The Cursor Recap

All my favorite design finds, insights and ideas from 2023.

Hi, I’m Maureen and I work as a product designer and design content creator. The Cursor Magazine is my online publication on design, workshop facilitation and career.

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In this edition I look back at a year of big changes, both in my personal and professional life. I share…

1. My favorite tools of 2023

2. The Cursor’s best read articles of this year

3. Most inspiring articles and posts by others

My favorite tools of 2023

Arc

Arc from The Browser Company took me a good while to get used to, but what a game-changer this browser is! I’ve had it for a while already and tried Arc over the course of the past year. Every time I wasn’t ready to commit yet and struggled to get used to Arc, as it challenges a lot of the mental models I had about browsers.

After starting at Miro I decided to give it a serious go and I can now say: I’m fully converted. My favorite features I use daily are:

• Split view

• Mini player

• Previews

The fact that I can now also customize the look of websites and make everything Barbie-pink is a nice bonus.

Jitter

a little behind the scenes of my animations made in jitter

Jitter is my go-to tool for motion design and animation.

It has been a staple in my design toolset since 2021. After I stopped being so active on Instagram I haven’t used it as much. Recently, I logged back in and was pleasantly surprised at how much the tool has evolved and grown.

I’m not a skilled animator or motion designer - in fact, it’s that part of design I struggle with the most. Having a tool like Jitter makes the work so much easier and fun! Currently I mostly use Jitter for the animations of this very newsletter.

Womp

my first character build in womp - sanrio’s rilakkuma <3

It seems like the past years have been all about 3D design finding its way into the 2D designer world. Tools like Spline have been around for a bit, but never really got me convinced. It’s hard to wrap my head around designing in 3D after having solely designed in 2D before.

Womp works intuitive and it’s interface reminds me of Figma - it’s self-explanatory and not overwhelming. If you haven’t yet, do give it a try!¹

The Cursor’s top 3 articles of the past year

Interesting design tidbits by others

• How Design is Governance by Amber Case via UX Collective

• This post by Vitaly Friedman on LinkedIn: How to boost UX in a company with low UX maturity

• Reno Perry shared useful resources to help with your salary negotiations

• This very real and insightful article by Dan Cariño

  Rising to the Challenge

Thanks to all of you - old and new subscribers of The Cursor! I truly enjoy writing these newsletters and seeing that others enjoy reading them gives me so much motivation. I hope to bring even more content to you in the coming year.

If there’s a specific topic you’d like me to talk about, please let me know by replying to this email or leaving a comment below.

Cheers and happy new 2024,

Maureen

1. All of these tools are personal recommendations, not sponsored. If I ever include sponsored content in my newsletter, this will be clearly stated.