80 Works for Designers

Stretching Your Creative Talent

I was reading through some old interviews with Paul Rand before our first class, and I came across the following stunner. This was taken from an interview at MIT between John Maeda and Mr. Rand:

JM: "What are the fundamental skills of a designer?"

PR: "The fundamental skill is talent. Talent is a rare commodity. It's all intuition. And you can't teach intuition."

The first thought that popped into my head? Wow, what bullshit.

Yes, you can't directly teach intuition, but you can foster it in indirect ways. That is the function of the 80 Works class. I can't lecture you in how to increase your intuition. However, I can provide you with situations that you'll experience and tools that you can adapt to your working process over time. Then your talent will teach you what it needs, through the process of ideating and making. As a result, your intuition will begin to shine through and your inner critic will have to quiet down. Being in the moment, doing the work, and moving on with detachment.

Students in my first class called 80 Works for Designers "Design Acrobatics," and for good reason. We will often find ourselves on the trapeze, flying through the air in the midst of a difficult project, hoping that we'll be able to catch the hands of another acrobat and keep from falling into the ever-present net that will keep us from being injured. We keep doing various tricks over and over again, until we cease to think about the great height we're performing at and focus only on the double somersault that needs to occur mid-flight.

Being able to peg the somersault without worrying about failure -- and, if failure does occur, brushing yourself off and climbing up the ladder again to give it another shot -- is a true measure of your creative talent.

Having confidence in your capacity to create something of meaning under any sort of constraint -- that is a worthwhile goal for your design career, and much more valuable than being driven by the fear that you may not have enough talent to be the next uberdesigner of the century.

Sorry, Paul. But we're going to prove you wrong.

Find Out For Yourself

"If you want to study something, it's better not to know what the answer is."

I was reading the essay "Find Out For Yourself" by Shunryu Suzuki today when I was struck with a sudden thought: we can be better designers when we don't know what we're doing.

Many of us were attracted to the field of design specifically to make art. Then, somewhere along the way -- especially after having so much energy placed in making artifacts, not art -- our perception of what it meant to be a designer broadened. We became competent in creating specific kinds of artifacts. We mastered specific domains of expression.

But that didn't mean that we designed better artifacts. It's human insight that grounds and infuses design work that creates meaningful change in our society.

Making is not a direct substitute for generating meaning in design. But the process of making can lead to meaning, and our minds must be open to receive it. I've heard this described as "abductive" design thinking -- which in plain English boils down to being able to extrapolate solutions from limited information.

You can seek out that insight before creating your design, if you have the tools. If you don't, then you can start designing. But if you want to use your time wisely -- not efficiently, mind you -- you should practice agile design.

How Designers Can Think Strategically

Last class, I made good on my promise to describe how to properly frame a design problem. And while all of you said that what I was describing wasn't "new" in any sense of the word, there was some good dialogue about what does and doesn't fall into the realm of a designer's control when you're working through a project.

One of the last things I touched upon in our discussion and drew on the board was a rudimentary version of the following chart:

When clients meet with you to discuss their needs, they're often thinking solely about tactics. However, good designers know how to rise above the tactics and describe how their actions impact business goals and marketing goals beyond making a good logo. These designers get a seat at the table with the CEO and are more likely to retain their clients in the long term -- provided that their design work is well-executed and on brief.

If you find this topic of interest, feel free to read further in this 6-part series from last year on ChangeOrder.

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.

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.

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.

Collaborative Design Methods: Simple Sketching

There are plenty of books and tutorials out there that describe how to draw things well. We spent a lot of time in school learning how to draw things beautifully, in all sorts of photorealistic ways. This is considered a hard skill and in many cases a cost of entry for being a commercial artist.

So please excuse the rudimentary nature of this post. I suck at drawing with a pencil. But that has never gotten in the way of putting out solid design work and sketching ideas for buy-in by my peers.

Collaborative Making, Part 4: Role-Setting

This past Thursday, I provided the following structure for developing a working process for your first collaborative assignment:

1. Set your intent, deliverables, and timeframe.
2. Establish individual roles.
3. Consider methods of critique. A.k.a. form the braid, set rules around idea-sharing.
4. Schedule touch-points.
5. What's your contingency? (Sick, late, timeframe or budget changes dramatically)

This structure dovetails with the "Forming the Braid" post from last week and blows out some of the action steps you'll need to take to work effectively.

