80 Works for Designers

Challenge: Lost in Translation

2009-11-02T20:34:36-08:00

This is a fun challenge that I've used a few times in class, and it should only take you about 30 minutes!

The above example, a retooling of an ad for avoiding infant formula, was turned into an ad for Woodland Park Zoo by Donnie Dinch... which shows how you can do this exercise with a straight face or have some fun with it.

Lost in Translation

Your ad reads: “Lorem ispsum consequat dolor ix vox populii.” Either your audience is fluent in designer’s Latin, or you need to roll up your sleeves and start writing some real headlines. Crafting copy for a design project can be fun if you have a strong command of your native tongue—though if writing is not your forte, the process can be nerve-wracking.

But don’t be scared. You’ve probably been copywriter at one point in your life. Just think back to when you took a trip to a foreign land. When confronted by cryptic billboards and bewildering ad images, you couldn’t help but write sales copy on the fly. How else could you process that otherwise unintelligible mass of foreign characters atop a smiling, bikini-clad woman clutching a piping-hot cappuccino?

Use the following challenge to take a journey into the mind of a copywriter. Find a foreign-language advertisement that you admire, then redesign it with text you’ve written in your native tongue. If possible, do not adjust the layout to fit your words. What will help this foreign ad make sense in your cultural context?

If you'd like to take it further: Find a television advertisement in a foreign language, take screen captures from key scenes that incorporate written text, and retouch them with dialogue in your language that makes sense of the progression of images.

Included after the break is another example from a set of images that I provided in this post from this past January.

Challenge: Charitable Status Update

2009-10-03T16:31:59-07:00

See if you can solve this challenge in two hours, with a tight sketch of your solution...

Charitable Status Update

One of the wonders of the Internet is as follows: our newfound ability to connect like-minded individuals in support of nonprofit initiatives that need immediate assistance.

While online campaigns will never completely supplant the silent auctions and fundraising breakfasts of the world—which are conducted to finesse the high-rollers for big-ticket donations—social communities can mobilize swiftly and effectively to create an impact on both a local and a national scale. And within those communities, we can use our design skill and technological savvy to create new kinds of cause-fostering opportunities that have never existed before.

In this challenge, consider the possibilities that exist for nonprofits to raise funds and support within an enclosed social network.

Come up with ideas for a Facebook application that will help raise $200k for a nonprofit cancer-fighting foundation.

Should it be a game? A pass-along greeting? Bracing factoids that induce guilt? A charity auction? Clearly think through how people will need to move from their first interaction to donating money, what elements of the application you’d need to design in order to sell in your recommendation, and how your installation and use of the application will potentially be shared on your friends’ news feeds. What will you create that transcends the ways that we currently use Facebook?

“Every good act is charity. A man’s true wealth hereafter is the good that he does in the world to his fellows.” —Moliere

If you'd like to take it further: Draw up a press release that you would send to bloggers promoting your Facebook app. Why would people outside the Facebook community want to promote your cause?

80 Works Update: Finished Manuscript, Winter 2010 Class

2009-10-03T16:20:01-07:00

I've been a little lax in updating this blog because I've been working on finishing up the 80 Works book. It's been delivered to HOW Design Press! Now I'll be focusing on rebooting this blog, with a focus on sharing a number of challenges that didn't make it into the manuscript, as well as highlighting work from around the web/on other websites regarding ways to come up with better design ideas faster.

I'm also considering teaching "80 Works for Designers" again in the Winter 2010 quarter, so if you're interested in participating, feel free to contact me at dksherwin at msn.com.

Work 07 / Lick It Good: Student Designs

2009-04-30T22:30:00-07:00

The challenge: Design a series of six commemorative stamps that celebrate energy conservation. The class will brainstorm illustration styles, which will be written on slips of paper, dropped into a hat, and then selected randomly to determine how you will individually execute the stamp designs.

The Spring 09 class into a hat the following artistic styles: collage, folk art, stippled, photo-realistic, gouache, and kitsch. Here's what they came up with...

Katharine Widdows:

Jake Rae:

Michelle Cormack:

Jessica Thrasher:

Spring 09 | Class 02: Book Report

2009-04-18T19:32:48-07:00

We're dong this assignment again! This time, we're focusing on doing young adult books.

