ChangeOrder

What My Yoga Teacher Taught Me About the Design Business

A few months ago, my yoga teacher Jennifer made some bold statements that I couldn't help but write down and think about in the context of design business...

1. Gain is an illusion.

We need to get paid for what we do (unless you've got one of those trust funds that we're all clamoring for). However, we can't get too caught up in the illusion that doing good work for a fair price earns you some thing in return. Design is one of the most selfless professions, in the sense that what we reap from our actions are artifacts that usually create value for other people (read: clients).

Gain is an illusion in this profession, as shown in our portfolios, which are a record of our activity. Our portfolios are not us. The humanity of our design activity is evident in the work. I find that mature designers learn this, just as professional writers, painters, and musicians achieve a level of success when they are able to see their work with a clear eye, divorced from any personal context.

Gain can be reflected in what we are paid, both in personal satisfaction, in the realization of our talent as artists, and in compensation, but money alone is an indicator of value more than a token of actual progress and change. At least, to clients and tax advisors.

It's my belief that true gain -- personal gain -- happens out of the corner of our eyes, when we're not focused on the work at hand, when we aren't aware of any sort of boundary around our talent and experience. It sneaks up on you and pounces when you least expect it, which is when it's most welcome and appreciated.

The word gain isn't even the right word to describe it. Maybe we should just call it fulfillment of potential.

2. Don't lean too far into the future... or the past.

Designers are extraordinarily intelligent, soulful, yet pragmatic individuals, often possessing whole brains that can cartwheel between fanciful dreamscape and logical Web site user flow.

It's fairly easy to short-circuit a designer: make them focus on their past work, where they begin to drill into the compromises that they made on each client project, or try to plot out the future, with its bevy of unknowns and fear of unfulfilled ambition. (I know I've been wanting to design book covers since I got out of college, due to my deep love of books as designed artifacts and my voracious reading habit. Definite hasn't happened yet.)

I started doing yoga about a year ago, and realized how many mental cycles I was spinning in worrying about the progress of my work and my life. Progress and change are constant as a designer, even as we strive to create a design that's finished. (Have you figured out what a finished design is yet?) If you're spending a good deal of your time in the moment, communing with your design work, you may discover that you're going to be a lot more happy in the creative process, and surprise yourself with the results.

3. If you're feeling pain, you should back out of it.

If you try too hard to reach for a goal, you pay for it with a measure of your humanity. This is the kind of lesson that's always learned through pain.

Until the age of 31, I was a design masochist. I would always complete any job or task, at agency large or small, no matter what the personal cost. Isn't that what's supposed to be expected from a top-of-their-game creative workhorse? Uh, wrong.

If you don't have boundaries and protect your humanity, you don't have room to grow. Think of it like this: you decide that you're going to run a marathon, then only train by doing 800-meter sprints. There's no way you'll survive a career as a creative if you don't pace yourself and respect your limits. This is especially bad in the big creative agencies, where your tolerance for pain is often subverted due to undue expectations.

I've watched designers burn up in a ball of flame because they put every bit of themselves into their work, to the detriment of themselves, their work, and their employers. Personal investment is important, but you need the space to keep your creative self whole. Avoid that by training like a good athlete: build yourself up for the big races through cross-training and fostering a support network, get the right amount of rest, eat right, and make sure to keep a copy of The Elements of Typographic Style by your bedside if you want to keep your A-game going.

If your work is always too painful to accomplish, rethink what you're doing. Question everything: your clients, your talents, your process, your fees. Chances are, there's an imbalance in one of those four areas that needs to be rectified.

4. It's a lifelong practice, even if you don't do it every day.

You don't stop being a designer if you aren't designing 8 hours a day, or even 2 hours. Be secure in your talent. When you aren't thinking about a design problem, talent continues to exist in full measure.

5. Be sure to use both your mind and your body.

Something that surprised me about beginning yoga practice is that focusing on the body and forming discrete poses creates space in the mind for the self to well up. The same approach applies to great design work, which requires space for emotion to emerge in the design itself.

