The truth is, there are a million excuses we all can use to avoid making the necessary choices and sacrifices we need to in order to truly succeed. However, sometimes those excuses are actually legitimate.

Sometimes we really do need to figure things out first before we acquire our first clients. And, sometimes we really ought to quit working on an idea that’s clearly going to be a failure.

The trouble is knowing whether our excuse is actually legitimate, or whether we’re just stalling. We’re going to explore some of the ways you can tell the difference, and start finishing everything you start.

Thinking It Over

In almost everything we do, there’s a lot to be gained from having a thought process that’s separate from taking action. Putting effort into the planning stage of a project is essential to ensuring that it will be a success.

Just like you probably wouldn’t just walk onto a stage in front of hundreds of people and start talking without having a speech prepared, it’s rarely a good idea to jump into something feet first and hope you swim instead of sink.

Take the time to really evaluate whether you’re ready to take action. Does your idea seem half-baked? Is it the best solution you can come up with for the problem you’re trying to solve? If you’re the type to act first and think later, make sure to slow down and visualize the actual end of your project. That’s right – pretend that you’ve already achieved your goal.

What, exactly, does that look like? What deliverables have been created? What is the reaction of your client? If the reality doesn’t match up with the hopeful scenario in your head, it’s time to recalibrate what you’ve been doing and start again.

Taking Action

This is where many of us get choked up. You’ve planned and planned for ages, and you’re sure your project is going to be a smashing success. Yet, for some reason, it’s extremely difficult for you to actually get started.

Maybe you’re missing some essential component, or you feel your skills in a certain area aren’t quite up to par. Whatever the excuse, it’s keeping you from actually taking that first step.

Believe it or not, there’s an easy fix to this common problem. It involves setting clear deadlines to action. Even if you haven’t completely thought everything out, it helps to just put something out there and get feedback from others.

If you’re working on a long-term project for a client and you find yourself struggling with making decisions, see if you can communicate with them more regularly and get their input. Or better yet, go find some of your client’s target audience members and ask them what they think of your work so far. Does it resonate with them? Which parts are the most successful?

This kind of “on the job” market testing is a great way to plan your work and take action at the same time. You don’t need to be 100% ready before you release your work to the world for evaluation.

Often, the ideas and suggestions you get from showing people what you have will help make your work even better than it would have been otherwise.

It’s better to do something – anything – that’s “good enough,” than it is to do nothing and wait for absolute perfection. You’ll learn more after you begin than you ever will by research and planning alone.

If You Don’t Succeed, Quit?

In a word, yes. Part of being successful is knowing that, many times, you are going to fail. If you want to succeed on a regular basis, you have to develop the foresight to know when to abandon an idea or project that’s not working.

The reason might be that you ran into complications that you didn’t plan for, or simply that you’re just not interested in making time to complete the project. It’s just as important to figure out what you actually want to work on as it is to make the decision to work on something.

The last thing you want is for a project you only feel so-so about to simply yield mediocre results, resulting in months or years of work for no big payoff. It’s much better to fail at something quickly – recognizing a failure when you see one.

If you’re working on a project and you can’t bring yourself to meet your minimum goals every day (30 minutes of writing, an hour of looking for new clients), perhaps it’s time to admit to yourself that what you thought you wanted to accomplish isn’t really working for you anymore.

Give yourself a hard deadline and evaluate your progress. If you haven’t taken any firm action within two or three weeks, then it’s important to be honest and ask yourself whether you actually want to finish this work.

Sometimes the answer is “no” – and that’s perfectly okay. We all miscalculate our enthusiasm for an idea from time to time, and there’s absolutely no shame in starting over if the interest suddenly evaporates.

Again, set a concrete goal (I’m going to finish this piece in three months, etc.) for taking action. Decide that you’re going to do everything that needs to be done to achieve this goal by your deadline. If it doesn’t happen, then you’ll know it’s time to move on and try something else.

A New View

Sometimes what we need is a new perspective. Determination is important for seeing a project through to the end, especially if it’s a personal project like a side business that no one is paying you to complete (and which may not yield financial results for years).

If you are burnt out on a project, but are absolutely sure you want to do it, it’s probably time to draw back from it a bit and look at it from a different angle.

Maybe all you need is some choice feedback from a trusted friend or mentor. Or perhaps a day spent brainstorming and gathering more inspiration will inject new life and vigor into your work.

The post How to Let Go of That Failing Creative Idea appeared first on Speckyboy Design Magazine.

That’s the underlying principle of Apple-style minimal design. Not necessarily to “strip” something down, but to make sure it’s easy to figure out and access with as few distractions as possible.

Here are what I like to call the 10 Golden Rules of Simple, Clean Design. They are based loosely on the 10 Principles of Good Design proposed by master product designer Dieter Rams, but I’ve modified them a bit to fit with a more general goal of design simplicity.

Less, but Better

Dieter Rams said it first, and it’s first on this list for a reason. Simple design isn’t just about subtracting things from a design willy-nilly. It has to improve the design’s overall effectiveness.

Rams’ aim is to strip away the “non-essentials” of a design, to return it to a pure, simple state. However, too many designers seem to think that one has to keep stripping things away even past the point where it’s practical for the design.

