Designing by Email - a design blogging/learning experiment
Some time ago, I signed up to receive the Hack Design emails. If you're not familiar with those, they're a weekly digest/course to help development-oriented people learn to design.
However, I haven't done anything with them so far. Starting post-Christmas, and for most of 2015, I'm going to be blogging my reactions & results of the activities recommended every week. It's like Julie and Julia for design!*
*I have never seen this movie or read the book. I'm assuming this is what it's like.
Without further ado, here is Week One.
Startups, This is How Design Works
Article
Task: Look for some resources that you can bookmark and reference later on your own. This article is filled with helpful sites, meetups, and design-focused organizations around the world. The first step to design literacy is to immerse yourself.
Done. I already have plenty bookmarked, so I added a few more from the site to my Pocket account, as I'm always running out of good reading material.
As a side note, I love Dieter Rams, and keeping his key principles in mind is a good way to try and create a useful, timeless output - but holy jesus, this site is basically teaching potential designers that he is the ultimate aesthetic & approach to aspire to at all times, for the rest of every project you do.
I'd argue that this is less than practical, and could also lead to some awkward client interactions if taken too literally -- imagine if your client's vision involved excessive amounts of art nouveau swirls, hand-drawn type, and metallic gold. I doubt they'd take it well if you replied with "but according to the principles of design outlined by Dieter Rams this would be dated and overdone! Try this minimal, ultra-sterile white canvas instead."
2. Making the Transition from Development to Design
Task: As you read through the tips, notice that they're not necessarily only about design – they're about making great products in general.
Bookmarked. I like the bit about designing everything in your life -- I'm pretty disorganized. I could stand to apply a bit of this philosophy.
3. Complete Beginner’s Guide to Interaction Design
Article Task: I suggest bookmarking this for later. There's a lot of helpful content and definitions, and you'll probably want to come back and reference this later on.
Oh, this is *long*. I took their suggestion of bookmarking it for later, and I'll be reading it tomorrow evening when I'm back home from the holiday break.
We're Not Unhappy, We're Designers
Editorial
Task: Why did Morgan write this? What issue is he addressing?
So far as I can gather, this was written because many people say that designers are negative - when really, according to Morgan, we’re just upset that something hasn’t been done to our personal standards. I feel like this isn’t a valuable way to look at the world once you have matured as both a designer and a person who wants to improve the community around you. Instead of being unhappy and frustrated with what you are seeing or using, and complaining about it, you should find ways it could be improved upon, and ask yourself why the person made these choices.
For example, take all of the redesigns of Facebook, 8tracks, soundcloud, et al done by designers as “case studies”. These aren’t real case studies at all, imo -- they don’t take the real decisions made by the designers into account. They say “this is something I hate, so I have improved it in a way I find personally and aesthetically pleasing.” However, when you’re designing for a client or for your company, having to take frontend & backend developers’ needs, user feedback, ROI, and conversion rates into account, it isn’t half as easy to do something “just because it looks nice”. It might look slightly less attractive, but it might function fantastically for the users -- so then it is well designed.
I felt that this article, and several others in Lesson 1, including the Dieter Rams idolation-fest (Design for Startups), fail to take real people and real challenges into account and cater to “high design” over “low design”.
Beautiful Web Type – A showcase of the best typefaces from the Google web fonts directory
Totally gorgeous and useful. Mostly here to comment that I like the use of PT Sans and PT Serif to suggest an early 20th century newspaper effect, and might be stealing the idea.