Often, we need to feel our way through the design, capture what emotion arises there in the material, and craft that raw artwork into what the job at hand requires. If you analyze things too deeply, they often fall apart or fail to contain that essential human element that resonates with people beyond ink on a page or pixels on a monitor.

Any other thoughts?

Why I Am a Designer

Farewell, graphic designer. We'll miss you.

If you're hiring somebody for a design position... if you're freelancing in the design community... if you're about to make the leap into this burgeoning field... leave the word "graphic" off your title. Just call yourself a designer.

I think it's time to put the title "Graphic Designer" on the top shelf in the closet, turn off the light, and tiptoe softly to bed.

A "Graphic Designer" today may be responsible for a range of graphic applications across various materials, but that's not what we're paid to do anymore. We're asked to consider audience experiences through media. The expression of that consideration is our tangible work, but the volume and quality of thought that creates the work is often just as valuable. Designers can contribute insights and ideas that have ramifications far beyond some ink on a page, or colors on an LCD display.

At the shop where I work, in any given week we may be responsible for creating a motion graphics piece, a Web site, a poster, a 60-page annual, a logo, an advertisement, an email, or a brand experience that extends into a physical presence at an event. Different people at my office have deep competencies in many of these areas, but none of us can be great at all of them -- which is as it should be. But the thinking underlying all of the design as part of those deliverables is always focused in the following way:

1. We think about, over time, what the audience may expect from our clients, and exceed those expectations through what they experience.

2. We consider what happens through the audience interaction with each touch point, and attempt to make them as intuitive and effortless as possible.

3. We see how those interactions/touch points sew themselves into a cohesive story and experience, fostering meaning over the course of a relationship with a brand.

Design as a discipline has broadened to encompass functional considerations in a way that has made the term "media designer" or just plain "designer" carry more (ambiguous) meaning. And I like it that way.

Designers reduce uncertainty and provide meaning, value, and respect for our client's products and services. Adding the term "graphic" doesn't speak to long-form experience. It speaks of responsibility for managing visual graphic quality, which is often reduced by clients to a function of decoration.

I'm not interested in decoration as a sole function of being a designer, and the designers that I work with -- while passionately dedicated to creating the most artful visuals they are capable of achieving -- know that a killer design won't overcome a flawed strategy. Well-designed visuals don't function in the marketplace if they don't speak to a grounded insight into a real human need. Besides, as design tools become more easily used by our clients, our skill sets will overlap, and they'll be telling us to drop the leading by two points on the paragraph styles.

How to Get Started in the Design Business

Know what you're good at, and what you wish you were good at. Outsource the latter until you learn your vendor's methods. Note the partnership in your portfolio. People won't look down on you for being a team player. In fact, they'll want you on their team because you know who to call when you need to bring in a photographer or a copywriter.

Sell what you're capable of providing and what is within reach. Designers are always encouraged to stretch outside their boundaries, and that's fair if you're strong in a related area -- a brochure design to go with that logo you just put together, or a newspaper ad that goes along with the billboard. Don't cross clear boundaries, like offering to design a Flash advertising campaign just because you've done some print ads, if you don't have the chops to fulfill it. Build your expertise on work that's structured to accommodate long-term learning, like pro bono projects.

Even if you think big picture, you may need to start small. A portfolio accretes over time, slowly evolving. Don't think every project will land within the hallowed pages of your book, or you will pay for it in skinned knees and time lost. Those who choose their battles wisely see the utility of failure and the value of identifying what work deserves that extra 3% of polish.

Know your methods. They're what set you apart. Utilizing software is a skill. Design thinking is a talent. You need to merge the two to win in this business. Oh, and also a really good account manager.

Stay humble, but be an authority. There's nothing worse than a designer with a big ego, lording over their client. It's not your name on that poster -- it's your client's. Do what's right for them and you'll have a job. Become an Artist with a capital A if you want to fulfill your dreams and impose your vision on the world. The pay isn't so hot, though...

Are You A Non-Profit Designer?

I'm not talking about pro bono work. I'm talking about barely breaking even on existing client work. You can make the most beautiful design work in the world and run yourself right out of business. Here's how.

