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Jury Selection

Rodolpho Henrique, Design Director,
McKinsey & Company

Rodolpho is a digital designer focused on interactive experiences for web, mobile, and TV. Currently, as a Design Director at McKinsey & Company, he has been working with cross-discipline teams on the entire product design process, including strategy, vision, research, interaction design, and visual design. Rodolpho has been partnering and leading cross-functional teams of designers, engineers, data scientists, and product managers. He has deep expertise in UI/UX craft and a passion for visual design, motion, and typography.

Over the past 11 years, he contributed to the success of several digital products, taking on new features and concepts from early ideas to final implementation and elevating products to a higher level of craft for big leaders and startups worldwide. With an extensive curriculum and experience working in different continents over the past years, besides commercial work, he is constantly pushing his craft with several side projects, such as On my iPhone, where Rodolpho shares his photography passion with a series of photos taken in different cities of the world using his iPhone. During the pandemic, he designed ComandoAfro, a non-profit project that aims to centralize and share information about small/large services led by black people in one of the world’s biggest cities.

We asked Rodolpho to share his interests in culture. See his favorite conferences around the world, productivity tools, best digital-forward typefaces and more.

Rodolpho's Picks

Events/Conferences

Framer Loupe Conference
A few years ago I had the chance to attend the Framer conference in Amsterdam and was one of the best experiences I’ve ever had. The way how they organized the agenda between speakers and technical sessions was something that I liked a lot. They were launching a new digital tool back then so they made sure to create several technical workshops where they taught, explained, and used the digital tool with us – that was a great example of how brands should mentor users in a relaxed atmosphere

Figma Config
Figma is doing a great job of evolving the most used UX/UI design tool in the world. Besides that, they also put extra effort into hosting this conference where they share new features, talk about overall news from the company, and also invite great people from the industry to share hot topics and subjects. I love the ‘hands-on’ approach they have with the sessions/

Websummit
This conference is a big event not only focused on design but also on tech and other topics such as product, web3, crypto, and AI. The last one took place in my hometown, Rio de Janeiro, and it was fascinating to absorb so many interesting topics and fresh ideas from industry leaders from different markets and industries. I love how they merge different topics (such as design and product management for example) into interesting and solid conversations.

Digital Tools

Loom
Loom is a simple and easy-to-use screen recording tool with advanced video editing. I started using it a few months ago to share some work and comments with coworkers working remotely and the speed and quality are just on point. I love how they use AI to recognize the content you are showing or saying and automatically organize the video into chapters. This has been so useful when I’m sharing large videos with large teams.

Webflow
I’m a lifetime user of Webflow and this is the best low-code tool ever created. I’m constantly impressed by how they are evolving this service and how easy it is to create something great without any code or development knowledge. I’m really optimistic to see how the “low code’’ tools are growing fast. I don’t believe they will ever replace the full development, but there is a great thing that comes with these tools — the fact of democratizing the web. The biggest advantage of low-code tools is that it doesn’t require any advanced coding skills. It allows you to test your ideas without needing any experts; automation is done through plug-and-play and drag & drop mechanisms.

Notion
I recently started using Notion for work-related tasks and ended up extending it to my personal world. The user experience and visual design are something that I admire a lot: simple, easy-to-use, and funny-to-use. Notion has a really solid design identity that makes the interface almost disappear and the focus is always your content or what you’re working on. I find this type of experience really great because they achieve a level of design where they can deliver what the user needs in a way that what the user is creating is actually the most important thing in the interface

Fonts/Typefaces

Suisse Intl Typeface
A well-crafted and timeless typeface made from the talented folks from Swiss Typefaces. The typefaces are made by designers, for designers. Suisse Intl. typeface works extremely well for digital environments. I love how easy it is to use this typeface and adapt to different scenarios and identities. This typeface combines classic style with cutting-edge design quality – unique and great to use.

Inter
This typeface has become one of the most used and versatile typefaces for digital products. Pick your 5 favorite digital products and I’m sure at least 1 of them uses Inter as typeface. Inter is one of the world’s most used typefaces with applications ranging from computer interfaces, advertising, and airports, to NASA instrumentation & medical equipment. I love how simple Inter is and how great it looks for user interfaces, it doesn’t matter the type of project you’re working on.

Clash Grotesk
I recently used this typeface for a specific project where I needed to bring some personal identity to the digital product I was designing from scratch for a financial startup and I loved how this typeface works well for headings and titles. Clash Display is a free font family designed by Indian Type Foundry. It is basically a Grotesk font, which performs best when the font size is set to high values. This makes it ideal for headlines and titles.

Mobile Apps

Wise App
On a recent trip to Japan, I ended up using Wise Services for all my financial transactions abroad and fell in love with the experience and design. The mobile app is so well-crafted, with thoughtful animations, transitions, and behaviors. The user experience is so simple you can easily achieve all of your goals with 3-5 clicks. This is how a financial service should be: simple, straightforward, and solid. It’s easy to see how much effort was made by the design team at Wise.

Airbnb
The new design language from Airbnb is one of the best things I’ve seen lately. The level of detail and craft with the latest update is so fascinating. I love how they simplified some well-known user flows and features into something easier and quicker. This is a great reminder of how our work as designers is to declutter as much as possible and create interfaces so simple to use that the user doesn’t even think about it. Great interfaces are like jokes, if you have to explain it, it’s not that good.

Apple Weather
This app to me’s just on point. I use it at least 5 times a day. It’s the first app I check when I wake up, and the last app I check when I’m going to bed. I love how simple and illustration-driven this app is. When you open a location, they did such a fantastic design job that you don’t even need to see the numbers, just checking the background animations you can see how the weather is in that specific location. As someone who frequently travels for work and needs to deal with different timezones and weather to be on time with my coworkers, I love how you can see a list of different cities with literally just one click on the screen. Kudos Apple Design team!

 

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