A story about reconnecting with my first true love
Prologue
Oh my days, I used to LOVE design. Ever since I was a spotty teenager I wanted to be a graphic designer. It’s all I ever wanted to do (I previously flirted with being a chef or helicopter pilot, but I digress…) It sounded so cool and my graphic design teacher said I had some decent talent.
But I fell out of love with design. Like I can’t explain. It was my one true non-biological love affair and my heart was shattered. WTF happened, and how do I fix this? How do I fall back in love with design?
I’m going to try to tackle this issue using a design thinking process.
Oh you've never heard of design process? Thats because it’s the slide thats left out of the deck you show stakeholders. No-one outside of design cares about the ‘process’.
The Brief
Design is about solving problems, here is the classic double diamond (a bit dated, but much easier to understand)
Discover
Somewhere in 2017(ish) I fell out of love with design.
I was getting divorced, freelancing my ass off, depressed and working on some terribly bad projects with the most toxic people I had ever met. My life was in free fall, but I had a huge monthly overhead to pay. Exhausted and being bullied by the worst person I have ever worked with, I left a well paid contract (by mutual agreement), went home and went to bed for a few months. I had left my marriage but I felt like I had also broken up with design.
How to a fall back in love with design?
Design Research
Let’s go back to the start
I used to fucking LOVE design. I always wanted to be a graphic designer. I left school and went to LCP, where my first design hero Neville Brody went, and my second design hero Tom Eckersley taught. I studied Typography, and started playing around with type.
I used to take the train up to college at Farringdon, have steak and kidney pie and chips (with a strong cup of urn tea) for breakfast in an old caff off of Theobolds Road, and spend my days tracing 6pt type, watching videos on Letraset, Linotype and learning about type foundries and the building blocks of visual communication. Typography is amazing. Its a sorely underrepresented skill in modern product design, but I digress…
Well I graduated and went to work in advertising.
Define
What are the areas to focus on? Well we can identify some pain points
Gatekeeping
My goodness, theres so much gatekeeping in design now it's dreadful. The biggest enabler of this is LinkedIn. Apparently you cannot be UI/UX. You cant do research without a Masters. Look its ok to expect a decent foundation of education and some solid experience but gatekeeping is so anti-design its sickening. As long as you have design chops you are so welcome in this wonderful industry. Take a seat. Have a custard cream.
Trends
Digital Product design is not subjective. Nor is it ‘Trendy’ (eurgh) Sure, there used to be design trends, in the days where everything just needed to look and feel a certain way. Now there are a plethora of articles that promote ‘UX trends’, ‘the next 10 big things in UX design’ etc.
It's snake oil. There are no trends in UX. UX is a set of immutable, intelligent human interface design principles, grounded in behavioural psychology. Even UI, which suffered the cult of Flat design (AKA simple minimalism) is affected by this need to categorise ‘talent’ as something to be appropriated.
We need to talk about Agile…
Erm, design (as a discipline) is not agile, its waterfall.
Design is a process, it takes time, it can’t be broken down into JIRA stories
Product design PRODUCTION… yes that’s agile.
Sometimes you need some time to create a solution to a problem, and that solution does not fit into agile.
Anti-Minimalism
Minimalism is your north star in digital design. But my goodness its tough to Keep It Simple, Stupid! (KISS)
The best example of the need for simplicity is the perfect homepage:
The perfect homepage only needs 3 things:
- Minimal branding
- The value proposition
- A single CTA
This homepage with convert 300% better. Design is about simplicity.
Marketing
One of the biggest constraints in digital product design is Marketing.
Design and Marketing are like oil and water. One is trying to get more people to spend money. The other is trying to make stuff easier and more fun to use. Good design is really hard to quantify in a set of yearly sales results. The amount of organisations whose entire design department is governed by marketing is remarkable (hello M&S!).
Put simply, the user is on a journey of discovery, they find stuff that they want to buy. You then hit them with a banner ad, a pop up voucher, a PROMO, you are simply overwhelming their cognitive load and you’ll lose a potential customer.
Ways of working
In a recent job interview, I proposed that finding the right ways of working at an organisation, was part of the design process. Its literally ‘Human Centred Design’
Evangelise design
As designers, we need to solve problems, one of those is that unless we adequately express what we ACTUALLY do, and how it fits into the overall project, we are just some ‘humans making rectangles in Figma’ and listening to EDM on grossly overpriced headphones.
Understand Product
We also need to understand PRODUCT. Working closely with Product on how to successfully add value and ship decent products and features is critical. It starts by creating a relationship that is born of mutual respect and integrity Understanding constraints.
Understand Tech
Then we need to really make friends with TECH. Understanding code is not critical to a designer, but understanding platforms, systems and how a large DevOps team work together is a great way to get our stuff built brilliantly.