To this designer, the goal isn’t complete and utter white space. If something is essential but makes the design look clunky or inelegant, your job as a designer isn’t to eliminate it anyway but to figure out how to “make it work.”

Image Source

Be Neutral

This doesn’t mean your design has to be completely devoid of personality, but if accessibility is your goal, your design should provide an easy way for your viewer to make sense of the content.

Remember, the number one goal of graphic and web design is to present content, to feed people the information they’re looking for in the least headache-producing way possible.

Be Honest

Your design needs to communicate the intent of your content clearly and honestly. If your viewer has the wrong idea of what your content is trying to tell them, your design isn’t honest enough.

No tricks are necessary here – everything about the design of your website, flyer, brochure, or poster, from the graphics down to the colors, should be suggestive of the product being sold or the information being conveyed.

Image Source

Go For Timelessness

Of course, it’s not for us to say, right now, what will become timeless and what will fade into obscurity. But there are certain rules you can follow to make sure your designs steer clear of fads and trends which will destroy their longevity.

First of all, if something feels like a trend, it probably is. The thing that will help you most here is reading. I’m not talking about design blogs and websites either, though those are great resources for keeping up to speed with your fellow designers.

But certain design fundamentals are basic and important enough to be printed in a book and referred to over and over in your permanent library. The closer you stick to those fundamentals, the more classic your designs will be.

Braun Speaker by Andrew McClintock

Don’t think that just because something is “classic” that it has to be boring, either. It’s true that certain approaches work better than others when creating designs that will speak to both present and future audiences, but keep in mind that classic work is being produced every day by creative professionals.

It may be “contemporary” today, but give it a decade or two. It’ll be right alongside the greats in design libraries the world over.

Less “Design”

If you mention the word “design” in just the wrong context, some people will get a mental picture of something fussy and overdone. That’s not what you want. Your job as a designer is to get out of the way of the content.

Yes, design can be beautiful and an art form and all that warm, fuzzy stuff. However, the priority is always the content.

A helpful way to think of it is “assembly” versus “ornamentation.” Sushi, with its clear, separate components – each important to the whole in its own way – is a perfect example of an assembly type of design.

The fish, rice, wasabi, Japanese mayonnaise (if you’re into that), and seaweed are like blocks of content in a design, which must be arranged to form a complete, concise, delicious bite.

There are endless ways a skilled sushi chef can assemble and arrange these blocks of content, and this same type of creativity can serve you as well in the creation of a clean design.

Ornamentation, on the other hand, is like the sprinkles on a cupcake. Or, to keep with the sushi theme (because I love sushi), it’s the little bowl of soy sauce or the leaf used to hold the extra wasabi on the side.

Nice to have, but essential? Unless you’re extra-hardcore about little wasabi leaves, I think not.

Be Thorough

Just because your design is simple, doesn’t mean you can get sloppy with the details. Remember that, in a minimal design, the end result your viewer will be seeing will highlight all flaws in your work.

Quite mercilessly, I might add. When most of your design is white space, there are very few places to “hide” bad composition or an unfortunate typography choice.

Be Conservative

I don’t mean your design has to look like a frumpy, old librarian (apologies to any frumpy and/or old librarians out there), but it should be conservative in terms of the resources it uses.

“Green” design is all the rage these days, but conserving your resources as a designer goes much deeper than that. It’s also about your personal resources – your time, your manual effort, your hard drive space.

A note I should make here is that when you’re striving to create a simple, minimalist design, the majority of your resources should be spent in the beginning stages.

Think of it like baking a cake, since my favorite kinds of analogies involve baked goods of some sort. When you lay out all the ingredients on your kitchen counter, it can be messy and confusing at first.

Then, once you slowly begin to combine things in the proper order, and the batter comes together in a single bowl that you can then transfer to the cake pan, you know that all that energy you spent in the preparation stages was worth it.

You won’t see all that early work in the finished product, of course, but you’ll know it’s there.

Design is the same way. When you make your initial plans, sketches, and studies, you’re just like the baker in the kitchen, producing a clean, simple, singular design that reveals very little about the work that went into it.

Take Your Time

To give the details of your designs your full attention, you need to take your time and get them just right. This may seem like common sense, but I’m always surprised at the opinion many designers seem to have that simple design is somehow “easier,” or that it takes less time.

Braun AW20 Watch by Barry Lachapelle

Minimalist design is like an optical illusion. The result might look clean and simple, but that’s the point. It’s like ballet – the whole intent is to trick the viewer into thinking they’re seeing something effortless.

If you do, then the ruse was successful. But don’t think that it takes less time or effort to achieve those results. If anything, it takes more time.

Be Understood

Good design doesn’t need to be explained. You know this, even if you’ve never consciously thought about it before. Think of all the items you use daily. The odds are good that you didn’t have to read a manual to learn how to use them.

Your designs can be that straightforward as well. Note that I didn’t say they “will” be that straightforward – only that they “can” be.

It takes work to arrive at a place of such simplicity, but one way to approach it is to make a note of exactly what appeals to you about your favorite simple designs. Is it the ease of use? The approachability? The absence of clutter? The chances are good that straightforwardness has something to do with what makes these designs work.

Make It Pretty

Dieter Rams says that good design must be beautiful as well as useful. Why? Because “the aesthetic quality of a product is integral to its usefulness because products are used every day and have an effect on people and their well-being.” That means the more you look at something, the more of an impact it has on your senses.

