80 Works for Designers

Sustaining a Sketchbook Practice

Where do you keep your ideas?

While we've been discussing the different kind of design challenges you might face through a varied career, and I've provided you with various methods and tools to come up with solutions to those ideas, we haven't talked much about where you store those ideas and reference them in the future. Keeping a sketchbook is the best way to capture both ideas and the processes by which you iterate those ideas into a coherent form.

I saw a lovely presentation by Tim Wood of the company Effective UI on this topic a few weeks ago, and he had a few great points about keeping a sketchbook that I thought would be helpful for you.

Work 45 / Touch Screen of (Deaf) Rock: Student Prototypes

A few weeks back, I took a class taught by Dan Saffer and Bill De Rouchey about designing gestural and touch user interfaces. Within the class, we had an hour to prototype a "music store interface of the future." When we were working on the exercise, I couldn't help but wonder what kind of experiences we could create with similar technologies for people who are disabled.

Two weeks later, I'd crafted the following exercise for our 80 Works class:

"The Experience Music Project (EMP) would like you and your big brains to create a novel exhibit experience for their Music Lab that lets deaf people feel different kinds of music. You have 45 minutes working together as a team to create a paper prototype AT SIZE that defines this experience. We’ll test your interface in a walkthrough, and then you'll get 15 more minutes to refine the interface for a final test."

With only 45 minutes to get a first rev of a paper prototype into place, Mark Notermann, Meg Doyle, Claire Kohler, and Donnie Dinch jumped into action! Let's look at their interface and see how they revised it on the fly to make it sing.

Precisely Rough Sketching

When I was at Interaction'09 last week, I had the luck to attend a 4-hour "Drawing Ideas" class with Mark Baskinger, a professor in the design program at Carnegie Mellon, and William Bardel, an information designer. They have a book coming out later this year on this topic, and in their class, they shared a number of tips and tricks on how to render your conceptual ideas with a certain level of fidelity.

I can't give away the crux of what they shared -- they want you to buy the book! So let me point out some tips and tricks that helped me out... especially because they align with the previous discussions and posts we've had about sketching design ideas.

Work 22 / Dry Diapers: Student Designs + Case Study

About four weeks ago, the 80 Works class was tasked by me and Jill Vartenigian, an instructor at Seattle Central, with the following challenge:

"In 30 minutes, brainstorm ideas for a name, logo, and form factor for a brand of diapers that can be marketed to urban parents. These diapers need an edge, a hint of sly humor or cool that make them stand out from the boring 'ol diapers you can find pretty much anywhere.

Boy, did the class rise to the challenge. The following is a case study of how the class took this seed idea and executed it as a design concept.

Work 21 / Mr. Blue: Student Designs

The most common color? Blue. And yet there are so many variations on this hue... Can you design a masthead for a new magazine that’s solely about the topic of blue? This includes its name, suggestions for art direction, and what kinds of articles you think the editor should include.

 

True Blue by Mark Notermann

 

BLUEMAG by Meg Doyle

 

Blue by Donnie Dinch

Collaborative Design Methods: Group Critique

This is one of the hardest skills for any designer to attain. It is a lifelong practice. And you will discover, as you move from agency to agency, that there are varied points of view to how to approach a critique. I am going to share with you some guidelines that we can use for the rest of our class. This is what I'd like to call a positive method for discussing design concepts, as opposed to the "shooting gallery" approach I've seen at other shops.

Collaborative Design Practices: Choosing Your Tools

Whether you're using a camera, Adobe CS3, or a stone tablet with an awl, you need tools to make a designed artifact. Those tools could be anything physical beyond your brain and hands, really: torn paper, a sponge, an 8-color Heidelberg press, or code that will be compiled into a Flash SWF.

Knowing which tools to select and when you apply those tools while you're making a design can have massive implications on how long it takes to execute a project. Beyond coming up with a strong idea and knowing how to manage your design role and tasks, improper tool selection can hurt you more than any other decision in the design process.

And when you're working in a team of designers collaboratively, not clarifying what tools will be applied in advance can be deadly. This is why in agency settings, we default to whiteboards, pencil and paper, and other simple methods of working through design problems.

This post will talk through some of the reasons why we stay low-fi so far into the design process, and what rewards you can reap from the result.