Inspiration
Competitor analysis is useless. You are looking at what a company did 18 months ago. They haven't shipped the new stuff. It’s up to you to lead the way. But it's always good to see what is out there. For my design research I tend to go ‘back to basics’ before Dribbling over Dribbble
I always start with my design heroes:
Otl Aicher
“Good art inspires; Good design motivates.”
Otl Aicher (May 13, 1922 — September 1, 1991) was one of the leading German graphic designers of the 20th century, and the designer of the identity of the 1972 Munich Olympics.
Raymond Loewy
“between two products equal in price, function, and quality, the better looking will outsell the other.”
The father of industrial design, responsible for such product design behemoths as the slenderised Coca-Cola bottle, the streamlined Greyhound bus, the Lucky Strike cigarette package, as well as some of the most famous Identities, Exxon, Greyhound, Shell, and the U.S. Postal Service. Life Magazine selected Loewy as one of the 100 most influential Americans of the twentieth century.
Neville Brody
“An electrician isn’t an opinion former, but a graphic designer is. My argument is that all graphic designers hold high levels of responsibility in society. We take invisible ideas and make them tangible. That’s our job.”
The other reason I went to LCP, and the guy who introduced me to Bauhaus Inspired Typography. Known for his work on The Face and Arena magazines of the 80′s, as well as album covers for Depeche Mode and Cabaret Voltaire.
Ralph McQuarrie
“George had described Vader as having flowing black robes. In the script, Vader had to jump from one ship to another and, in order to survive the vacuum of space, I felt he needed some sort of breathing mask. George said, ‘OK,’ suggested adding a samurai helmet, and Darth Vader was born. Simple as that.”
There would, arguably have been no Star Wars without Ralph McQuarrie. When George Lucas was trying to sell Star Wars to the studios he realised that he needed some conceptual paintings to help green light the picture. He called on a commercial artist and designer whose career included stints at Boeing and Kaiser Graphic Arts and creating animations of Apollo space flights for CBS. Ralph McQuarrie came up with the look of Darth Vader, C-3PO, R2-D2, the Stormtroopers and many other characters, then going on to helping design such classics as Raiders of the Lost Ark, E.T, Back to the Future, Cocoon, Total Recall and the original TV series “Battlestar Galactica.
Ralph McQuarrie died in March 2012
Shigeru Miyamoto
“A delayed game is eventually good; a bad game is bad forever.”
The Father of modern video games, and creator of Mario and Donkey Kong. Shig is a hero to anyone who has ever played or been involved with gaming.
Tom Eckersley
“…that stimulating time when certain artists, supported by enlightened clients, saw opportunities to use their art and their vision to solve communication problems. They began to realise the many exciting visual possibilities that could be derived from the major art movements taking place in Europe between the wars”
English poster artist and design tutor, creator of most of my favourite posters. Tom Eckersley spent much of his childhood drawing. He was greatly inspired by the work of A. M. Cassandre and Edward Mcknight Kauffer. At college he met Eric Lombers, who shared his passion for progressive poster art. From 1934 they collaborated on a number of poster design for key patrons London Transport, Shell and the BBC. During the Second World War Eckersley produced propaganda posters for public service agencies including the Ministry of Information and the General Post Office. After the war, the bold simplicity and timeless quality of his designs led to prolonged international success. His teaching inspired new generations of progressive designers for over 30 years.
I hugely recommend you buy this book. It’s marvellous.
Dieter Rams
“My goal is to omit everything superfluous so that the essential is shown to best possible advantage.”
German über product designer and major influence on Apple design. Starting out in Architecture and moving on to product design for Braun. He came up with ten principles for good design, I still print these out big as possible and stick to the wall in the studio for everyone to enjoy.
Dieter Rams’ 10 Principles of Good Design
1. Good design is innovative
The possibilities for innovation are not, by any means, exhausted. Technological development is always offering new opportunities for innovative design. But innovative design always develops in tandem with innovative technology, and can never be an end in itself.
2. Good design makes a product useful
A product is bought to be used. It has to satisfy certain criteria, not only functional, but also psychological and aesthetic. Good design emphasises the usefulness of a product whilst disregarding anything that could possibly detract from it.
3. Good design is aesthetic
The aesthetic quality of a product is integral to its usefulness because products we use every day affect our person and our well-being. But only well-executed objects can be beautiful.
4. Good design makes a product understandable
It clarifies the products structure. Better still, it can make the product talk. At best, it is self-explanatory.
5. Good design is unobtrusive
Products fulfilling a purpose are like tools. They are neither decorative objects nor works of art. Their design should therefore be both neutral and restrained, to leave room for the users self-expression.