If you’re looking at a hideous design day in and day out, you’re going to internalize some of that hideousness, and it’s going to affect your interaction with the world in some way.

Maybe you’ll be a little more irritable to the barista at the coffee shop in the morning, or you’ll frown a little deeper and grip your steering wheel a little tighter when you’re stuck in traffic.

If you’re a designer, that ugliness might affect you in even worse ways (well, worse for designers at least). If all you’re looking at is bad design, your taste – or what Rams calls the “aesthetic” – will reflect that, and it will skew your perception of what “good” design looks like.

After an onslaught of crappy designs, your own output will suffer, and pretty soon you might catch yourself actually contributing to the crap pile instead of fighting against it.

Don’t do this to your fellow designers. Take care with your aesthetics and inspire others to be and produce their best as well.

Simple is a lifestyle. You have to think very hard about what you’re going to leave out of a design, and how you’re going to go about it.

It’s not an easy process, but the more you attempt it, the more you’ll discover what works and what doesn’t.

The post The 10 Golden Rules of Simple, Clean Design appeared first on Speckyboy Design Magazine.

Perhaps you should do these things… and perhaps not.

Today, we explore specific ways to further educate yourself as a designer, and apply what you learn immediately to becoming better at what you do, as well as being more desirable to clients.

Marketing and The Unhappy Freelancer

Let me start off with a story about a person I know. This person is a freelance designer who really wanted to get more quality business. His work was quite good, and he worked hard for his clients, but he was struggling with attracting the kinds of people he really wanted to work with. His clients were the lower-end type, always giving him problems when it came to payment and deciding exactly what they wanted him to design for them.

This designer could have benefited greatly from learning how to properly market his services. There is definitely a right way to reach out to top clients, and there is a wrong way, and making an effort to learn the difference can make an enormous difference in your success as a freelancer.

Market yourself and your work the wrong way enough times and you can do real damage to your potential to earn more and attract better clients.

Learning your niche – knowing the ins and outs of your client base as well as the customers they serve – is the best way to tailor your marketing efforts for maximum effectiveness.

Get A Design Mentor

Mentors can teach you a lot about design, and can help you greatly improve your craft. But they can also provide a critical look into the industry from a veteran’s perspective, something you’re not likely to have if you’ve been working for less than a certain number of years.

Personally, I believe every designer should seek out a mentor – there are tons of experienced designers out there who would love the chance to help guide and foster a future industry rock star. Making time to reach out to people who can help you often costs nothing, yet it’s one of the most important things you can do to grow your career.

The problem is that younger designers often don’t ask to be mentored, believing that more experienced designers are too busy to help them. Nothing could be further from the truth. First of all, you need to know one thing about designers who have reached a certain level of renown: they love it when people give them compliments and ask them stimulating questions about their craft. Especially younger designers.

Try it – email 10 of your favorite design “celebrities” and think of a few short but intriguing questions to ask them. The worst that can happen is that they say no, but if your questions are good enough, they almost certainly won’t.

Test, Then Invest

Sometimes you might have to invest a lot more money, time, or resources into learning something than you initially thought.

If you hate networking, for example, and know you will have to expend a lot of time, money, and energy going to networking events and building relationships with people in the design industry, you may question whether or not you genuinely need to make that investment and expand your network.

Sometimes, you don’t need to make a significant investment to achieve a goal. If you honestly feel that you can get by without making a particular investment, then test this assumption before going any further. This is an excellent way to learn what works and what doesn’t, both in your design work and in the promoting of your freelance business.

In fact, this is my absolute favorite way to learn anything related to my own design career. Research and mentors are great, but in the end, you must test each and every piece of advice you get from your sources. If it doesn’t work on a practical level, there’s no reason to keep playing the guessing game.

In Conclusion

Your design education doesn’t end with college or university. It starts there.

The acquisition of knowledge to further your career is a lifelong pursuit, if you’re doing it correctly. Remember that education, in whatever form it comes, is never a waste of time, money, or effort. When you don’t invest in your own education, you are losing a game you may not even realize you’re playing.

Your competition is certainly busy investing in themselves, and will come out ahead if you aren’t right there with them, putting in the time, money, and energy to improve your edge and win over clients.

The post Why You Should Further Educate Yourself as a Designer appeared first on Speckyboy Design Magazine.

Often, designers simply jot down those excess ideas in a notebook and file them away somewhere, but that’s boring and unhelpful.

The truth is, there are far better ways to deal with your spare ideas. Here are some suggestions on what to do with them.

Give Yourself A Deadline

If you really want to finish something, force yourself to make time for it.

We often have more time than we think we do, so if an idea is really burning a hole in your desk drawer or hard drive, it’s time to pull it out and make time to finish it. This may require reorganizing your to-do list, and letting go of other items that are less important.

Ultimately, it’s up to you to decide whether this project is really worth the sacrifices you’ll need to make in order to finish it. Sometimes it is and sometimes it isn’t, but you’ll never know for sure unless you actually schedule time to analyze your priorities.

Combine Them With Other Ideas

If you’re anything like me, you come up with approximately a million and one ideas every single day. Over the course of several years this can add up to… well, a lot of ideas.