Bill different rates for different clients, based on how much you like them. Sure, give that classy nonprofit a hefty discount. And that referral you got from your sister, cut them a break too. Pretty soon, everyone's getting a deal, and you're bleeding money. Keep a consistent rate structure and you'll be protected in case of emergencies. Don't bill clients like you're running a retail store. You aren't selling a product. You're providing a service.

Give little extras away for free on every client project. It wasn't in the contract, but it'll just take you a few minutes, so why not make that sticker? And if they need changes to it along with a quick little one-sheet, that'll take only take a half-hour, right? There goes $1,000 out the window. Every time a client asks me for something gratis, I have to weigh the value of the work they've requested against the long-term value of the work we're contributing to their business. With rare exception, extra work always requires compensation. Otherwise, your client will expect the Mercedes-Benz luxury treatment when all you've got is a Toyota hatchback to offer.

Be a killer designer, but don't keep up with technology. Assume that every three years, the technology landscape will change dramatically. Browsers evolve. Markup standards change. Printers upgrade their prepress systems. Software vendors change the fundamentals of their interfaces. Not knowing your tools and implementation methods, or not having a strong support staff that can keep you up to date, can cause you major strife while you're also trying to get out the work. It also plants fear in the hearts of your clients and is a big risk factor for retaining business in the long term.

Do spec work to land every project. Rule of thumb: If you can afford to give away a week of work for free in order to land every new project, you probably shouldn't be doing spec work. You should be taking a vacation due to your extraordinary wealth. Or, as is more often the case, you should be scrambling to improve your cash flow by closing new-business opportunities that only require proposals -- and fewer flaming hoops to jump through. Besides, those flaming hoops usually set your clothes on fire and then you need to run around in circles, waving your hands in a panic until help arrives...

Taking Stock of Using Stock Imagery and Type

At first glance on the magazine page, you notice the tightly-drawn outline of the Los Angeles skyline, and below it, a pool of blue-green water roughly splashed and dripping down the page. Within that three-dimensional puddle are any number of shapes that merge and swirl together like a Rorsharch inkblot: men resting in large inflatable rafts rendered in razor-sharp vector outlines, hand-drawn sketches meant to represent scribbled paparazzi with cameras raised to their faces. And did I mention the typography? The slab serif face fading in and out of the water, calling out different facets of the brand's services...

As I looked deep into the design, I began to pick out elements that I recognized from various stock agencies, from the ever-ubiquitous Getty Images and their iStockPhoto microstock service. The typeface resolved itself into a familiar friend, just distorted a little in Adobe Illustrator. In time, I could see little other than a vector illustration that was hand-created by some artistic soul, who then blew into their vision a rash of raster and type assets that were cleverly arranged and manipulated, but not singularly unique.

Such is the hazard of being a designer in today's stock-controlled environment for visual assets. The times can often seem fleeting for those designs that rest upon custom-created imagery and illustration -- those tiny details that elevate your creative work from an intelligent execution with commodity imagery to a singular work of commercial art.

You can create good design with mediocre imagery or so-so typefaces. But you can only create great design with great imagery and killer type use. And great imagery and type costs money, time, or both -- something many clients are loath to sacrifice for a deadline. They see sites like Getty Images or Corbis and assume that we can just go buy what we need, drop it into a layout, and we're "Good to go!"

Here's a few rules for ensuring that projects with custom asset needs escape into the world with some measure of soul.

1) Never use royalty-free imagery or microstock for high-level client work. Period.

These days, the shelf-life of a design is however long it takes for an image to "crash" into another. I vividly recall landing what seemed like the perfect photograph for a high-profile advertisement, and right when the ad ran, seeing the same photograph plastered across the Web site home page of a direct competitor.

The client, angry, called and asked how such a thing could occur. We explained to them that since they'd cut the photo budget out of the contract, we had no choice but to use royalty-free assets -- and even rights-managed assets would have held the risk of an "indirect" collision with another placement in a similar industry. The client wasn't thrilled with the outcome, but future projects did contain the proper amount of money for use of rights-managed imagery that was vetted through the stock agency to ensure there was no overlap of use across any close industry.

