Your brain & app design + this startup is buying up carbon 🌳🧠 (Startup Watching #209)

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We unconsciously look for order and simplicity. Gestalt principles explain how. And applied to app design, the principles make sense of why good design works. This is one of my favorite newsletters that my friend and coworker Laura has ever written. #featured

My friend Clay is a baller designer and marketer who specializes in brand strategy. In this blog post he tears down the Superhuman website messaging, analyzing what works and what doesn’t. My favorite part? He conducted a survey to test alternate messaging tactics! The CEO Rahul Vohra even responded to him on Twitter. #marketing

In this video Steve Schoger redesigns a chunk of the Transistor app interface (Transistor is a podcast hosting app created by Jon Buda and Justin Jackson). It’s a super practical look at how designers think about a problem - he explains everything he does as he’s doing it. There’s a ton to learn from videos like this. #design

So much startup news is critical or negative, that I thought it would be fun to share this piece from Stripe. The company already buys carbon offsets to balance out their greenhouse gas emissions. Now, they’re paying to directly remove additional carbon from the atmosphere as part of an environmental commitment. I would love to see more companies follow suit. #inspiration

Answer five questions and this income-ranker will help you compare yourself with your neighbors (provided you live in the US). Normally I’m not one to encourage comparison, but this is pretty interesting data and will hopefully show you that you’re better off than you expected! What do you think? #interesting