Often, these ideas might be compatible with one another, in ways that you might not expect. You can always combine ideas if you don’t have time to do each one. Sometimes this results in an even better idea.

Combining ideas is actually a well-known brainstorming technique, in fact, because the juxtapositions can open up new creative pathways in your brain and put you on the path to your best idea yet. Or at least something that you will actually want to finish.

Give Them To A Friend

Ideas are free; you can’t legally copyright an idea. But you can still give away some of your extra ideas that you know you’re not going to get to anytime soon to someone else who might use them in the near future. They might know exactly what to do with the idea, and will be grateful that you’ve helped them develop their creativity a bit more.

By the way, if you’re worried about having your idea ripped off or stolen, don’t be. Your friend won’t implement the idea the exact same way you would, so there’s nothing to worry about.

Also, consider this: if an idea isn’t good enough to be stolen, it’s probably not worth doing in the first place.

Drop Them

Sometimes it’s better to just admit that you’ll never use an idea and move on. Holding on to old ideas can actually hold you back creatively. You want to be fostering the development of new ideas, not hanging on to old junk that’s never going to be realized.

You might be surprised to discover, after a few years have gone by and you’ve managed to drop an idea, that it wasn’t even that good of an idea in the first place.

This has happened to me many times, and I consider it a good sign. As your taste develops, you learn to detect bad ideas more easily, and you’ll no longer be stifled by those ideas you’re not completely sold on.

Logo Sketch Ideas by Ian Barnard

Whatever You Do, Take Action

Ideas are useless unless you act on them. Don’t forget to check your backlog of ideas often to make sure you’re not simply stockpiling them for a “rainy day.”

Whether you combine them, power through them, give them away, or drop them, always make sure you’re keeping things rotating in your creative process.

Shaking things up, shuffling ideas around, arranging ideas like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle is a great way to get your creative juices flowing, even if you never end up doing anything with the idea.

The post What To Do With All Those Spare Creative Ideas appeared first on Speckyboy Design Magazine.

Why am I talking about pie on a design website? Well, because I think that designers, of any kind, can learn a lot from bakers who skip over the fancy trimmings to give people what they want most – an uncomplicated plate of minimalist goodness.

Apple pie has endured through the years because it’s something people easily understand. In the same way, a simple, classic design that doesn’t require your audience to think too hard to understand the message will still be relevant after years of fancy fluff and bad trends have come and gone.

Apple pie is something you can’t really mess up – unless you start adding things that don’t really need to be there. It might not be easy to create the perfect design, but simplifying your “recipe” of features and information is one of the most important steps toward creating the best user experience possible.

“Pare” Necessities

The best recipes for apple pie, in my opinion, are the ones that keep things basic. In culinary terms, this allows the flavor of the main ingredient – apples, in this case – to shine. The apples are the “selling point,” so to speak. When you sit down to design a website, flyer, or brochure, make sure your audience knows exactly what they’re looking at.

In America and most of Europe (with a few exceptions), apple pies are covered with a crust. This crust is traditionally either flat or plaited into a lattice, and it sends a signal to hungry folks that the fruit they’ll find inside is probably going to be apples.

Make sure your selling point in a design is as clear as the apples in a pie. Determine exactly what your users are looking for and what they want. Ask them, if you can. The more testing you can conduct before publication, the higher your probability of creating a design that speaks to your users’ specific needs.

If, for example, you’re designing a clothing website, do your users want to search based on the types of clothing (shirts, dresses, shoes, etc.) or the types of materials (silk, cotton, leather, vinyl)? The only way you’ll know the answer for sure is if you ask.

Getting feedback from friends and acquaintances is a time-honored way of gathering “market” research in the initial stages of a design. Ask them specific questions about their experience – is something missing that they’d like to see? Can they digest the information they need clearly and without any assistance? If you’re bound by confidentiality agreements (or you have no friends), it’s perfectly acceptable to ask your client to produce this research for you or enable you to do it yourself.

This will probably be a terrible pun/cliche combo for both this article and this topic (forgive me), but Apple is the leader in the area of simple design and streamlined user experience. The Apple website and store are specifically designed to lead you, the user, through the buying experience with as little hassle and stress as possible.

The product images are big; the text is short and obvious. Additional information is available at the click of a mouse, but if you don’t click the links, you never need to worry about it. You’d better believe that the web design department at Apple spent hundreds of hours figuring out the things their users wanted – and needed – to see in order to complete the sale. And well, cliches just mean that something is extra-extra true!

Sweet Reduction

There are plenty of things you can put on top of a pie: ice cream, sugar, whipped cream, syrup, cookies, cherries – the list goes on and on. Some people might think this makes the pie taste better, but in my opinion, if you have to add that many extra things to your pie to improve the taste, you’re starting from the wrong end of the plate.

Similarly, extra bells and whistles usually only serve to clutter up a design and obscure the fact that it wasn’t very good to begin with.

I’m not saying you should never add, say, an extra column, widget, or typographic treatment if you really need to, or even just really want to. But it’s important to start with a good “base.” Make sure the fundamental message of your design gets through loud and clear. Don’t give your users extra options they don’t need or aren’t looking for.

Don’t make it harder for them to get to where they need to go. Make your users’ main goal your top priority, and add in the “toppings” only once you’re sure the main event is a treat. And hey, toppings can be delicious. My favorite is apple pie à-la mode!