Bring in a book that you really like that most people probably haven't read. Each of us will give a brief talk about the book and why we like it. Your book will be randomly assigned to another designer in the class. You are now the book designer at Knopf assigned to create the cover for the new paperback edition. (Let's ignore that Knopf doesn't regularly do paperbacks.) Come up with an idea for the cover design + a single chapter page/spread of the interior. You may not read any part of the book other than the back cover/inside jacket flap.

Class, please leave a blurb about your book here for whom you've swapped books with. Thanks!

"The Cult of Done Manifesto" by Bre Pettis and Kyo Stark

2009-04-13T15:49:16-07:00

Have you read "The Cult of Done Manifesto"?

This is one of the best attempts I've seen to codify principles of agile design. Of course, it was written in 20 minutes:

There are three states of being. Not knowing, action and completion.
Accept that everything is a draft. It helps to get it done.
There is no editing stage.
Pretending you know what you're doing is almost the same as knowing what you are doing, so just accept that you know what you're doing even if you don't and do it.
Banish procrastination. If you wait more than a week to get an idea done, abandon it.
The point of being done is not to finish but to get other things done.
Once you're done you can throw it away.
Laugh at perfection. It's boring and keeps you from being done.
People without dirty hands are wrong. Doing something makes you right.
Failure counts as done. So do mistakes.
Destruction is a variant of done.
If you have an idea and publish it on the internet, that counts as a ghost of done.
Done is the engine of more.

Dave Randall wisely noted in the comments to the original post: "Let me know when you design an airplane, or automobile, or CAT scanner, or fire extinguisher, or elevator, or SCADA system, or microwave oven using this method, so I can be certain never to use it."

Stretching Your Creative Talent

2009-04-12T10:53:10-07:00

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

2009-03-18T20:49:21-07:00

"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.

"When you seek something, your true nature is in full activity, as if you are feeling for your pillow in the dark. If you know where the pillow is, your mind is not in full function... When you do something with a limited idea, or with some definite purpose, what you will gain is something concrete."

Over the life of our class, you've been provided with a huge breadth of different types of design problems. But I think the one that may have hit home hardest -- at least for me -- was Work 72, "100 Iterations":

"Over 15 minutes, the class will brainstorm a name and description for a new, affordable organic energy drink that will be highly desirable during our lovely recession. Then, over the next 15 minutes, the class will create 100 sketches of said energy drink. We will then spend 10 minutes refining the 100 sketches down to 3 final design sketches."

The first part of this exercise was fairly easy. The class had been focusing on rapid concepting techniques and was able to brainstorm a series of viable names within the time limit.

But the second and third parts were more challenging. We had to come up with at least 20 sketches of the drink form factor and type placement within a 15 minute period, which allots less than 30 seconds per idea.

There were no boundaries. No rules. We were fumbling around in the dark for the pillow. Our pencils informed the result.

At the start of this class, I mentioned this quote by Angie Drakopolous, which I'll include here again at the end of 80 Works -- because I think it is very important to consider:

"...because of the project’s size and deadline, you couldn’t spend too much time on any individual work; so you achieved a certain degree of detachment from the end result, which allowed a lot of latent ideas and tendencies to surface. I think that was the first time I experienced art as a mind-game."

Angie doesn't just mean that you are playing a mind game with yourself to fulfill the end goal of the class and survive. These latent ideas and tendencies that Angie describes are the material. You got to better ideas more quickly as the class progressed because you stripped away a layer of attachment -- whether you liked it or not.

The important question for you to now consider is: Did you need that attachment to create great design?

I am often afraid, when embarking on a project, that the strategy is wrong and that I'll have to start over. Or that I haven't covered enough ground to get to a good idea. Or that I won't have enough time to really steep myself in the process of making to achieve flow and maybe even enjoy the design process.

All those fears are completely valid... but you can't be attached to them. They're only as real as the weather. The weather doesn't control you. If it's raining outside, you can still embark on your journey. Eventually, it will stop raining, and you will end up where you needed to travel.

"If you continue to try to find out ... you will gain more power to understand things. Whatever you do, you will not waste your time."

We have spent 11 weeks speaking words, drawing pictures, cutting and pasting paper, and creating designs in computers. On Thursday, we will review the work that we have created -- some of it no more than sketches on tracing paper -- and try to suss out exactly what kinds of understanding we have gained.

