4
Feb
2011
Cultivating Design for Greatest Yield
Direction has been given. The seeds have been sown. The project is in motion. You’re looking at the first round of proofs, and a lot of thoughts and feelings are rising within you. You know that you and your team are at a pivotal point in the process, so you want to make sure the project’s growth is proceeding correctly. Here are a few tips that I have learned through the years that will help you to eliminate weeds while cultivating great designs.
Be open minded
This might seem obvious, but it can mean more than you might think. Design preferences are often very subjective, but an experienced designer has reasons for each design decision they make. Find out what they are. It is important to not let personal preferences — either yours or the designer’s — negatively impact the effectiveness of a design. The fact that something looks weird to you might or might not mean that it should be changed. If you make decisions based on your own subjective opinions, you become a focus group of one, and such a small focus group does not represent your market. Design is not as subjective as it seems. Designers are trained with visual and psychological rules that can and should help to mitigate personal subjectivity.
Be specific
Talk in terms of how the design makes you feel. Talk about what you are getting from it or not getting from it. Mention what you see first and last. What stands out and what doesn’t. Designers respond better to too much feedback than they do to not enough. Be specific about what you do and don’t like about it. Blanket statements like, “This doesn’t meet our goals,” or “This is really good,” are fine, but they need to be qualified. Otherwise, designers are shooting in the dark when taking the design to the next stage of the process.
Have a discussion to avoid micromanagement
Chances are, you’re a busy professional and you may only have 10 minutes between the previous meeting and the next. It seems efficient to mark up a printout with a red pen and return it to the designer, but this can lose you time in the long run. Especially during the first few rounds of proofs, cultivating a design requires fluid communication. You have to eliminate the aspects you don’t want without harming the good stuff. Simply dictating changes — move this up a bit, put this over here, make that darker, use Helvetica, etc. — misses the discussion that will accomplish your goals more effectively. To use another metaphor, micromanaging a design is a lot like playing Jenga; you pull out the wrong piece and the whole thing collapses into a mess. Talking with the designer about how you feel about the design and what you both think should or should not be changed can help to make the final piece stronger.
Now and then, approve designs you don’t like
Crazy, right? It is a bit crazy, and it takes a lot of guts, but you don’t have to like a design for it to be effective. Knowing the difference between your tastes and what speaks to your audience can have a huge impact on the effectiveness of any effort, whether it is a website, an ad, a direct mailpiece, a package, or what have you. Once you cross this hurdle, you may find your tastes aligning more with effectiveness, so each time you do it, you will get better at it. This is something that I experienced as I learned to be a designer, but I still have to relegate my tastes to the back seat when I design.
Avoid design by committee at all costs
Your peers provide another challenge that you have to navigate in order to cultivate effective design. It’s natural to want to test designs by getting their feedback. But trying to cultivate designs by getting everyone’s approval and input can lead to disastrous results. Here is why.
First, everyone has an opinion, and they can be as various as the colors of the rainbow. Imagine one person’s opinion as yellow. Another’s is green. A third’s is blue, and so on. When you mix all these colors together, you’re not going to get a bright, strong color. You’re going to get something very muddy and indistinct. Similarly, if you try to incorporate the feedback from a group of peers, the resulting design has increased chances of being very blah. If a design is strong, it is going to evoke strong responses. Some will like it; some will hate it. That’s a good thing. If you want to get responses from your peers, make sure you read them in the broadest terms, like how they feel about the design; not in specifics, such as exact positioning of elements.
Second, if you make revisions based on a committee, you can end up with an incohesive design. One person likes this font; another likes a different one. One likes purple; another likes gray. One likes bullets; another likes bursts. Unless you’re trying to make Frankenstein’s monster, this is not the way develop a project. Keep the design strong by limiting the number of people who have influence. This puts more burden on you, but that will force you to grow too.
Stand behind your decisions
Just about everyone has a boss — unless you’re the CEO, someone above you has the responsibility of steering the company and its brands in the correct direction. So you may not have final say with respect to design. But you can give a strong presentation of the work that you and your team creates. If you present it passively, your superior is going to assume that they need to take a more active role. And if you immediately back down every time your superior tells you they don’t like something, you are not going to earn the respect of that person, and they will value your opinion less. So be more than just a messenger who carries a design to the big boss and then carries their response back. Provide project context. If presenting multiple ideas, say something strategic about what you think about each idea. When you can, and when appropriate, stand up for what you believe in, and know why you believe in it.