Ask Grandma

You know what they say: if your Grandma can’t figure out how to navigate through your design, it’s too complicated. Elderly people tend to have less patience, ability, or desire to sift through tons of unnecessary information. That makes them perfect starting points for determining exactly what’s needed for your design and what’s simply taking up space.

Let’s say, for example, that you’re testing a design for a web template store. Is your objective clear (instant download of PSD files)? Will it be easy for your customers to find exactly what they’re looking for? Is the font size large enough for most people to read? Is there too much text? Too many ads? Is the shopping cart/payment method simple to find and navigate through?

Simply put: is there anything standing in the way of your user getting exactly what they want? If so, Grandma might just get up and head down to the record store. (Assuming there still is one in her neighborhood!)

Remember to run your design past your grandmother (or your uncle, your great aunt Matilda, or anyone who’s not so “tech-savvy”) and see if she gets it. If so, perhaps she’ll bake you a nice apple pie!

The post How Simple, Classic Design Should Work appeared first on Speckyboy Design Magazine.

But what exactly should you focus your attention on when it comes to learning new skills? You probably want to pick skills to learn that have universal appeal and can be applied to many different types of client projects.

Here are five exciting design specialties to broaden your skillset.

Learn Photography

This is an obvious one. Taking your own photos has many advantages, both creative and legal. Learning about lighting, camera angles, and photo composition can improve your designs immensely.

Many designers are already being expected to perform the work of a photographer, so why not take a few classes and practice to build some genuine professional experience in the field?

When you take a photo, you own it. It’s your intellectual property, and you don’t need anyone else’s permission to use it for client work. Having this power can speed up your design process, and, if your photos are good enough, can also help you get noticed by relevant media channels.

If you or your client has something to promote, it will be an enormous help to have professional-looking photographs ready to be plugged into a blog or print publication.

Learn Video Editing

An extension of photography, only with “moving parts,” so to speak. Video is a field with tons of opportunities growing with popularity even as you read this.

People have long since decided that they enjoy watching videos online, and your clients are waiting for someone with the expertise to take advantage of this huge market.

If there’s an opportunity for your clients to take advantage of the medium of video, it’s your duty as a service provider to make them aware of that and communicate the possibilities to them.

You will have clients begging you to incorporate video into their businesses once they see how simple it can be to do so. You can learn the basics of video editing for free (ironically) on YouTube.

Learn Motion Graphic Design

Long used in the advertising industry, motion graphics are making their way onto the web as well. Motion graphics can be applied to everything from animated typography to responsive mobile app design.

Software such as Adobe After Effects can help turn you into a motion graphics pro. Of course, motion graphics software is not cheap, but the percentage increase of what you can charge for your work will more than make up for it.

Learn 3D Effects

3D has exploded in the design world. Especially with the advances in 3D CAD technology, which is taking the craft from the esoteric realm of product designers and animators and placing the power in the hands of the common people to create virtually anything they can dream up.

The rise of 3D printing is also helping to generate more interest in 3D. Free software like Blender and SketchUp can get you started in this exciting field.

If you’re thinking that 3D design is difficult or complicated, think again. Simplified, free software made for 3D printing can nearly eliminate the learning curve, and the growing library of free 3D base models to use even lowers the amount of modeling you need to do to create something extraordinary.

Learn Mobile Web Design

As of last year, the number of mobile users is estimated to be 6.4 billion. Yes, that’s right, over 6,400,000,000 people currently use a mobile device.

That’s a lot of potential customers that your clients want to reach. The more you know about mobile design, the more valuable you will be to a wide variety of clients.

As you can see, there are many exciting design specialties to explore. You can broaden your client base and make more money the more you know how to do.

Of course, these are just five of the most popular and potentially useful skills, but the possibilities are endless if you know how to dominate a design niche.

Things like calligraphy, origami, or even knitting and basket weaving can help your career take off. You just have to know where and how to apply an expertise.

The post Exciting Design Specialties to Broaden Your Skillset appeared first on Speckyboy Design Magazine.

Even people who have no idea what the original design was even used for will discuss its beauty, simplicity, and timelessness.

What goes into creating work of that caliber? Today, we’re going to explore some possible explanations and try to get an idea of how a designer might go about creating timeless designs.

Will It Be Timeless?

Some things might seem as though they will be instant classics. Then, without warning, they fade into obscurity and no one ever mentions them again.

Why does this happen? No one really knows for certain, but there are some possible explanations. The most important, in my opinion, is that the general public – not just the design community – either stopped caring about the design, or never cared enough in the first place.

Design is meant to change the way people interact with one another in the world, not just designers, but everyone. If it fails to do so and generate influence beyond the scope of the original brief, it will never become the classic it could be.

Glitch Mona Lisa by Dan Svetlichnyy

Design Marketing Problems

Public opinion is fickle, but it can be greatly influenced by the right advertisement. Brands like Coca-Cola, Apple, and Microsoft didn’t get to their current level of market dominance by chance.

Even great art like the Mona Lisa has been heavily promoted to be recognizable to a modern audience.

There were plenty of contemporary works that were just as popular in their day, and even some that were more so. But it was marketing that propelled the Mona Lisa, the Sistine Chapel, the statue of David, and other iconic works of the Renaissance to last as long in the public memory as they have.

