This morning I had the pleasure of giving a pretty open talk titled “10 Things Craig Jamieson” at Creative Mornings in Cape Town on the topic of Transparency. Thank you to everyone who woke up early and was present, you were a great crowd, I truly hope you enjoyed it. Please find my deck below.
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I will be talking at this month’s Creative Mornings in Cape Town and the topic is Transparency. It will be held at Friends of Design and if nothing else, there’s breakfast! Best of all it’s free, so register now to join me.
There are so many good reasons for any team to build a living style guide, but one of the most obvious ones for me, given the movement of talent in the industry, is for onboarding new talent into projects. I cannot tell you how many times I have seen designers join a project and be expected to start rolling out designs straight away and more often than not, fail to meet any sprint deadline due to the huge learning curve and asset collating they go through.
I always try and think of what I would want when I join an agency and a living style guide is a perfect place to accumulate everything someone new will need. The most common elements are fonts, icons, PSD’s, style guides, pdf’s and so on. These can all be built into a living style guide, so not only can they download the files, but they can view how they are made up and work in the real scenario.
Hopefully, if the style guide is not an afterthought, it would be current, which is in the sorting of working files can be very confusing. Of course giving a designer a sketch file or access to a creative cloud library of colours, components etc that they can drag and drop into layouts, already speeds things up.
Designers shouldn’t be focussing too much time on designing pages, they should be working with these components and utilising what’s already been built and build on from that.
Onboarding is easy when you have all the working assets in one place, with a reference you can actually interact with which allows you to work in a modular manner and will help new designers get up to speed quickly, focussing on smaller tasks which will make getting into things, even faster. Another win for living style guides.
This evening we went to a viewing of the InVision movie Design Disruptors. It’s filled with lots of really big name designers for lots of really big name companies who owe their huge success to design. Designers won’t be hugely blown away, as this is the stuff we already subscribe to, I think this movie is what is needed to articulate what we do and the value we bring to those who maybe don’t understand what we do and why it’s so important.
Everything is designed. Not everything is designed well.
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This morning I had the pleasure of giving a talk to the world class second semester students of Friends of Design. I gave a brutally honest 50+ point presentation on things I have experienced and thought they ought to know.
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We all have ego’s and they are gluttonous beasts within all of us. As designers, our egos get in our way and often chase a lot of great opportunities away. My best advice I have for everyone, including myself. Get rid of your ego, focus on your work and be excited by every opportunity that comes your way. We are problem solvers and there’s little that should be beyond our ability to apply our thinking.
Yes we all want to work on hot brands that make us feel great, but doing great work of your own, trumps the success of others, honestly, get over yourself, there are very few people who can singularly lay claim to an entire brands success.
I was watching a talk the other day where the speaker explained that when you work at Apple, it’s not your design, it is Apple. Ego is gone! Product and brand are great, you work there, contributing the team that makes Apple great.
There are a lot of great people willing to afford us many opportunities if we just drop the ego, so be rid of it and you will do the best work of your life.
Working with a writer on my personal brand, I was asked the other day, “what makes you tick?” This question totally stumped me as I there’s just so much I love about what I do that I just don’t know where to start. Truth is, my first reaction is, “I don’t know”. Which seems like weird as the response should have been completely different.
Lately, I have been learning a lot more about what I don’t like to be doing. Just the other day I wrote an article which stated clearly, I am not a UX designer. I explained fairly poorly how I am not a UX designer as I mostly don’t like doing what they do, although I totally buy into what they do. I’ve used to have this same problem back in the day when it came to development. I could certainly code, some might say better than most developers out there, but I wouldn’t want to do development as my job, it’s something I did to ensure my designs came out the way I wanted them to.
In everyday life, I practice not focussing on negativity, so I thought I’d start doing the same with my work. Stop focussing on what I don’t do, and start looking at what I do and work my way into figuring out this question once and for all. Needless to say, I don’t expect to answer this immediately, and quite openly I will work on this, as part of the very transparent approach I have decided to take while I journal my journey of self-employment again.
With digital being such a broad term, I have started to gravitate towards the things within the industry I do like and that I feel others are overlooking. Like websites. I love websites, they offer a whole set of new challenges and despite the decline in builds of late, I still see the potential and I look forward to sharing my new offering in this field. Interaction design is another thing I love. The thing that I loved when building Flash sites, was the movement, the personality and the slickness I could do, beyond the pure prettiness of my designs. Every interaction was scrutinised and I simply obsessed over the tiniest of details, every pixel, animation, and reaction to a click. I love making sure that user has a good experience at every touch point, I can’t help myself as I go through life, wondering how I can improve shopping experiences or digitising services etc.
There is just so much I enjoy about the above-mentioned things and truthfully I can find so many opportunities beyond those things I love doing, but I have to be practical in my articulation of this question, what makes me tick. I don’t want to get caught out. I am pretty good at what I do, according to the feedback I have received over my career, so I don’t like to half-ass anything. I can design logos, which commonly do as an extension to building sites etc, but am I a logo designer, not nearly at the level others are. Do I have an opinion, absolutely! I have a great eye, I know what people need, hence me being one of the more recognised Creative Directors locally. But being self-employed only affords me so much opportunity to direct, I have to be practical and sometimes I actually have to do.
Now I’m not sure this is exactly what this question was intended to focus on, but for me, what makes me tick, is more than what I like, it’s what I like to do and what I do really-really well.