But let me be clear: This is not another summit that you have climbed. Don't be tempted to cling to what you've learned as the end-all, be-all of how to approach your design practice. Be agile in how you think about design. Surprise yourself with different methods of brainstorming and making. If you find yourself gravitating towards a solution that seems easy, it's probably not meaningful.

In short, be prepared to change your mind. Ignore boundaries. Find out for yourself.

"This is what it means to surrender, even though you have nothing to surrender. Without losing yourself by sticking to a particular rule or understanding, keep finding yourself, moment after moment. This is the only thing for you to do."

Thank you for our time together. It's been an honor to design beside each and every one of you.

How Designers Can Think Strategically

2009-03-01T22:28:03-08:00

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

2009-02-22T17:07:00-08:00

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.

Resolve your designs in steps. When keeping a sketchbook, don't think that you need to draw the design in all of its glorious finality. Record your progression of thinking, from the high-level concept down to the steps necessary to render that idea. Then you can fashion the details as their own individual sketches, and bring it all together in the computer.

When you were putting together your user flow project in class, you were taking part in this process backwards, from details to overall flow. But when you're working on a design concept, as opposed to a user flow, you start with your concept/vision and then work into the particulars.

Resolve complexity as needed. I've been hammering on using a pencil and paper for as long as you can before you hop into the computer, but you can't figure it all out with a sketch. Sketching can only elaborate complexity.

Cluster your ideas. Find relationships. See how things relate. This is a function of the SCAMPER checklist I shared with you in the first week of class.

Draw/redraw the same idea to find new ones. Sketching is a type of thinking. You can passively stimulate new ideas by simply redrawing an existing one. Don't feel like you need to be in control of the pencil.

Overdraw. Don't apply boundaries to your ideas. Let sketches and words overlap, fuse together, and suggest new ideas.

Never erase. I've been seeing you scratch out ideas in class as we brainstorm and critique. See what happens if you don't erase. Layer things up. Allow mistakes to mingle with "good" ideas. Sometimes great ideas come out of the marriage of the two.

Notate sketches. Capture your thoughts about those visual ideas you've drawn through the sketchbook. Describe the details and subtleties.

Cut, paste, and stick in material from the outside world. Feel free to include extra layers in your sketchbook, plus those little napkin sketches that happen when you don't happen to have your sketchbook around.

Return to the notebook when it's full. If you're solving a similar kind of problem, see what kind of thinking you applied to it in the past.

I hope Tim's thinking here helps you as you work through your designs for the rest of this class and beyond. I'm waiting for his presentation to get uploaded to the Internet, so I can point you all to it to see his visual examples!

Work 45 / Touch Screen of (Deaf) Rock: Student Prototypes

2009-02-21T23:15:47-08:00

A few weeks back, I took a class taught by Dan Saffer and Bill De Rouchey about designing gestural and touch user interfaces. Within the class, we had an hour to prototype a "music store interface of the future." When we were working on the exercise, I couldn't help but wonder what kind of experiences we could create with similar technologies for people who are disabled.

Two weeks later, I'd crafted the following exercise for our 80 Works class:

"The Experience Music Project (EMP) would like you and your big brains to create a novel exhibit experience for their Music Lab that lets deaf people feel different kinds of music. You have 45 minutes working together as a team to create a paper prototype AT SIZE that defines this experience. We’ll test your interface in a walkthrough, and then you'll get 15 more minutes to refine the interface for a final test."

With only 45 minutes to get a first rev of a paper prototype into place, Mark Notermann, Meg Doyle, Claire Kohler, and Donnie Dinch jumped into action! Let's look at their interface and see how they revised it on the fly to make it sing.

In case you've never been to the EMP in Seattle, here's the skinny. On the top floor of the museum is a Music Lab where you can play with interactive exhibits that teach you how to play various musical instruments in both public displays and in special booths that you can enter for a set period of time and get some privacy with you and your friends to jam out. The exhibit that I'd tasked the class with would be within one of those rooms, maybe with a frosted glass window so that there was some privacy.

The class quickly decided to set a series of constraints around the exhibit. It would allow visitors to select between full bands (by selecting genres of music) and specific instruments. Visitors to the exhibit would then see, hear, and feel the music through visuals on a screen, speakers that would play audio, and vibration transmitted through the floor and walls.