In the end, it would have been cheaper to just shoot the photographs!

Unless assets have been manipulated far beyond the original presentation, or used as a very quiet support in a layout, the use of royalty-free or microstock assets is much too risky.

2) Don't let clients negotiate the cost of assets out of your contracts as "padding." You'll burn time and money seeking out the right visuals, or salvaging poor imagery.

Make it clear to your clients that great design requires quality assets. No questions asked. Either they give them to you or you charge them for acquiring or creating them.

Ensure those costs are captured in your fees, no matter whether it's a photo shoot or the rights for high-quality stock imagery, plus markup. If they try to shake you down in this area, chances are that in the end, they may not value your overall design as much as you'd like.

If they are a marquee brand and the work you're creating has shelf life beyond the immediate deliverable, consider a photo shoot or custom illustration as part of the cost of doing business. (Also, it's a definite red flag if you're working with a major brand and they can't provide you with a pool of custom-created assets to support their overall brand needs.)

If you need to negotiate on price, work with your client to negotiate on your fees, but keep your photo costs and markup on those services to ensure profit. In the end, you'll likely save money by not having to burn countless hours searching through the stock pools for "that perfect image."

3) Always assume all visual assets, whether purchased from a stock agency or provided by the client, will require retouching. And budget accordingly.

Just because you bought an image at Getty Images doesn't mean it's going to print beautifully on a CMYK press. Never think that any image whose rights you acquire, from custom-created to stock-licensed, will ever be prepped for reproduction in print or proper use on the Internet. Always budget the time or the outside resources to assure the quality of your assets. I never let an image out into the world without some level of color-correction.

4) Don't go back to your client to get approval for using a new typeface. Factor the licensing costs for yourself and/or your studio into your fees.

Designers love to work outside the box, and projects such as logo development always ask for seeking out new flavors of type as inspiration. Just fold the potential costs of licensing a new font into your agency fees, instead of selling in a killer logo and then dropping the bomb on your client that they'll need to pony up an extra $500 to cover the typeface for your agency. This conversation usually ends with a pissed off client and a designer eating the cost as overhead.

--

The stock industry has created a beautiful illusion of instant-access imagery and fonts as a commodity for creative professionals, as well as anyone else who can afford the licensing fees. Let's do our best to educate our clients to the real complexities of ensuring quality visuals in our design work -- and get paid accordingly for it.

The Three Fundamentals of Creative Strategy, Pt. 3

Read Part 1 and Part 2.

Great creative strategy always starts with a clear articulation of a business problem, and a rational strategy for solving it. This is the outer layer of the onion that peels away to expose a marketing strategy -- or a sales strategy, or a need to retool existing products or services due to customer feedback, etc.

To forge the right approach, quantify the business problem, qualify the competition, and distill what you've learned to show understanding of their need. This post talks about qualifying the competition and distilling what you've learned.

Qualify the Competition and How It Shapes the Problem

After the client presents the business problem and you ask necessary questions to understand its context, look at everything you can find that frames the problem from the competitor's point of view.

Clear business strategy is crucial for us designers in presenting proposals or participating in a pitch, where clients may intentionally refrain from disclosing key information to see how much you can glean and intuit from the scraps scattered across the media and the Internet.

You need to sniff out the business reasons for specific marketing initiatives through client interviews and research in order to ensure that you're making the most appropriate strategic decisions to solve their business problem.

You also need to show that you understand the world that your client lives in, understanding the trends that shape their industry.

This is different from traditional market research, which would live in your marketing strategy.

This is knowing which competitors are privately held, and sometimes more nimble, versus publicly traded. Which products in their industry are selling the best, and why. What the analysts from Forrester and other trending firms are saying about your industry category. What the Wall Street Journal noted in their most recent column on your corporate outlook. What is going on locally and globally on a cultural level that could have an impact on your business.

All these elements shape the world view that your client holds. Being able to present this kind of information, peppered through your ongoing communication, lets your client know that you appreciate where they're coming from -- and helps to support your creative strategy from a business perspective.

Distill What You've Learned to Show Understanding

The best trust-building exercise with a new client is reflecting back to them what they said, in an intelligent manner, with a few key learnings that they may not be aware of.

