What We’ve Been Reading: Design Resources, Accessibility Playlists, and More!

Each month or so, we try to collect and assemble for you the interesting stories we’ve been curating to each other. These stories from around the internet help us do our work, but they also do a good job of keeping us engaged and even entertained. You can learn a lot about a company’s culture by the stories they share with each other too.

Dan Sitton:

Dan is our Solutions Analyst and shared some interesting news that ran across his radar about HubSpot acquiring a company that bakes AI into the sales process. He was keeping us all up to speed on HubSpot’s moves.

HubSpot acquires Kemvi to bring more AI into its sales and marketing platform

This month, a lot of the chatter on our Slack channels was peppered with discussion about the eclipse. It was a big thing in the region, so hard to avoid, but also inspiring and an opportunity for our teams to enjoy something together despite being distributed geographically in some cases. Dan shared this awesome article for what to do with your eclipse glasses now that the eclipse (for this season) is over.

You Can Actually Do Something Good With Those Eclipse Glasses

Dan also shared a link to a story about Target moving away from AWS. We all like to keep up to speed on what new trends are happening in digital spaces, and Amazon has been owning a lot of headlines recently for growth. We help organizations wade through all that to find solutions for them, and remaining in the know is a big part of that.

Finally, Dan shared a fascinating story about some of the behind-the-scenes motivations for some internal changes HubSpot has made recently. As HubSpot partners, we find it especially important to stay on top of what is happening with the platform, but also why it is happening, so that we can pass that knowledge along to you.

Why We Traded Scrum for “Science Fair” to Build HubSpot

Allison Casey:

As Diagram’s Digital Marketing Director, Allison is always sharing great bits of insight from a wide array of sources. This month, she shared this excellent article about the value of note taking by hand from noted smart guy Daniel Pink.

Pinkcast 2.2: Why you should take notes by hand

Nick Melville:

As a Front-End Developer, Nick works with the rest of Diagram's design team to bring a website from vision to reality, so it is no surprise that he found some awesome links to share this month around javascript and design.

Here he shares some collections of little tips from @steveschoger to improve visual design skills with the little details that make a big difference.

Like I said, we also like to share other bits of information with each other, and a big part of our internal culture is that many of our staff share a love of fine beverages, so Nick shared this post, with the caveat that it may not be available in the US yet.

Here he shares a "pretty cool (and short) video walking through the FizzBuzz problem in JS."

Likewise, another member of our design team, Derrik Engel, UI Designer, shared a tweet with some similar resources:

I woke up too early pic.twitter.com/upYuNeWpmV

— Eric Hu (@_EricHu) August 17, 2017

John McKillip found this awesome Back to the Future inspired resource: The Back To The Future Lorem Ipsum Generator

AJ Laporte shared some great tools like: Fullstory - A Hotjar alternative

An awesome tool for showing responsive design, even shows the keyboard open: Sizzy.co

And a "pretty nice playlist to watch" that ended up being worked into our weekly design clinic.

The design clinic is the brain-child of Dennis Kardys, our Design Director. Here’s what we viewed together in August as a part of that:

Sarah Corley, our Marketing Specialist, shared this interesting article from CMS Wire "revolving around our last design critique on web accessibility".

She also shared this interesting blog from HubSpot about compay logos:

Hopefully these stories that we shared with each other give you a window into the way that we stay on top of things in our industry to better serve you. I also hope this gives you a chance to see into what makes our team so special as well. Are there items of interest you shared with your team in August that you want to share with us? Let us know in the comments below or over social.