Digital nutrition is about developing and implementing cognitive skills and creating new habits to help us stay in control of our technology consumption.
UX Collective have posted this great essay on what designers can do to contribute to what they are calling a tech diet. Given all the dark patterns and manipulation out there imposed upon us all, I agree we need to start influencing change from the inside.
InVision has released the 2019 Product Design Hiring Report, which is apparently the first global survey of its kind to assess the product design hiring landscape. It’s an interesting read if you are interested in a career in this space, are a hiring manager, design leader etc. Should share it with HR too, they might understand the realities of the industry.
I’ve started a YouTube channel and have been making these little videos. I guess they’re vlogs. I’m learning as I go. I’ve really made a lot of mistakes, but it’s a lot of fun and challenging me. I needed a new project, something out of my comfort zone and creating content in this way seemed right. I have built enough portfolio sites, my first portfolio was done back in 2000 and I’d written my first blog post by 2004, which I’m also tired of doing. Social networks mostly bore me, so becoming a YouTuber seems like a thing to do, well I guess try.
The hardest part for me is capturing footage to tell my story. I’m not one for sticking to a script, so I’d likely not do very well thought out posts and have the level of storytelling like Casey Neistat, the cinematography of Peter McKinnon and I certainly don’t have the adventures of Fun for Louis. Still, I’m much more of a creative thinker, a design leader and I’m me, which if I look back on my time on this planet, I’ve always managed to attract an interesting bunch of people around me. So let us see where this goes.
I’ll likely not blog often, if at all, but I have no intention of pulling this site down anytime soon. However your support is most welcome and I’d appreciate it if you would subscribe, like, share and leave a comment.
Stay cool!
A design system is a living ecosystem that serves the teams working on deploying products. As a central repository, it can be a combination of a coded components, design guides, brand assets and rules of engagement. This is usually an independent project run by a dedicated team who maintain the overall repository, code all the components, deploy updates and create all the assets for consumption by the teams across an organization.
The following are some of the most common categories within a design system.
Styleguide Commonly referred to as a living style guide is a visual reference of all the design assets that make up a brand and it’s supporting media and include things like colour, type, layout and other assets to help the design team consistently utilize the brand assets. This is constantly growing as more and more assets are added and the brand evolves.
Visual Language The brand will share the visual assets and their usage to best communicate effectively across media and contain a variety of produced assets such as video, icons, illustrations, and photography.
Design Language Every great design starts with a definition of the values and the standards to which a design effectively comes together and communicates seamlessly across multiple media. Principles are shared to help teams better understand why decisions were made and how best to apply them.
Pattern Library A coded repository of atomic-like assets for developers to easily consume to reduce the amount of churn and repeated assets that need to align across a project and function in a consistent way. This is usually html and css and some basic javascript. It can be, but not necessarily include complicated coded assets such as angularJS, jQuery and React, as technology changes so quickly code might be redundant before going live. The coded assets are both visual, functional and can be executable.
Voice & Tone Effective content and communication requires a brands voice and tone, while also including guidelines on how to effectively add content to communicate consistently across media.
Brand Guidelines Brand assets can be downloaded and appropriate guidelines shared to ensure consistent brand usage and avoid dilution of the brand and incorrect deployment creating confusion when developing brand assets.
Added to that, guidelines, legal documentation, how to contribute, get support and update logs are essential to maintaining a design system.
I hope you found this very basic guideline useful. Design systems are ever increasing in their detail and functionality and I’m sure in the future I will explain in more detail all the new features you can add and why you would need them. Whether you’re a designer, a developer or running teams and projects, a design system has to be the best way to create a consistent product, increase productivity and align your teams to your companies product vision.
It’s been ages since I blogged properly, but I have every intention of sharing loads more with you all. I have started doing some site maintenance. Currently, I’m playing with adding some gradients to all the pages and posts and also putting my blog at the forefront rather than my work, as I’ve just not got much content to show there, as well as how I share my posts across social channels. I have had a super 2017 and look forward to doing a recap over the next few days and sharing everything I have been doing. So thanks for understanding, and please check back soon for some updates to the site and a recap of the past year.
Dann Petty has put together a series called Freelance TV that documents freelancing. Inspired by the interviews, I thought I’d talk to the many freelance roles I have for filled over my career.
Independent
There is a stigma with the word freelancing that made me uncomfortable early in my career. To me I did not work for free, I was not some guy working in a basement etc, rather I was an independent professional and I guess, literally a one man show for the first 10 years of my career, because I chose to be self-employed as I had no formal design education.