Keep on learning
In order to become a more effective leader of a creative team, you need to be able to change. The more you learn, the more you can challenge your team, the more you can understand where they are coming from, and the more you can achieve positive results with your superiors and with your customers. Designers might get annoyed if you just start using design lingo, but if you truly know what you are talking about, they will respect you more, and you’ll be able to get more from them.
2
Feb
2011
Design Direction for Strong Results
If you are in charge of designers for any reason, you are probably responsible for giving design direction. Whether you are an art director, a businessperson who has hired an independent designer, or a manager who has designers under them, you can give useful design direction. I’ve been on both sides of the equation, so I have learned a bit about both giving and receiving direction. A book could easily be written on the topic, but here are a few ideas.
Be Prepared
There’s nothing worse than meeting with a designer or design team without knowing what you want from them. What you want largely depends on your role — how much creative input you need, what types of decisions you want designers to make, what aspects of the design are flexible and what should be taken as given — you will get the most valuable output when you define parameters most clearly. Without clear parameters the results you get will be determined by the designer’s assumed parameters. The results could be too narrowly constrained to hit the mark, or too widely spread to have effective impact. So start out by knowing what you want.
Appoint a leader
If you are leading a team, but you are not a designer and/or you do not want to be involved in each small decision the team makes on a project, then you need a project leader. Without a leader, each member of the team will tend to do their own thing — for example, they may decide to create designs individually and present them all to you rather than work together. Sometimes this is desirable; sometimes it is not. Having a leader will help the team to focus, and each person on the team will know their role for the given project. It will also give the team leader important leadership experience. By having a different leader on different projects, you will strengthen your team collectively and the members individually.
Be specific, but encourage coloring outside the lines
When you’re prepared, you know the parameters of the project. Now you need to convey those parameters. Designers are not inspired by jargon. Exhortations such as “Think outside the box,” “Show me cutting-edge,” “Knock our socks off,” and “Be creative,” are not helpful to designers. These instructions are akin to telling an accountant to make sure the numbers are accurate. Lay out the project goals — are you looking for newsletter subscribers, visitors to your store or site, attendees at an event? Provide the designer with budget and time constraints. Talk about how the brand should be handled. Ask the designer to think of the best ways to meet those goals. Tell them what you don’t want. If you have a specific approach in mind, share it, but I suggest leaving the door open for different ideas.
Use examples
It is not always easy to describe what you want in a design. Sometimes it is hard to simply know what you want. One of the best ways to communicate what you want is through examples. I’m not suggesting that you have a designer copy another design, though often one design approach can be adapted for a different purpose. I’m suggesting that you know what you want ahead of time. It is your job to coach the designers who will be creating the design, and a coach never says to their team, “I don’t know what I want you to do, but I’ll know it when I see it. So go out there and win!” That’s not coaching, and it’s no help to the team. So have examples that communicate your tastes. You can have designers bring examples of what they see as effective and you can respond, but what if they don’t bring anything that you like? Ultimately, in order to save time, money, and frustration, it is up to you to communicate what you want in a meaningful way.
Listen
Questions and comments in response to your direction can be very informative. They can tell you what directions the designer is thinking of going, and whether or not they understand the goals of the project. They can also inform your direction and decision-making process. However prepared you are, creative people often have ideas that can add something valuable to the project, so be ready for that. You are creative too, and fostering the synergistic development of ideas is part of leadership.
Respond
After direction has been given and the designers have been set free to create, you will need to respond to that creation. Much like a farmer who has planted seeds, you will have to weed out the bad and cultivate the good. And that cultivation is just as important as the initial planting of ideas. My next post will be devoted to this process
9
Jun
2010
A Word to Forget
As a graphic designer there is one word I hear more than any other. This word is so powerful that it can either end the life of a design or usher it into the limelight. Yet it is a word that is so irrelevant to the quality of a design that it should be, at most, a side note. Everyone should forget this word while discussing designs. This word is “like.”
“I like it.” Angels sing. Success!
“I don’t like it.” The design is a failure. Back to the drawing board.
What’s wrong with liking or disliking a design? Pretend we’re not talking about a design. Pretend we’re talking about Bach. Some folks like his music. Some don’t. This has no bearing on whether or not Bach’s music is good. That Bach’s music is good is definsible objectively. Objective evaluations have nothing to do with likes or dislikes. They depend on a set of standards against which the object of evaluation is measured.
Why is design not evaluated by such standards? Why do clients* rely on subjective evaluations to make decisions about design? They wouldn’t use likes and dislikes to make decisions about a business plan or product development. Let’s home in on the reasons for this difference in behavior.