To Trendy To Be True?

As I’ve said in the past, if something feels like a trend, it probably is. I’m not simply talking about phenomena that are currently all the rage, like neumorphism or previously flat design.

I’m talking about things that merely look cool without any underlying fundamentals to ground them. Such trends are destined to be one hit wonders, fading as the design world moves on to more solid ideas.

A good way to spot a trend that’s being milked purely for profit is to determine what the most respected members of the design community have to say about it.

If the ‘movers and shakers’ of design are constantly lambasting the trend then there’s a good chance it’s simply a throwaway fad. However, if they don’t have much to say or are even incorporating it into their own work, it’s probably a winner.

Neumorphic Radio Player App by Alexander Plyuto

No Good Designers Left?

A lot of designers complain that the current crop of design professionals are too caught up in trends and technology and are ignoring the fundamental principles of good design.

These designers tend to be older and may even feel a bit left out as the world seems to be embracing a completely foreign approach to design.

This happens every generation, with the old-timers complaining about ‘today’s kids’ and their apparent lack of respect for the profession.

I’m sure the designers from the 1940s and 50s griped about ‘whippersnappers’ in the 70s and 80s with their Rapidographs and floppy disks or…whatever.

It’s true that there are a lot more designers actively working now than there ever have been in the past.

But the number of talented designers who have a solid understanding of the fundamentals has not diminished. If anything, it has increased due to the larger pool of designers out there.

The likelihood that at least a handful of these designers will produce something lasting is very high, even though one might have to wade through a lot of junk to find it.

Rapidograph & Notebook by Harry Diaz

Timeless Doesn’t Equal Boring

Think that classic design is boring and behind the times? Think again. Every single designer is influenced by those who have come before them.

If you choose only recent, contemporary designers to be influenced by, you’ll only be regurgitating the most recent trends, which could hasten their demise and make all of your work look horribly dated.

Try heading to the library and flipping through examples of classic designs by the greats of the 20th century. You might even be surprised at how often (and how badly) those designers were ripped off by later copycats.

The post How a Designer Might Create Timeless Designs appeared first on Speckyboy Design Magazine.

The restaurant has been around, in some form or another, since ancient Rome, and its function – to bring people together over a conveniently cooked meal – has changed very little in all that time.

There’s another benefit of restaurants that specifically applies to designers and other creative people, and that is to stimulate your creativity. That’s right – it’s been proven that socializing improves your intelligence. Not just academic intelligence either – interacting with friends and peers actually helps to make you more creative.

When you go out with others, you’re exposing yourself to an influx of new ideas that can’t help but positively influence your creative process. And food is a natural bonding agent, which is why so many creative ideas are born around a lunch or dinner table with other designers, artists, musicians, writers, et cetera.

Today, I’m going to explore the idea generation process familiar to so many designers who eat out with friends: the “awesome idea scribbled on a restaurant napkin” process.

It’s very high-level stuff. No, really! The lowly napkin sketch (or scrap paper or ledger pad sketch) has been used by everyone from babysitters all the way up to top creative executives at Microsoft and Walmart to bring to life important ideas that change the world, or at least bring in more profits.

Some experts say that the business sector is too dependent on language to express ideas that really should be expressed using visuals (i.e., sketches). That’s good news for us designers, but how exactly do we adapt it to our working process to make things easier for ourselves and our clients?

We designers all know the advantages of sketching: it’s a way to sort out our preliminary ideas and eliminate the ones that aren’t right for the job.

Of course, you don’t have to sketch on a napkin, but any kind of sketch is more useful than just thinking about the idea, because it requires you to use a different part of your brain.

Image Source

When you think, or read, or write, you’re nurturing the connections your brain makes between the different thoughts you have (called ‘neural pathways‘), and increasing your brain’s “elasticity.” When you add drawing to that process, you’re exercising important motor skills that can actually feed your creativity.

Personally, I prefer to sketch on paper. Why? Because it allows me the opportunity to step away from the computer for a brief moment and collect my thoughts on something I can touch and hold in my hands.

That’s important to me, and to a lot of designers whose work almost always ends up on the computer one way or another.

We humans respond to things that are interactive, and that allows us to make a direct impact on something. Ever wonder why more and more vending machines are see-through, rather than opaque?

The working mechanisms of those machines are engaging to our brains – we love to put our money in the machine, and literally see our desire (to have a refreshing beverage or snack) being fulfilled right before our eyes. It’s fun.

And guess what? Your clients are the exact same way.

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If you’re a designer or art director redesigning a company’s brand identity, how do you make sure everyone there understands the creative vision you have?

Well, you could tell them. But most people aren’t going to take notes and will end up misinterpreting what you said at some point or another.

You could show them a presentation, which might work for some people. But I think that printing out handouts of your sketches, and walking people through them is the best way to involve them in the decision-making process.

Sometimes, sketching can be used to effectively communicate ideas to people – designers or non-designers – in ways that far surpass, say, a PowerPoint presentation.

Think about what you’d rather have in a department meeting: a dry, preachy collection of slides, or a sketchbook to work out your ideas about the company’s creative direction?

Just like a clear-windowed vending machine allows us to see the effect our money has on it, involving people with live sketching gives them a democratic insight into how design decisions are made.

