"70 percent of freelancers have been stiffed by a client at least once, only 28 percent say they always use a contract—likely due to the costs associated with seeking legal counsel."

We've seen too many designers either use difficult to read contracts they don't quite understand or not use them at all. Really happy to see AND CO trying to create a standard here for freelancers everywhere to get more designers to be protected, make it cheaper to have a contract, and give you more time to do the design work that gets you paid. Would love to hear people's thoughts on this and how they want to see this evolve.

We’re excited to announce an evolution of Bridge in 2017, which will enable us to impact more designers than ever before. This year, we’ll be hosting three Bridge programs, each structured around a different design focus: Product Design, Communication Design, and Design Management.

If you have any questions we're happy to answer them for the DN community!

Would love to hear what other trends people here think will emerge this year (other than soft drop shadows ;)

AND CO only uses conversational UI when there’s a clear benefit to the experience. “Sometimes simple lists and clean forms are still the best UI for getting people through workflows,” says Leif. “It’s easy to be seduced by new UI paradigms but forcing everything to happen in tiny chat bubbles can often make an experience rather painful.”

Hey DN - we interviewed designer founders Leif Abraham and Martin Strutz about their approach to designing AND CO, a service that helps freelancers create invoices, file expenses, track time and manage projects. They broke down some nitty gritty design decisions and shared some mocks so designers everywhere benefit from their learnings. Hope you enjoy.

James the post should be easily available here - http://designerfund.com/recommended-tools-designer-founders?utm_source=designernews

Do you mean the guide itself? We try to make sure we understand the types of designer founders served by the knowledge we share which is why we ask for that info before sharing the guides themselves. Does that make sense?

Today, we’re releasing our second Knowledge Guide: Recommended Tools. When starting a new company, many designer founders spend a lot of time researching and testing tools to help them effectively build their company. This includes design and product focused tools for A/B testing, prototyping, and design collaboration, as well as more general business tools to track customer support, invoicing, and sales. We think we can make designer founders more successful by sharing this siloed knowledge more broadly.

Happy to answer any DN community questions and would love feedback on other tools people find valuable.

So well done - you guys should talk about all the details that went into this game!

We're bringing together a group of exceptional founders who are committed to helping more designers build and scale tech companies. Through events and knowledge guides, we plan to distill best practices to share with the broader design community. Our first DFG knowledge guide is a list of recommended investors who’ve backed companies co-founded by designers because it’s hard to know which investors understand and value design at the early stages.

Happy to answer any questions from the DN community. Thanks all!

Wrote up some thoughts about why this update is so special - http://designerfund.com/design-everything - complete with Framer expert tips.

We get asked about comp a lot and hope this guide can be a great tool for designers joining startups. Let us know if you have more questions or tips you'd want to see added to it.