1. Ignorance
Nobody wants to admit that they are ignorant. It sounds so shameful, but it should not be. I drive on bridges every day. I see them every day. I have a lot of interaction with bridges. But I am ignorant of bridge building. I would not offer an opinion on whether or not a bridge design is structurally sound. The consequences would be obvious and most likely catastrophic.
The consequences of bad graphic design decisions are usually not as obvious or catastrophic (with some exceptions), so it is not so natural to learn what design decisions are bad and which are good through casual observation. Clients are put in the position of having to make these decisions, however. Without education in objective standards, it is understandable for decision-makers to follow their gut — what they like or dislike. Graphic designers should, whenever possible, educate decision-makers on the principles of design. This can lead to better decisions.
Yet even in the face of education, clients and executives often go by their likes and dislikes. Why?
2. Stubbornness
This is another negative-sounding word that is ultimately not so negative. Stubbornness often comes in the form of “Nothing that I don’t like is going out;” or, “I don’t like it, and it doesn’t matter what the designer says.” People in decision-making roles are often in that position because their guts have served them well. Their confidence and persistence have gotten them where they are today. They know their business and they are not going to be swayed against their preferences. There is no panacea for this situation. Trust has to be learned by one party and earned by the other, and that is an enormous, separate topic.
3. Fear
Inevitably, clients are more hands-on when their business is not going as well as they’d like. The reason for this is simple — fear. Fear that the tiniest misstep could be costly. Fear that designers are not invested enough and are not creating the best designs. The client fears that they haven’t been involved or concerned enough about small details. Sometimes they’re right. I think every designer understands this. And it’s not just designers who feel the scrutiny during such times.
When fear behavior persists through good times, however, it speaks to a more fundamental problem. If a client does not trust the designer they have hired, then something is very wrong. Maybe it’s communication issues on one or both sides. Maybe the designer isn’t educating the client properly. Maybe the designer is actually not trustworthy. But the knot of persistent fear will resultant in micromanagement and should be unwound and examined so that the client-designer relationship can become healthy again. Fear is contagious, and if a client is fearful that a designer is not going to do a good job, then the designer is going to be fearful as well.
In summary, design decision-making that involves likes and dislikes is indicative of problems and is ultimately harmful. But it is so common to talk about design using such terms of preference that many will not even know how to talk about design without them. That is what I would like to address in my next blog entry.
*”Clients” refers to both clients and business executives, who are the clients of in-house designers.
27
Sep
2009
Stock logos and the demise of customization
This past summer, my wife and I discovered homemade ice cream. Sounds nice, right? No, it’s not nice. It’s flippin’ awesome. You don’t know until you’ve tried it. And, like the ice cream, there are many things in our world that we just buy off of the shelf. Donuts, cereal, shoes, clothing, bikes… all of these things are made in stock varieties that everyone just passively lives with. I often imagine how wonderful it would be to have custom-made shoes — shoes made just for my peculiar feet. I have a sense it should be that way; I feel that something has been lost by quantizing the options I have to choose from. But there aren’t any cobblers in the yellow pages.
Perhaps logo design is going the way of cobblers. Only the wealthiest buy custom-made shoes — they have become a luxury. What’s mass-manufactured is good enough for the, um, masses. Maybe only the wealthiest will contract custom logos. As for everybody else, consider this list of prefab-logo mongers that I put together in 1 minute with a google search:
- Iconshock.com
- Shutterstock.com
- Pixellogo.com
- Logosinabox.com
- And now, the potential coup de grâce: Istockphoto.com
Maybe logo design is going that direction, but I don’t think so. I think that there will always be savvy businesspeople who know that their brand identity needs a logo that is part of the uniqueness and differentiation of their product or service. How can an off-the-shelf logo do that? Does a savvy businessperson buy a stock business plan and a stock marketing plan, or do they craft them to suit their vision? Do they use stock product designs or do they engage in the process of creating a unique product? Similarly, a savvy businessperson will participate with a design professional in the crafting of a custom logo suited to their vision and the brand that will arise.
And yet stock logos abound, soon more so than ever with the popular istockphoto.com weighing into the fray. It’s no surprise that I hear a lot of negativity about this new development. I think most of the concerns can be boiled down to these three points:
- A generic logo speaks to a generic identity. Pretty obvious.
- Stock logos undercut the value of professional design. This the biggest concern for smart designers. If potential clients can just go to an online warehouse and buy a logo off the shelf for a fixed rate, why would they consult a professional and pay (generally) more for a custom logo?
