for women and girls to leave their careers. It's important to remember that these reasons are not universal and may vary greatly from person to person. 🎯Gender Roles and Expectations: Traditional gender roles have often placed the burden of childcare and household responsibilities primarily on women. These societal expectations can make it easier for women to leave their careers, especially if they face pressure to prioritize their family over their professional aspirations. 🎯Unequal Distribution of Household and Caregiving Responsibilities: Even in dual-income households, women often bear a disproportionate share of household and caregiving responsibilities. Balancing a career and these responsibilities can be overwhelming, leading some women to opt for leaving their careers temporarily or permanently. 🎯Career Barriers: Women may face numerous career barriers, such as discrimination, a lack of mentorship opportunities, and a glass ceiling that limits their advancement. These obstacles can discourage them from pursuing their careers or can lead to them leaving their careers prematurely. 🎯Personal Fulfillment: Some women choose to leave their careers because they find greater fulfillment in roles outside of the traditional workforce, such as entrepreneurship, volunteering, or pursuing creative passions. This decision may not be solely influenced by external pressures but by personal values and aspirations. 🎯Health and Well-being: The physical and emotional toll of balancing career and family can impact women's health and well-being. In some cases, leaving a career may be a necessary decision to prioritize mental and physical health. 🎯Lack of Access to Quality Childcare: The availability and affordability of quality childcare can be a significant factor. If women cannot secure reliable childcare, they may have no choice but to leave their careers temporarily or permanently. It's essential to recognize that women's decisions to leave their careers are shaped by a wide range of factors, both personal and systemic. Addressing these issues requires a holistic approach that includes changes in societal expectations, workplace policies, and support systems. Ultimately, empowering women to make choices that align with their goals and aspirations is crucial for achieving gender equality in the workforce.

I studied 118 nonprofit donation forms. Here's what I found. 1. Add a big, obvious, donation button to your home page right now. It takes 5 seconds on your website builder. A quarter of the nonprofits I looked at hide their donate button behind a dropdown, or have no clear CTA (call to action) on their homepage. Those nonprofits were 51% more likely to have a budget deficit. 2. Ugly websites beat beautiful ones. The average donor is: - old (~avg. US donor age is 64) AND - distracted (89% of donation page visitors leave before donating) Relentlessly prioritize ease of use over aesthetics with: - high contrast colors and large, simple fonts - redundancy (Smile Train has 3 donation buttons on their home page) - visibility (Obama Foundation's website even shows you a donation form before the main website) 3. Use the grandma test. Grab your grandma (or mom...if she's a grandma). Have her try and donate to your nonprofit. Stand beside her and watch. If she asks for help before she finds the donate button, you have work to do. 4. Add an impact unit to donation amounts One study showed that the gap between bad donation pages (8-11% conversion) and well-optimized ones (22%) is closed mostly by two things: form simplicity and tangible-impact framing (e.g. $50 = 10 meals) 5. Cut your donation form down to 4 fields. Most nonprofit donation forms ask for 8-12 fields. One study found that reducing form fields from 11 to 4 led to a 120% increase in conversions. The only fields donors actually need: name, email, amount, payment. Everything else is friction. Open your form, count the fields, and delete every one that isn't essential. Address, phone number, "how did you hear about us" -- cut all of it. You can ask in a follow-up email. 6) Default to monthly recurring, not one-time. Ethically pre-selecting monthly giving on your donation page can increase conversions of monthly donations by up to 35%. For some reason, almost nobody talks about donation page mechanics in nonprofit world. I haven't posted in a while... is this research/content helpful to keep posting?

Most people don’t need more charts. They need the right chart. This graphic shows 50 ways to visualize data — and that’s exactly why many dashboards are confusing. Too many choices, not enough thinking. Here’s how I’d use this: Start with the question, not the chart. Comparison? Use column/bar. Trend? Line, area, or sparkline. Distribution? Histogram or box/violin (not 12 pie charts…). Choose by relationship, not aesthetics. Correlation → scatter, correlogram. Composition → stacked bar/area, not donut overload. Flow or structure → Sankey, org chart, network. One insight per visual. If your audience can’t say, “This chart shows X,” in 5 seconds, it’s decoration, not communication. Reduce cognitive load. Fewer colors. Clear labels. No 3D anything. Ever. Build your “go-to 10.” From these 50, pick 10 charts you’ll master. Use them 90% of the time. The pros look “simple” because they obsess over clarity, not complexity. Save this as a checklist for your next report or dashboard. And if you want to go deeper into data storytelling and visualization, Corporate Finance Institute® (CFI)'s resources are a great place to start.