Whenever you write a proposal for a new project, you should begin the document with a narrative articulation of the client's business case and current strategy. This shows to the client that you understand their business needs at a high level, and any marketing recommendations that may follow are derived directly from their needs.

Always try to simply answer Who? What? When? Where? and Why? The How? is always proposed through what follows the business strategy: our marketing strategy.

As you craft this paragraph or two, be aware of your audience. As such, I make it as simple and quick to understand as possible. I always pretend, as I'm writing, that the CEO of the company could get their hands on this document. Besides, don't you want the CEO signing off on the dotted line and handing you that nice big project?

--

Future posts in this series will talk about how to leap from the business problem to your creative solution through marketing strategy and tactics.

Designers Create Artifacts, Not Art

The best graphic designers seem to possess the most finely honed aesthetic apparatus of any type of visual artist, when it comes to clearly communicating an idea.

We may not create works on par with the great painters of antiquity or the boldest conceptual artists of our current age, but we create works that have to retain meaning consistently through reproduction. This not only requires an artistic sensibility. It requires great empathy for a body of people -- our audience, per the creative brief -- and a shared cultural language that ensures our work doesn't turn into a tangle in our audience's minds.

The work that I admire as a designer, the work that contains a sense of meaning no matter what the cultural or business context, retains a kernel of the impact that a true, physically-made piece of art would hold. But it isn't art.

Strong designers are able to scrape away at the page or the computer screen until they uncover a hint of the aura of art, then shape it into a consistent communication. This takes patience, intuition, and the ability to smell an idea that can survive replication in its production and delivery. Clear conceptual thinking. Simplicity of thought that is consistent in delivery. Otherwise, the audience can't clearly discern what you want them to feel.

Any posturing from a designer that they are an artist of any stripe only holds true when they're making personal work. Calling your day-to-day design work in a corporate context artful does not mean that it's art. (Though many agencies I've worked at hang the actual designs we've done around the office, artfully shot and presented as such.)

The critic Walter Benjamin, whom I had to read when in college, made a huge impact on my personal design work only because I've resisted his thoughts for some time. Of course, in resisting them, I was only validating them:

"That which withers in the age of mechanical reproduction is the aura of the work of art... One might generalize by saying: the technique of reproduction detaches the reproduced object from the domain of tradition. By making many reproductions it substitutes the plurality of copies for a unique existence. And in permitting the reproduction to meet the beholder or listener in his own particular situation, it reactivates the object reproduced..." (from "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction")

Walter Benjamin published these words in 1936, and it never reached an English-speaking audience until 1968. I can think of no better description as to what designers need to be aware of in their work -- and their own disposition.

Design ideas have to transcend the computer and consistently create the same impact in our audience's minds independent of delivery medium. Our work is truly "conceptual art," just married to a commercial parent and continually attempting to resist the flattening that occurs in mechanical reproduction. It also, through its replication, ceases to be individual and instead becomes cultural. Political. Part of a discussion that transcends the personal.

All of this said, however, points to a painful truth: because of its reproduction, design is generally lacking in tangible value compared to a singular work of art. There may be an art of creating effective advertising or a competent brochure, but that doesn't mean that the ad or brochure in its reproduction ever holds value independent of its association with a product or service. The Internet blew that argument right out of the water.

If you're a product designer, then what you create can add value to a product for sale. Designers can create artworks that are sold in limited editions and are viewed as art. A well-crafted identity can skyrocket the overall equity of a product. But the vast majority of design work that we create is valueless without association to something tangible and meaningful. Sure, you can make beautiful logos all day long -- but if they aren't attached to a real company or political candidate, what weight do they really hold?

The highest praise we can give to design work is that it perfectly resonates with thoughts and feelings latent in the audience, and draws them out effectively. Artistic means may be the delivery medium, but in the end, it is merely an artifact that generally ends up in the recycling bin, awaiting its return to the zeitgeist.

(Except for this gorgeous monoprint I want to buy from Hatch Show Print... is it art in the vein of Robert Rauschenberg? Is it design in the vein of the recent explosion of gig poster design?)