6. Good design is honest
It does not make a product more innovative, powerful or valuable than it really is. It does not attempt to manipulate the consumer with promises that cannot be kept.
7. Good design is long-lasting
It avoids being fashionable and therefore never appears antiquated. Unlike fashionable design, it lasts many years — even in today’s throwaway society.
8. Good design is thorough down to the last detail
Nothing must be arbitrary or left to chance. Care and accuracy in the design process show respect towards the consumer.
9. Good design is environmentally friendly
Design makes an important contribution to the preservation of the environment. It conserves resources and minimises physical and visual pollution throughout the lifecycle of the product.
10. Good design is as little design as possible
Less, but better — because it concentrates on the essential aspects, and the products are not burdened with non-essentials. Back to purity, back to simplicity.
* TV ad break *
Get a coffee and some posh biscuits, and enjoy the two best TV ads that have ever graced a television:
Ok I’m back, did you save me a biscuit?
Weaknesses
Packaging, along with identity, were always my weakest suits as a designer, so I’ll just leave my favourite examples, which are Portuguese fish tin designs.
Develop
Ok here are some ‘solutions’ to make design better and more enjoyable for everyone. Let's try to understand what we should be doing properly. First the big things:
Big ticket ‘things’
1. Gatekeeping is toxic: The idea that there are some ‘things’ you are not welcome to experience, or don’t have the skills to appreciate. You ‘cant do UX’ if you are a graphic designer, you cant do research, without a degree in Psychology etc. ‘A designer needs to have a formal education’. ‘Designers should code’. Yadayadyada.
This is just people projecting their insecurities on you. Human beings are programmed to try to find a way to make you feel lower graded and sub-delineated by an arbitrary factor.
As a designer, you can achieve EVERYTHING, and you are AMAZING.
Classic design, layout, typography and colour theory are disciplines to be respected and practised daily. You can become really amazing at all of them.
UX is based on psychological behaviours that anyone can read and learn. And most digital platforms are based on navigational patterns that are obvious to everyone. Its literally not rocket science
Anybody who puts up barriers to your progress is just scared of their weaknesses, lack of cognitive ability and are trying to protect their lack of talent.
Be awesome. Ignore this noise.
2. Design Principles: These are a wonderfully immutable set of principles that you can use to protect you from the subjective noise that you will always experience whenever you put out a piece of lovely design. There are Gestalt principles, and a decent traditional design education will solidify this, but everyone can learn these tenets.
As long as you make everything inclusive, familiar, visually congruent and easy to understand, you have done a great job. Be proud of your job and your responsibility
3. The HIPPO problem: ‘The highest paid person’s opinion’
Anyone who has worked at the highest level in design will know that you will face the final boss, which is the CEO or whoever is the highest paid person, and they will try to tell you to make the buttons bigger, or change the colour.
Your job is to tell truth to power. Its ok, its scary but you will always be a better designer if you can throw away the shackles of corporate hierarchy and just be yourself.
Little ticket ‘things’
1) Mobile First. Mobile is not a screen size, it’s a set of behaviours, it's about making more out of using less. Less space, bandwidth, input methods and attention span
2) Design for Disruption. Everyone is busy, easily distracted, and multi-tasking. Try to provide context, signposting and break content up in snackable chunks
3) Brevity. OMG my nemesis. Make everything smaller, tighter and super relevant. Speak less and respect peoples busy schedules. Decks don’t need to be 100 slides. Being good at something is also being able to explain it really simply and quickly
4) Remove stuff. Its a taboo in design but sometimes making a product better is about removing complexity, choices, old features and old code
5) Avoid showing multiple options. Showing choice at the start just shows no focus and creates doubt and noise. Show the design solution, then if it absolutely does not get stakeholder buy-in, then chuck it and start again.
6) Any piece of digital design should aim to be clean, concise, familiar, low bandwidth and visually congruent. These tenets are product agnostic, universal experience principles
7) Get a proper lunch. It’s a great time to spend with colleagues. It’s also both 100% inclusive, equitable and diverse, whatever age, gender, race, religion, we ALL eat lunch.
8) Never underestimate the power of good coffee
9) Software is just a tool. You don’t have to be great at Figma to be great at design.
10) Its not the size of the button that needs changing, its what’s competing with the button for attention that needs review.
Deliver
I strongly believe if you are passionate about design, you will have a great career, you will get the jobs that require you to do what you think your manager/product owner will like, but you will also get the jobs that allow you to create, inspire and hopefully change minds.
I hope to fall back in love with design soon, I also hope this helps you too
Thanks for reading!
Mx
p.s. If you like this sort of thing I also write about other stuff on my Substack