- The proliferation of stock logos perpetuates the perception that logos are a commodity, and you can get one anywhere.
These are all valid concerns. Some businesspeople will always look for ways to cut corners. The growth of stock logos makes this easier than ever. But there will also always be savvy businesspeople who will make the better choice and work with identity design professionals to create unique logos for their unique visions. So it’s not the end of the world. I actually think there are some benefits to istockphoto.com jumping on the already existing stock logo bandwagon.
- The istockphoto.com logos will, arguably, be better than MS Word clipart, or Art Bombardment 8 Billion Clip Art Files collecions. They will be created by graphic designers and will be editable and scalable at the very least.
- They will also be better than “logos” created in MS Paint. You’ve never seen such a thing? Really? If you haven’t seen a homemade MS Paint (MS Word) logo, then you haven’t really lived. It’s quite an enriching and affirming experience for a graphic designer.
- Since the istockphoto logos will be made by designers, designers will be paid for them. And since it will be designers all over the place contributing (not just from one company), there will be some diversity.
- Istockphoto.com’s pricing structure seems better than some of the others. $35 for a logo? Really? Would you contract a lawyer to draw up your corporate charter for $35? If you would pay $35 for either of these things, you’ll surely get what you pay for. Istockphoto’s logos will range from over $100 to almost $1000. That’s a little bit better. Stop yelling at your monitor. I said it’s better, not good.
- Istockphoto.com will offer exclusivity on the logo designs. That means that, unlike istockphoto’s stock photos, if you buy a logo, you won’t have to worry about your competitor down the street, or someone completely unrelated, using the same graphic. That’s absolutely brilliant — it’s sound common sense.
- As always, the existence of off-the-shelf logos will highlight the value of custom logo design. A lot of inexperienced businesspeople are looking for a little widget to put next to their company name on their business cards. That’s what they’ll get with a stock logo design. But good logo design isn’t a space-filler. It’s magic. The logo mark goes with the company name and vision like it was born there.
So don’t worry. Because there is intrinsic value in custom, professional logo design, there will always be a need for custom, professional logo design. But as designers, we must be more certain than ever that we provide that value. Don’t give clients logos they could have bought off a virtual shelf somewhere. Give them the power of custom identity.
15
Jul
2009
Real Design Collaboration
Have you ever been working with a designer, standing or sitting by them as they work on a document? They asked for your help, so you suggested they try one thing, move another thing, rotate something, add something, etc? Or maybe you’re the one in front of the computer listening to someone else give suggestions. Wouldn’t it be easier if you both could actually work on the document at the same time? Instead of saying, “Try rotating this 3°. Try five. Okay, take it back a half of a degree,” you could just do it and see if it works.
Here’s my idea: What if designers could collaborate on a layout in real time? I don’t mean that one designer takes care of one aspect of a job, and another takes care of another aspect, then they put them together. I think it would be fantastic if I were working on a layout that was giving me trouble, and I could say to one of the other designers, “Would you jump in here with me and give me a hand?”
Here’s what I’m thinking. In a given application, for the document on which some designers want to collaborate:
- Each designer could stay at their own computer.
- Each would get a cursor, and everyone would see it. Maybe the cursors could be color coded to keep them distinct.
- Each designer would have full editing capabilities.
- When one designer selects an object or layer, that object would be locked to the other designers and specially tagged to indicate someone else is working on it.
- Each designer could be working on different objects, layers, etc. at the same time.
- A voice/video chat option would be included in case the designers are not right next to each other.
I have a feeling that this sounds like hell to some of you: There will be arguments and differences of opinion. It will get confusing with multiple people editing the same document. It would be annoying to wait while someone applis a big filter. Sure, it could be awful. But I’m not suggesting this as a regular workflow. It’s only for special projects or situations that would benefit from multiple inputs at the same time. And it would not have to be a free-for-all; designers could be civilized and take turns.
I don’t think there are any technical barriers to this type of application workflow. What are your thoughts — is it a horrible idea or a fantastic idea? What other uses for such technology can you think of?
Oh, and Adobe, are you listening?
5
Apr
2009
First post brought to you by Twitter and the Standby Symbol
I owe the fact that I have a blog now to Twitter. If I hadn’t joined twitter and started following interesting people, I would not have been inspired to create a forum for my own thoughts. It’s fun to be able to share ideas and links through Twitter, but it’s impossible to develop thoughts through that medium. I could post links to other people’s sites and comment on other people’s sites, but this felt a bit hollow. Wouldn’t it be better to put my thoughts on my site rather than other people’s sites, where I have no cohesive presence?
