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These days, advent calendars often serve as a sobering reminder that the days before Christmas, which passed at a glacial pace when we were kids, now zoom through our fingers mercilessly.
A bit of that childhood titilation comes back into the holiday rush courtesy of UX Mastery and their UXmas digital advent calendar. For 14 days now, a new door has opened each day, revealing a “gift” to the UX community—articles, videos, sketches, and other goodies. And just like a real advent calendar, you never know what you’re going to get.
CEO Matthew Magain explains: “We thought of creating a Christmas countdown in late November, but figured there wasn’t time and canned the idea. Two days later we got an email from our friends at Thirst Studios—they’d had the exact same idea, and had taken it one step further by registering the uxmas.com domain, which we loved. With only one week to go before the start of December, we decided to team up and make it happen.”
They put the call out to as many UX people they could think of, asking the impossible: “Could you submit something to our project? We kind of need it tomorrow.”
“Incredibly, lots of people stepped up and submitted some amazing stuff, covering topics from all over the UX spectrum,” Magain continues. “So far we’ve published some video training by Jared Spool, a couple of short comics, career advice from Andy Budd, practical tips from Donna Spencer, a humorous opinion piece by Gerry Gaffney, exclusive book excerpts from SitePoint and Rosenfeld Media, and more. It’s been a really nice, collaborative effort, and we’ve been overwhelmed by the positive response from the community so far.”
Some of the best treats are supposedly being saved for last, so as these final ten days flit past, be sure to check in. Also, there are plans to run the calendar again next year, so get in touch if you have any worthy surprise ideas.