Freelancer slash unemployed
Between working at agencies, I was forced to freelance in order to bring in some sort of income between finding full-time employment.
Freelance employee
While holding a position at agencies, I have worked as a freelance designer while also earning a full-time salary. This was nice way to earn some extra income, but it’s time-consuming and really difficult to pull off given the attention to detail I am used to putting into projects.
Freelancer at an agency
Probably my least favorite experience has been freelancing at agencies. The sitting at an agency having to design or direct seems forced and just didn;t sit well with me. People don;t treat you with the same level of respect and you pretty much just feel like a screwdriver executing someone else’s bad ideas.
Whatever your situation and your reasons for freelancing, I hope it gives you both the freedom and rewards you deserve.
In a big organization, there are a lot of moving parts across various departments and projects and when the goal is to create a single design language, keeping a consistent design can become almost impossible. My strategy for this was to develop a core design team who would be responsible for designing the individual components of our design system which could then be deployed and consumed by designers who worked within project teams. This was met with a huge amount of resistance as people seem to think that having bums in seats within projects would speed things up and deadlines would be achieved. However, the goal is to have a consistent design and building up a living style guide would provide us with a platform that all teams could understand and consume the required components in which to apply to their designs. Ultimately project teams should be more focused on other priorities like functionality, better user experiences and align all projects into the specific channels that will deliver these to the people who will use them.
In order for me to explain this over and over again, to which I have mildly had some success, I have managed to create the analogy that this core design are busy creating the system, which if I get my way, will consist of pairing up designers with developers so they can dev these components and test, break and animate them before committing them or rolling out several static designs, is call these my Lego block builders. Their responsibility is to make the Lego blocks which the Lego builders will consume to make the Lego models. There is a very generic list of components almost every project may consume from (atoms), there’s how you piece these components together (molecules) and then there’s the way they work together (organisms). The Lego builders consume this within their various projects and should they need a specific block that does not exist, it is their responsibility to identify it and bring. it to the core design team who will then work with them to create the blocks and how they work together to deliver on the projects needs, feeding back into the system for all other Lego builders to consume. I have borrowed some language from Atomic design principles, and we have probably all played with Lego, so this should be language most people can understand.
I am often told that this is not agile and this is creating silos etc. Maybe, but it’s necessary if you want to have a single look-and-feel that represents the brand consistently. Spreading the design out across multiple teams, on multiple projects, in various buildings would simply not work. While I could move across all teams and keep alignment, the task is too great and much easier to control by giving out a set of guidelines for teams to follow. It’s a subject for another post, but living style guides and designs systems are necessary and utilised by most big organisations who want to create seamless experiences for their customers, but throwing tons of resources won’t develop this any more successfully than rather putting a core team together who work with each other to solve the visual design challenges and deploy them into the style guide and then iterate accordingly. I think the challenge is to identify the brick builders from the Lego designers who consume the bricks and make sure that there is still enough design challenges for everyone to be inspired no matter which role they are best suited. The other is getting people to understand the vision and hopefuly make them understand that in order to be consistent and speed up the design process, a small core team is the most practical solution I can think of.
For a while now, designers have been able to fire up their favorite design program and whip out some layouts which are sold to clients and then handed over to developers. While it would be damaging to some talented individuals to expect them to be able to do anything else, other than what they are primarily good at. For everyone else, they must learn to code.
The problem is that more often than not, is that the design does not come out built the same way it looked when it was designed. There could be any number of reasons, such as the designer not understanding what development limitations there might be, the developer does not pay attention to the details a designer might see, or things like responsive behavior and animation which you can’t explain in a static design.
The only logical solution I see is for designers to become great coders, learning how to design in the browser vs in a visual design app like sketch or photoshop. Of course, if developers came to the party and teamed up with designers like copywriter/art directors come together, that would be ideal.
Designers please, enroll in some online courses and learn to build your own responsive layouts, code animations and build a set of tools that will speed up your process with best in practice functional UI. Designers must learn to code.
I wanted to share the KLM iFly 50 website today as it’s the first website I have seen in a while that just blew me away. It’s simple but technically brilliant and I’m truly inspired.
To celebrate the iconic fiftieth edition of IFLY KLM Magazine, we created the ultimate travel collection, presenting the 50 most beautiful, surprising and mesmerizing destinations from all over the world. (found @ Awwwards)
I don’t pay as much attention to these sorts of sites anymore, but I am inspired enough to start keeping an eye out and sharing more finds to inspire you too.
The past year was not all doom and gloom for me and I thought I’d mention a few things I appreciated about 2016 and I hope to continue adding this sort of good stuff into 2017.
Wishing you all the best for 2017!