It can turn a lofty, complicated mess into something that’s easy for everyone to understand. And we all know that an informed client is a happy (and oftentimes repeat) client.

You don’t want to just talk at your clients and lecture them about things that are going to go over their heads. Your clients aren’t stupid (well, hopefully not).

They are running a company, after all. Clients like to feel creative, or at least like they’re contributing to something to the creativity of their businesses. And what better way to make grown adults feel powerful and in charge of something than by handing them some paper and making them draw like grade-schoolers?

All joking aside, people love that stuff. It creates a feeling of harmony and democracy in the company, as anyone, from the janitor to the CEO, can make a sketch.

As Lou Levit explains in his article, How Sketching Will Take Your Design Process to the Next Level, sketching allows you to “dig deeper” with your idea process, uncovering more design solutions that often work much better than the initial ideas you start out with.

Image Source

Another downside to simply absorbing information via presentation is that it tends to lead your client through the design process with minimal challenge to their own imagination.

Because of this, your client may not really understand your reasoning behind a more nuanced design solution, and may fight you on it. Presenting sketches is one way to quiet those feelings of misunderstanding. The more your client can see of your process, the more likely they are to trust your judgement.

The key to engaging your clients with sketching is to think of your design meeting more like a restaurant date with friends. Obviously, you should probably keep the celebrity gossip and alcohol consumption to a minimum, but the general feeling of creative camaraderie should be the same.

Engage your clients with spontaneous sketches, draw things out for them that you might otherwise just dryly explain, and observe the difference yourself in their level of understanding, engagement, and trust.

You don’t have to make them draw too, though, as I mentioned before, many people do love that. But just like passing around a napkin at the restaurant table to your friends can result in weird and wonderful new ideas, incorporating sketches in your meetings with clients can propel your projects to heights that you never would have expected.

The post The Idea Generation Process of Scribbling on a Napkin appeared first on Speckyboy Design Magazine.

The woman leaves the room for a moment, and when she comes back, she is dismayed to find that the children have all begun scribbling on the walls.

There are squiggly lines of color everywhere, ruining her pristine, white paint job. Imagine you are this woman. What do you do next? Do you praise the children’s artistic contribution to the decor? Or do you grab the nearest sponge and start scrubbing frantically before the company comes over?

If you’re like most moms, the answer is obviously the latter, but why? Is it because you want to tyrannize the kids? Infringe on their self-expression? Probably not.

More likely, you just want to maintain a sense of order in the house. Three toddlers running amok with crayons would quickly become chaotic. And in a world of chaos, no one is happy; neither you nor the children, even though they were the ones who started the madness.

Defending Design Simplicity

Antoine de Saint-Exupery once said that “perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.” That’s a nice quote, but what does it mean in the practical sense?

Sure, it’s telling us that simple is better than complicated. Most of us know that instinctually. No one wants a pen that’s also a steam iron, a soap dispenser, and a toaster oven. But how do we avoid ending up with one? Here’s a secret: it doesn’t just happen.

Source: Quote – Antoine de Saint-Exupery

Most people have an idea of the perfect simple, elegant solution to their design problem. The downside is, so does everyone else who has the same problem. Put them all in a room together, and you’ll have no consensus, but pandemonium.

Everyone will contradict each other, and sometimes even themselves, in pursuit of the “ultimate” solution that will be universally beneficial.

In one of the greatest paradoxes of human nature, when everyone has a say in what they think will make everyone happy, the result – invariably – is that no one is happy.

The underlying imperative of de Saint-Exupery’s words is that there must be someone in charge of a process who makes the single, final decision.

There must be one person – or a small, unified group of persons – who will ruthlessly prune the savage garden of the horde, creating a result that is not what anyone said they wanted, but what is truly needed.

They must be able to think globally rather than provincially. They must be willing and able to ignore what people say and focus on what is objectively best.

They must lead, and they must be vigilant about it. Any slack during this crucial moment, the final verdict will unravel the entire operation, resulting in a quagmire of confusion that will suck everyone under.

In other words, they have to act like Moms.

Don’t Make a Mess

People like to believe they’re an important part of a decision making process. And they are – just not quite in the way they think.

A consumer’s role in the design process is both less and more important than it often appears. It’s less important because what people tell you they want is almost always irrelevant.

That might sound harsh, but it’s actually a good thing. Recall the earlier example of the multi-purpose pen. Everyone you question will tell you something slightly different about what they “really” want in a pen.

Some people will want a pen that can light up. Others will want a pen that does arithmetic. Still, others will want one that can write underwater, or that is made out of living plant fibers, or that will give off a heavenly aroma of freshly baked cookies.

If you’re a reasonable sort, you’ll want to take everyone’s ideas equally seriously. It’s only fair – the customer is always right.

Plus, you might think all those ideas sound equally as cool – who wouldn’t want a pen that can do all of those things? In magical unicorn land, it would be perfect, a must-have item. But here’s the thing about the real world: when you add features, you get mass, and mass equals mess. Let me repeat that: features = mass = mess.

And a mess is completely at odds with de Saint-Exupery’s words of wisdom above. Nobody likes a mess. That perfect pen dreamed up by your well-meaning consumer test group would be the size of a wine bottle and weigh as much as a brick.