As this was a paper prototype, the class drew and refined it as they went, making decisions together as to what would make the best experience. I was then brought in as the deaf person to use the interface without any aural input. (Next time, I should definitely do it wearing earplugs, so sound wouldn't be part of how I experience the prototype...)

This is the first screen of the interface. When you walk in, instructions describe what'll happen when you use the exhibit, and prompt you to immediately choose a single instrument or a style of music. Once you've made a choice, this screen doesn't appear again unless you hit a "start over" or "back" button on the exhibit interface.

The user selects "Single Instrument" and then goes to the next screen.

Once you're beyond the "get started" page, the main exhibit interface has a large video player with a scrub bar so you can see the progress of the video. To the left of the video, there's an "about" panel that shows text that describes the music/instrument being played.

The first version of the interface had a large box that overtook more than half of the exhibit screen. This box contained either single instruments or styles of music. In the next rev of this part of the interface, the buttons were collapsed into a menu that was at the bottom of the screen. This kept the menu items from interfering with the exhibit experience and also helped reduce any repetitive motions, as the user would be listening to 30-second sound samples and would likely be selecting many different elements off the menu as they used the exhibit.

You can see here how the "single instrument" / "entire band" buttons have been shifted to the bottom, and the instrument selection is now part of a flyout menu. The users are prompted to "feel the music" by putting their hands on the handprints. The entire surface may be vibrating, but the visual cues will draw the user to start here.

The user sees footprints on the floor. If they stand there, vibrations from the music will carry up through their legs.

Donnie and I discuss the usability considerations about reading long-form text in touch screen interfaces. How could the user easily scroll the text without a mouse? Should they use their hand to scroll the text up and down by touching the screen and dragging the text downward? That would block a portion of the screen with your arm, blocking out content. However, if there's an arrow at the bottom of the screen, content won't be blocked and you won't strain your arm by reaching upwards to keep moving text...

The user has the ability to skip to a different point in the video by scrubbing the video progress bar. In hindsight, we could have added a play/pause button.

What if you aren't deaf? What if you don't want to feel the vibration? At the very end, we throw some controls over the vibration and audio, as it's likely that a mixture of deaf and non-deaf people will play with the EMP exhibit.

The class did all of this in just one hour!

Amazing work from everyone involved... and the foundation of an exercise we'll be doing next week, where we'll take this one step further...

Precisely Rough Sketching

2009-02-15T10:22:45-08:00

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.

First off, just to polish off what I'd talked about two weeks ago:

Computer-based design software sucks... compared to the humble pencil. Even using a Wacom tablet is harder than using a pencil and paper. Computers don't enable flow, and if you can get into a state of flow when doing sketches, you can go further much faster.

How you sit and use your pencil influences your quality of work.Keeping a stable posture, being close to the paper, and holding the pencil loosely in your hand is directly expressed when you're trying to draw an idea. Moving the pencil towards you, instead of away, also leads to more stable and precise illustrations.

Aim for work that's precisely rough. Is there such a thing? Yes. If you want to show an idea in a state that describes through its visual language that it's still in progress, use a sketch. Once you get in the machine, clients and your peers will perceive the work with a different frame of mind -- even if it's stamped with For Position Only or This is a Draft. A sketch treated in this way screams Still room for improvement. If you want a perfect square, use Illustrator at your own peril.

Work quickly in order to iterate your thinking and begin to create narratives. Mark and William keep notebooks in order to work through their thoughts in a visual manner. In doing so, each of them was able to iterate through a number of ideas swiftly and string them into a narrative. This is very important for interaction sketching, which shows how people use a product or service over time and is in effect a simple storyboard. I think the phrase they brought up was: definable = designable.

Include guidelines. If you're working with sketches that need to render a 3-dimensional idea, feel free to sketch in guide lines, circles, and any other shapes that will help you maintain perspective and volume. Make sure they're in place before you attempt assembling a complex shape.

Now, on to some quick illustration tips and some examples... I know you can do better than mine!

Indicate flow clearly and boldly. When telling a story or showing how an object can be manipulated, clearly indicate change from state to state. The example in the center is meant to show how you fold a t-shirt.

Take an architectural approach to rendering people. When drawing people, start with the head, then create the body in proportion to the body. And be sure to consider how the arms, legs, and overall direction of the person's body is showing gesture -- which helps to convey the context for the overall story.