Quite often when my friends introduce me to new people, they are unsure how best to introduce me, as explaining what I do is challenging, in truth, even for myself. But more often than not of late, I get introduced as a user experience designer, big thanks to my friends who always pop in “one the of the best …”, kudos! They call me this because I often talk about user experience as part of how I think about solving problems, and a practice I have gotten comfortable with, as I typed that I rolled my eyes, but I reluctantly use user experience as part of my thinking.
For me it’s all kinda simple, I design useful stuff that people simply love. The industry buzz word is user experience and it’s opened up an entirely new category of the team member in product teams and the like, who play not only a huge part in the success of a product etc, but they have huge clout!
I really believe that everyone is a user experience designer, as we are all responsible for the experience of the end user. But then that’s like saying everyone’s a designer because we all solve problems. Well, it’s how you solve those problems that define who we are and what we do.
Of course, given my constant attention I give to better experiences for users, or more specifically people, I am more broadly understood as being a user experience designer. But I am not. The guys that stand out for me as user experience designers might not be thinking on a whole other level as me, but they apply themselves on a level, I simply am not comfortable doing.
The thing that makes someone, specifically a user experience designer, is not purely how they think or the methodology they practice, but the tasks they do, such as user research, creating personas and hypothesis etc. There are lists of things user experience designers do, that I can do, that I enjoy hearing about, that I understand and I include in my decision making, but I simply don’t like to do myself.
I have been designing for digital channels and making stuff for nearly two decades and there are many I do well, but I am well aware that what I am when you strip away any fancy titles I might have received or called myself in order to qualify myself, is simply a designer. Where I practice my design is a whole other conversation. But what I am not, is a user experience designer, I simply subscribe to thinking and best practice and apply it to my work.
If only I could find a better handle for my social platforms, as I cringe that I still use @digiguru with all the misconceptions and remarks that name refers to, both the reference to digital, despite most of the work I have done has been in this gray area of what some people call digital and to sitting cross-legged in the lotus position somewhere on top of a mountain in the Himalayas.
Its been a while since I actually got to code a website from scratch without some sort of CMS or other hosted solution. Web design simply is nothing like it was when I started out almost 2 decades ago. A lot of the major engineering is gone and for that matter, so is a lot of the design/styling. We really don’t do as much grunt work as we do, know what works. So I was thinking about what a web designer in todays online world looks like.
Nomadic
Working nomadically is nothing new to web designers, but it’s never been easier than now to work remotely. As co-working/co-living spaces become more available, with high end internet access availability, there really isn’t much holding web designers back from enjoying travel/vacation and work, a term we like to call a workation.
Basic skills
No web designer should have the right to call themselves that if they cannot at the very least understand how to write html and style with css, but I have a sneaky suspicion there are plenty of folks out there who simply know how to use the customisation panel within WordPress or their hosted online solution.
Knowing
There doesn’t seem to be any reason to have to code anything from scratch anymore, so the modern web designer really does have to know, rather than have to do. You could probably surpass more seasoned web developers by simply trying all the platforms out there and understanding their offerings than actually being able to develop anything.
Designing
Often we forget that despite being able to code, or not, there is the design, in web designer. There is very little need to design anything anymore, it’s more like a mix and match type of process. I don’t even see the point in doing a mockup design anymore, I think it’s easier to just jump straight in and add your logos, select fonts and colours and add your content.
Content is king
This old rule still stands true, even today, except it’s a whole lot easier to do now than at any other time before given how comfortable we all are taking photos of just about everything using little more than our phones and writing micro copy on the fly. Crafting words will always be an art thats hugely valuable, not even spelling is something we ned concern ourselves with, given the incredible tools available to us in editors.
Thinking
I haven’t been paid to do much for years, most of how I keep the lights on has to do with design thinking. How I see things has become far more valuable than how I (physically) do things. Knowledge, experience and approach mean a whole lot more to people than how neat my style sheet is.
Users vs taste
While every designer should have good taste, I guess it’s what separates us, it’s far more important to understand our users needs than to impose a design style. I still believe I’m an artist, my tools have just changed, my choices show my style, but my methodology and approach are the real art for delivering an experience people will love.
Innovation
You don’t have to be hugely innovative to be on the edge of web design, you simply have to know how to use the right offerings, but if you do want to innovate, then there are plenty of opportunities to join teams of designers building apps, templates and services that require that sort of thinking. But being a pioneer does not a web designer make, you can earn without being the inventor, rather you are more of a curator, so to speak.
The web is dead
If that was the case, then I see web people. Web designers are everywhere and I would think it’s one of the easiest things to get involved in, no matter what your experience. The learning curve is constant, you have to keep your skills sharp, whether it’s designing, coding or learning the latest online offerings. Being a web designer will always evolve, the web is not going anywhere. As long as there is a browser, web designers still exist and while I’m sure their is a decline in people accessing the internet by way of the browser due to apps, there is a growing internet access footprint as connectivity becomes more available.
In 2016, you don’t need to design or code to be a web designer, you just need to know how to solve problems for the web.
I remember early in my career, I struggled with one thing, content Not being formally trained, discovering Lorem ipsum was a useful place holder. Looking back, I can see why my I ended up designing and then redesigning layouts, as content trickled in and I never really profited the way I should have when working on projects. But I’d like to think I’m smarter now, but still I am faced with working on projects where the content is not considered up front and the expectation is that I will just use latin. Well fuck your Lorem ipsum, I design right, I design with content. The content will absolutely influence my design decisions, so there is really no point in designing without the correct content, in fact I’d say design is content, laid out. Now I love me some Samual L Ipsum as much as the next motherfucker, but it’s wrong, so stop it and tell the next person who suggests using Lorem ipsum where to get off.