Sure, it would have all the features everyone asked for, but who do you think is actually going to use it? What people say is irrelevant.

As a designer, you must be prepared, like a good, caring mom, to give them what they need.

A consumer’s big, important role to play in a design process – their time to shine – is in demonstrating what they really, truly need in a product. Contrary to the things people say, what they need is extremely important. It is only through solving a need that any designer can hope to have a career. But how do you tell the difference?

If you can’t trust people to tell you what they need (and you can’t), how can you possibly figure it out? Should you guess? Do you simply create things arbitrarily, assuming you instinctually know what everyone’s needs are?

Of course not. That’s just as careless as adding too much mass. Do you embrace your inner creep and watch them intently, observing their habits and formulating an ideal solution based on what you see?

Well… yes.

People love to tell you how iconoclastic they are. Everyone else is one way, but they are different because (fill in the blank).

The truth is, the majority of human beings on this planet are remarkably similar in behavior, even people who might superficially be categorized as “different.”

True deviations from the norm are often frightening – sociopaths and murderers – or patently obvious mental or personality disorders. The rest of us – natives and immigrants, extroverts and introverts, liberals and conservatives, iOS users and Android – we’re all more alike than we typically care to admit.

And when we come together to form a market for a product, our actions as a unit usually prove it. We demonstrate what we really want, what we need, by how we behave; what we buy, when we buy it, how we pay for it, or even if we pay for it.

This is the meat of good design, the thing that makes it revolutionary. You must indulge your inner creep, or your inner mom, and let your market speak to you not with what they say, but with what they do.

The post Avoiding Design by Committee appeared first on Speckyboy Design Magazine.

I had no experience with working at a firm, nor was I technical enough to get deeply involved in the backend work. But my cover letter told them that I would be able to communicate clearly and effectively with their customers, while at the same time putting them at ease and perhaps making them laugh a little. I am pretty funny, after all.

The stories we tell prospective employers have a dramatic impact on whether or not we will be successful at what we do. They can literally make or break your career, so it’s important to choose and develop them wisely.

What is Storytelling?

You may be thinking to yourself, ‘I’m a designer – why do I need to worry about telling stories?‘ But storytelling is more than literally sitting down and writing a tale of heroics or romance or wizards who speak Latin.

We encounter storytelling in everyday aspects of our lives, like when we see a man pull a dog out of a busy intersection, or when we watch a group of protesters march by, carrying hand-painted signs for a cause they believe in. All of these things are stories; they’re tiny moments of people taking action and affecting the world around them. Because at the heart of it, that’s all a story really is.

I’ll bet that every movie you’ve ever seen goes something like this: there’s a person who does something in reaction to something that happened around them, which in turn causes another thing to happen that the person also has to do something about, and so on.

See? Story isn’t that complicated after all. Everyone already knows the basics. The key is incorporating them effectively in the way you communicate with your clients and your viewers.

Articulate the Vision For Your Clients

A few years ago, story artist Emma Coats tweeted a series of essential “story basics,” guidelines that she used at Pixar to create gripping narratives. Much of her advice had to do with simplifying and focusing on essentials that had a universal application. One of my favorites was #14:

“Why must you tell THIS story? What’s the belief burning within you that your story feeds off of? That’s the heart of it.“

What’s the essential thing you are trying to convey to your audience? When you walk into a client meeting, what do you want them to take away the most? You aren’t selling them on a website, or a branding campaign. You’re selling them on a story, an idea, a dream.

Your client dreams of something bigger than just “website” or “brand.” They dream of loyal customers who say glowing things about them. They dream of changing the world through the work they do. They dream of some story that, as the designer, it’s your job to uncover.

Words or Images?

As designers, visuals are highly important in our work. We use pictures to tell stories all the time – from the smiling mother pushing a shopping cart in a print ad to a sun-kissed row of crops on a site about sustainable farming. But what about words? You may think writing is the job of the writers, and it is, but that’s not the end of it.

Working with type means working with words – arranging them in a way that will reach out and grab the reader’s attention. Just like images, words can tell a different story depending on the way they look. Typography is a much more expressive medium than most people give it credit for. Traditional print designers typically have a good handle on this idea, but for web designers, the merits of a strong background in type can sometimes be overlooked a bit.

But what about the actual words themselves? Just because you’re not a professional author doesn’t mean your words aren’t valuable. Plenty of designers and artists have catapulted to tremendous success simply because they wrote or blogged about something that other people found valuable.

Austin Kleon’s bestselling book, Steal Like An Artist, is a great example of this. Kleon wrote the original blog post as an illustrated transcription of a talk he gave at Broome Community College in New York. Soon, it went viral, and within just a couple of years, the print version was selling like crazy.

Kleon had a story to tell that resonated with many people – not because he was paid to tell it, but because it was a simple truth that he had to share.

In Conclusion

The most important thing you can do as a creative professional is capture your audience’s imagination. A true visionary has a narrative, and tells the story of the work in whatever way he or she can.

Remember, nobody buys your skills – they buy an idea, a vision, a dream of how they can reach their business and personal goals with your help. They buy the story that tells the why, not the what, of what you do. Use the personality, passion, and drama of your stories to inform your designs. The more specific your stories, the more in-demand you will be as a designer.

The post The Importance of Storytelling in Design appeared first on Speckyboy Design Magazine.