How Many Concepts Should I Present?

Ah, the age-old question. Sure, it says you'll show three in your contract, but you just know they'll buy the twinkly idea that hit you in your morning shower. Why go through the hassle of designing out those lesser ideas that won't get client buy-in, but will demonstrate "range" and "value" as part of your ongoing relationship?

I have a few business rules about how many ideas to show. In numerical order.

One Concept Is for Friends and Art. Or You're the Shizzle.

If you're designing an art project, like a band poster or a pro-bono project for a friend, one concept is fair. If you're a hot shot, in-demand designer -- Stefan Sagmeister comes to mind -- one concept is part of the cost of engaging their firm. One concept is the illusion of a perfect solution, delivered by a rock star. So you'd better be one.

For us mere mortals, if you're designing for a corporation of an appreciable size, showing one concept can come off as sheer arrogance. I've had heart-to-hearts with local marketers about showing up to client presentations for major branding initiatives and being handed one concept -- and a dud at that. In every one of these cases, they've had to argue their agency down from their lofty perch to even consider an approach within the creative brief and budget. Is that really good client service?

Working with corporations, they are going to want to see the range of your thinking to frame up that single perfect solution. Now, this said: I have walked into the shooting gallery with only one concept, but only at great peril and backed by heavy artillery in the form of fully-baked research and strategic positioning. But try it at your own risk. It's too easy to get burned.

Two Concepts Are for Day-to-Day Projects, Tight Bids, and... Pitches.

When working on "big idea" campaigns and day-to-day, meat and potatoes projects such as collateral and environmental graphics, two concepts fits the bill. How many brochure covers does the client really need to see to make an informed choice? How many ideas to you want to show when they're going to govern a huge campaign? Any more and you're just asking for it.

If the client doesn't feel either design concept or campaign theme hits the brief, there's likely some great ideas that ended up on the cutting room floor, just waiting to be executed. Either that, or the brief wasn't tight to begin with. If it's not your fault, you could hit them with a change order to cover that extra round of work. You can't "miss the mark" if the target was in the wrong place.

If you're forced into doing a pitch, don't ever show more than two concepts per assignment -- and your absolute best ones, at that.

Three Concepts Are for Real Challenges.

If you're going through a branding exercise or developing an enterprise-level Web site, three concepts are completely fair. However, scope needs to be tightly controlled at the first round. Don't show color studies for all your logos right out of the gate, or develop multiple Web page exceptions when the client hasn't even bit off on a Web page shell.

Keep each concept simple -- as the purest, most uncomplicated expression of your idea.

Four Concepts Should Never Happen.

Three is the magic number, not four. Show a client four ideas and you're just asking for Frankenconcepting. Too many choices is always a bad thing. Stick to prime numbers.

Five Concepts = Fat Wads of Cash.

In some heavy branding exercises, I've done five to eight concepts. Was that a good idea? Not really. In the end, they quickly whittled it down to the three we knew were top-notch. We were getting a hefty fee, however, and the client felt like we'd shown real range and value for their dollar. More projects came through the door from that client, and we were able to bring it back to two concepts for future work.

If you're getting great compensation and love the thrill of executing a dozen ideas to their last detail, feel free to throw every last concept at the wall. Just know that in the end, only one of them will ever stick.

Secrets of UX Design Productivity from Google

Last Thursday, I attended a free session organized by SIGCHI, Puget Sound region at Google Seattle HQ. Jake Knapp, a very well-spoken user interface designer, entertained a packed house with a speech on 17 tactics that he uses for creating strong UX work in "the flood" of projects that pour through his UX department from month to month.

Since Google is well-known for its sprint approach to application development -- working quickly in small agile teams, touching base often to assess progress, aiming for short-term goals instead of having a long-term target, changing course to aim for quick wins -- I was very interested to see what methods they used to keep their many trains on the rails.

Jake did not disappoint, and unpacked his toolkit to show how he managed his workflow. I can't fit his whole talk into a single post, so instead I'll share what seemed like the top four main topics and their highlights.

