The Start-up Zine

For designers and businesses. Let’s network and make stuff.

sketch of a plan for our zine

Summary

We’re creating a zine for a laugh. It’ll cover Scottish start-ups, research and design. It will mainly exist as Social Media posts on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube and LinkedIn. We’ll keep a searchable archive of posts … somewhere. Every post will have a summary of 280 characters or fewer. We’ll also make a summary picture created with Facebook and Twitter dimensions: an infographic or sketchnote. We may link to a bigger piece of content – an interview, video or audio clip. We’ll post about conversations we’ve had. We’ll start with some email interviews and meetings, talking to designers, researchers and entrepreneurs. We might also find some interesting problems to solve. After the interviews we’ll invite people to talk at a meet-up evening. We’ll also experiment with HTML, CSS and JavaScript to offer interactive content. So, we may host the zine via a website. Get in touch if you’d like to get involved.

Who’s involved

My friends and colleagues from UX Glasgow and the Scottish Fintech meet-up; as well as anyone else who wants to help interview interesting people or design posts.

Timescales

We start now, because technology makes starting things easy. We’ll aim to do this for 12 months. At a minimum we’ll aim to interview 24 designers and 24 businesses.

Channels

Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram and YouTube. We'll find a permanent home for where to archive the posts.

Other ideas

More background (tl:dr)

This project is to meet a few demands:

  1. With Sergei Millar-Pomphrey and Alisdair Gunn I’ve run a Scottish Fintech meet-up since 2018. At the time of writing we haven’t organised a meet-up for six months or so. Towards the end of 2019 we started running out of Fintechs to speak at our events. So, we’d like to concentrate on interviews and might build up towards events again after that.

  2. Start-ups, mainly Fintechs, need to network and discuss ideas; in the longer-term they need help with design and research. I’m lucky enough to have been employed by some of them to do freelance design. I suspect that they could benefit from working with a UX graduate or someone looking to break into the field. I’ve also found that they value polished design and finished work but are less likely to go through a Discovery process where they start from scratch – say, by interviewing users in their chosen market segment. So, this is an attempt to spread design culture among start-ups … and possibly vice versa. As a designer I’ve mainly worked for larger institutions. I’ve personally benefitted a lot from working with smaller teams to develop new services. This is a nice contrast to my main job, which often involves large-scale redesigns for established companies.

  3. It’s more and more common to meet designers who have gained a qualification in UX or are on their way to getting one and are now looking for practical experience. If they’re not looking for a high salary we may be able to match them with a start-up with limited funds. As start-ups mature, win investment and begin to make a profit they’re also likely to have money to spend on design.

  4. I’ve worked for Scottish Enterprise and I’m currently working for a new Scottish funding agency. The more I find out about investment the more I can see opportunities for designers (including myself) to help businesses who want to grow: from a basic web presence to an app or a digital service. I also have friends who have moved from being solo contract designers for large companies to running their own freelance agency. As IR35 makes UX contract work harder to get and, in some cases, less well paid, it’s likely other experienced designers will make the shift to serving a number of business clients rather than working on a single contract or going in-house.

Tweet-sized summary: in 280 characters -

1 of 4: Scottish zine about start-ups and UX design, existing as Social Media posts: on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube and LinkedIn. We’ll keep a searchable archive of posts organised by tags.

2 of 4: Every post will have a summary of 280 characters or fewer. We’ll also make a summary picture created with Facebook and Twitter dimensions: an infographic or sketchnote. We may link to a bigger piece of content – an interview, video or audio clip.

3 of 4: We’ll post about conversations we’ve had. We’ll start with some email interviews and meetings, talking to designers, researchers and entrepreneurs. We might also find some interesting problems to solve.

4 of 4: After the interviews we’ll invite people to talk at a meet-up evening. We’ll also experiment with HTML, CSS and JavaScript to offer interactive content. So, we may host the zine via a website. Get in touch if you’d like to get involved.