Boagworld: UX, Design Leadership, Marketing & Conversion Optimization · Paul Boag, Marcus Lillington

Design and Launch Your Side Project

·54 min·5 clips

Ben explains why you should never start building a side project until you know people will pay for it.

A side project needs tools first, or at least that is where this conversation starts. The setup points toward design tools and finally launching the thing someone has been quietly carrying around, but the excerpt opens in true Boagworld mode: sponsors, live-meetup details, and Paul and Marcus needling each other about fifteen years together. It meanders before it gets useful. That is part of the charm, because the lesson comes through a very ordinary practitioner gripe, the kind that sounds tiny until it eats half an afternoon. Bulleted lists are the problem. Paul and Edward wonder why graphic packages still make a mess of something HTML, Word, and even WordPad have handled for ages. Figma gets some credit. It understands CSS gradient and, more recently, page flow, so a paragraph can push content down instead of leaving the designer to shuffle everything by hand. Sketch is said to have similar flow behavior. Still, the larger complaint holds: every tool feels close, but not quite there. Nobody is asking for magic. They just want a design space that understands enough about the web to stop treating basic layout like pretend work. The browser is the obvious reply. Designing there can be quicker and more honest when the final medium is already HTML and CSS. But Paul does not let that become a clean answer. Browser-first work can also pull him back toward familiar solutions instead of giving stranger visual ideas room to appear. So the tool debate turns into a constraint debate. Graphic tools make loose invention easier, browser work keeps things real, and neither gets rid of time pressure, client politics, or fiddly production detail. By the end, the chat has slipped into Slack channels, managers, developers moving things into threads, and the warm relief of a community that still functions because people keep turning up. It is not tidy advice. It is shop talk with a point: side projects need momentum, and the tools still ask for judgment, compromise, and patience with small ridiculous problems.

As heard by us

A practical argument about design tools, browser workflows, and getting a side project moving.

Boagworld uses a side-project launch discussion to make a broader point about the design tools shaping web work. The conversation moves from banter into practical observations about Figma, Sketch, InDesign, and the way some packages still make simple things like bulleted lists…

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Why you'd press play

You want a calm way to choose a design tool while still getting that side project out the door.

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