Have Strong Project Foundations

The UX team at Google is fairly small, so they need to choose what to focus on wisely. When they start new design projects, they ask the following questions:

How much does this project matter? Is there a value for the UX department to take it on if they're extremely busy with big projects?

What is the business impact? If it's an app like Gmail or Google's search home, improving the user experience could have a huge impact on Google's bottom line. Better focus some attention on it.

How much UX impact will it have? How complex is the system to represent? As an example, Jake showed a view of a sidebar menu from Google Talk versus a chart that needed to explain the whole process of going through a signup process with Blogger. A well-rendered chart could have a big impact on user experience for Blogger, so this is where they'd likely focus the most attention at first.

Is the whole team (a.k.a. internal clients) willing and ready to engage with the UX team in the right way? This question dovetailed right into Jake's next key point: when you're working with new clients, you need to know what their expectations for UX are, then aim for quick wins to establish trust with them and build up a strong relationship. This is consistent with what I hear from many designers that work in-house within a large corporation: behave like you've been hired as an outside designer, and approach each project with the same level of professionalism and client service.

Let the Code Be the Mockup

Since Google is in the process of getting great ideas produced quickly, Jake noted that they often whiteboard the implementation of an idea with the engineer, then let the engineer build it. Wherever possible, they reuse code and existing patterns from other applications, then iterate the user experience with actual working code to get to a result faster.

Often, this investment in application prototyping will pay off. Many of the Google engineers are strong designers as well and they bang out super-functional prototypes. This allows the UX design team to try it with users, find all the edge cases, then shipping it -- often saving a buck or two on engineering in the long run.

While I can't imagine taking this approach to a heavy Flash piece, it sure makes sense for the kinds of apps Google is looking to unleash on the world on a regular basis.

Be Smart About (Re)using Research

Within Google, researchers talk to each other all the time, ensuring that they don't duplicate each other's user studies. This research is then shared wholesale through the corporation.

When new research is required, Jake noted that they try to hit multiple projects simultaneously. Through field research, diary studies, and ethnography, they'll map out their personas and other necessary use cases. Then, as their project narrows into tangible prototypes, they'll enter into usability studies to confirm their research and ensure it's functioning well.

Research-based workshops were another interesting twist to their overall research methodology. In order to solve certain UX problems or brainstorm improvements, large teams will take part in an immersive research approach. The rough structure that Jake outlined was thus:

Research Immersion: 2-8 hours long, with 10-35 people

1. Show the group rough personas of the users they're looking to target.

2. Identify unmet user needs. As an open-ended exercise, everyone would write on Post-It notes their imagined needs. As a group, these needs were categorized into themes.

3. Brainstorm solutions. The overall group would brainstorm possible solutions to those top themes that seemed most relevant.

The work from the immersion session would then enter UX design. The most promising concepts would be mocked up and presented to an overall committee, which would critique the ideas. From these concepts, project managers would step in to help the UX team build a rough schedule and plan out next steps.

Designers Need to Create Memorable Presentations

Since much of what Jake presents is evidence-based, and much of his work is reviewed by a committee before it can be implemented, he's become expert in giving top-flight, simple creative presentations. His rules for getting a great presentation together were:

1. Have a singular goal for your presentation.

2. Start on paper, and see the big-picture story. His metaphor was, "Don't use a periscope to map the ocean."

3. Make horizontal and vertical storyboards. Jake showed a photograph of his presentation written out on Post-It Notes, from left to right. The "vertical" storyboard was a way to ensure that each Post-It, when pulled out of context, still made sense as its own contained message.

4. 3 words or less per slide. 'Nuff said.

5. Follow the 10/20/30 rule, per Guy Kawasaki. 10 slides. 20 minutes, even if you have an hour to present. 30 pt font for your text, though Jake advocated 32 pts or larger.

6. Be careful how you present mockups. Often, Jake would grayscale his tight designs, then slap on crappy graphics for the approval of the rough markups in PowerPoint to ensure that they were discussing the ideas behind the UX, not the design itself.

7. Drawings invite people to participate. Keeping the design work rough cues everyone to know it's a work in progress -- and treat it as such in discussions.