In this post, I wanted to focus on #2, "Establishing individual roles," since we only got a chance to talk briefly about role-setting for our class teams. I've been wrestling with how to simplify this discussion, as it's proving to be deceptively complex. Let me take a stab at it.

Collaborative Making, Part 3: The Need for Self-Critique

When you're working in a team setting, it can be tempting (and very easy) to ask your peers for regular critique as part of your braid pattern. However, this is a slippery slope. On the one hand, you trust your teammates and want their opinions; on the other hand, you can sometimes get a little bit lazy and overlook obvious blunders. It's very important to have your own methods of self-critique to keep the work evolving.

Here's a link to a piece I wrote last year about setting up your own process of self-critique. Even when you're leaning hard on your teammates to help you through a tough project, running down this list can really help you nudge a good design into great territory when you've factored in the feedback from your team.

Glenn Sakamoto, a great designer, added a few questions to the above list that you should also consider: Does it draw me in emotionally? Does it have significant contrast? Does it communicate clearly? Does it transcend fashion, fads, or trends? All good stuff!

Looking forward to seeing you all in class on Thursday!

Collaborative Making, Part 2: Forming the Braid

Many years ago, I worked at a very fast-paced agency, and I just couldn't keep up... or so I thought. I would keep showing work in review and getting smacked down. There were a lot of late nights and rework. But there didn't have to be.

One day, my art director pulled me aside and drew the following two illustrations on the board:

Collaborative Making, Part 1: Workflow

Next week, we'll be having you embark on your first take-home assignment that requires collaborative making, as opposed to how you'd work through every aspect of a design problem on your own. With this in mind, I wanted to get you oriented to how this process would play out in the setting of a design firm, and get you the tools you'd need to manage your time effectively to work in similar constraints.

I drew this sketch to show how, once you've got a solid idea nailed down for your project, you've got to enter into the actual "design process," using whatever tools are at hand to create a visual comp. After you've iterated through the design process to the point that you feel that your work can be shared with others, you bring the work into review with your peers. They provide their feedback, and you re-enter the design process or, if the work is very tight, you move on to present it to the client. This is verboten at any design firm, and you've lived through this kind of process a number of times in school.

Collaborative Concepting, Part 3: Sharing your Ideas

Finally, let's explore #3 in the chain -- sharing your ideas with your CD/account team.

After you've concepted out a series of ideas and roughed them into a form that's palatable to share with your larger team at work (or the client), the fun truly begins. That is, the fun of actually making your ideas into tangible artifacts. But first, you have to sell your ideas in. If you just start designing stuff willy-nilly without conceptual buy-in, you're going to be burning a lot of time on the computer that would be better spent making sure your ideas are salable.

And when ideas get shared with others, a funny thing happens... as the idea broadens to envelop others, they grow in ways that you can't anticipate and control. Shaping that change is a critical tactic of group ideation, not enforcing things exactly as you see them in your mind, but as they can be shared en masse to create a more powerful meaning. You've all got to drink the same kind of Flavor-Aid. After group review, you may need to tweak, retrofit, or otherwise reconcept material if it isn't fit for execution.

Here's some governing principles for presenting your concepts to the overall team:

Collaborative Concepting, Part 2: Brainstorming/Concepting Meetings

Let's talk about #2 in the chain -- the concepting meeting with your peers.

Unless you're leading a brainstorm, chances are you're going to have to conform to the team's working process. But I can tell you that even if they aren't rigid in how the session is set up, it's going to probably conform to the following template. In a one-hour session, it will likely break down as follows:

Collaborative Concepting, Part 1: Overview + Project Inputs

In class, I'd drawn a chart similar to this on the board:

If we start to question every link in this chain, then we have an opportunity to increase our speed from idea to artifact as teams without sacrificing essential qualities of our practice. Or, to think about it another way: we need to be who we are as people through the process, and preserve that through any method that we consider taking on as a group. Genuine creative sparks should fly, not those of frustration.

In these next few posts, I'm going to talk about the first link in the chain: getting to a great idea through collaborative brainstorming. Please forgive me if this seems on the surface to be a bit rudimentary. There will be plenty of nuance we'll be exploring in class and in our take-home exercises that will require the structure I'm outlining here.

Let's start by unpacking how creative ideation occurs in an agency setting, and how to jump into what seems like boiling water with a confident dive -- or a cannonball...