Indicate direction of movement through shading. Don't just scribble your people in. Otherwise, direction won't be evident in how they move. See the photo at the top of this post for an example.

Don't worry about "finishing" the sketch. Bringing things together with the necessary detail is all you need to do -- those little elements that make if "feel real". Don't put misplaced effort into microdetailing or polish. Save that for the computer comp.

This post barely scrapes the surface of Mark and William's knowledge on this topic. I'm very excited to get their book when it comes out... I'll be sure to put info about it here as soon as it's available for purchase, as I think it'll be an indispensable addition to any designer's bookshelf.

Here's some student examples from the class that I took. They were generated in a matter of a half an hour. We were asked to analyze how we did laundry, then work as groups to visualize the process, as well as ways that we could improve the task...

Work 22 / Dry Diapers: Student Designs + Case Study

2009-02-09T18:13:53-08:00

About four weeks ago, the 80 Works class was tasked by me and Jill Vartenigian, an instructor at Seattle Central, with the following challenge:

"In 30 minutes, brainstorm ideas for a name, logo, and form factor for a brand of diapers that can be marketed to urban parents. These diapers need an edge, a hint of sly humor or cool that make them stand out from the boring 'ol diapers you can find pretty much anywhere.

Boy, did the class rise to the challenge. The following is a case study of how the class took this seed idea and executed it as a design concept.

Within those first 30 minutes, the class worked as a team to brainstorm out the overall concept and thinking behind Dry Diapers. To give you an idea of where they ended up, here's a summary of the Dry Diapers product concept and overall ethos by Claire Kohler:

"Raising a kid is a wonderful and joyous thing, but let's be honest: it has its difficult moments. You made it through the morning sickness and nine months of sobriety, and now you get to figure out how to change a diaper that's full to capacity while dealing with a very wiggly and impatient infant. And who ever knew that you had to keep track of what comes out down there? Well, we can't make the job fun in the normal sense of the word, but DRY is here to make it an easier, quicker, and less wasteful task."

"Our starter pack consists of this stylish messenger bag, with twenty diapers and an oh-so-handy chart on the inside flap for marking the #1s and the #2s. We've even provided #1 and #2 stickers so there's no need to fumble with a pen. DRY diapers are 100% biodegradable, and the packaging is recycled and recycleable. When you run out of what you buy with the starter pack, a refill pack is only $9.99 and contains 40 diapers. So let us help you change a shi—whoops, can't swear anymore—a stinky job into a slightly less stinky job with DRY diapers (you know, stinky as in not-super-fun...the actual stink has more to do with what goes in, and we'll leave that in your very capable hands.)"

But I'm sharing what was delivered in the final client presentation. After those initial 30 minutes in the first class brainstorm, things actually looked more like this:

After seeing some rough ideas, the "client" gave approval on this more rudimentary idea of Dry Diapers. The class was given two weeks and the following deliverables brief to get to an articulated concept.

"Based on the work that you presented to the client last week, develop out the form factor, visual language, color palette, copy tone and description, and fully executed logo for the Dry Diapers packaging. Then marry them all up into a design execution. You will divide up amongst your teammates whom will take on what part of the diaper design, and one person will be responsible for bringing the entire execution together."

"Some important considerations, based on what I saw last week: 1. In order for this calendar idea to work, will you need to have a starter bag with some diapers, and then refill boxes that you buy? 2. What kind of bag materials will let you put on 1/2 stickers and then remove them safely, without damaging the substrate? And will be sustainable? 3. The idea is cool, but kind of gross too. In what ways can you make it not gross, but sophisticated, in the know, a kind of wink-wink between parents but otherwise cool?"

The class was given no instruction on how to divvy up the work to get to the first presentation. Without a formal process in place, Mark, Claire, Donnie, and Meg had to negotiate how they could work together, what tasks whom would take on, and how they would make it to the client review. This proved to be the first hurdle to the project: roles had to be negotiated before any work could start.

When roles were set up -- Mark as project manager and logo designer, Donnie as form factor guru and materials genius, Claire as copywriter and visual language overseer, and Meg as the person who would bring it all together for the presentation -- everyone sprang into action.

Claire and Mark worked through the details of the color palette, going through rounds of refinement:

Mark worked hard on defining the Dry logo, coming up with a range of samples based off a specific typography direction the "client" had admired from the initial presentation:

At the same time, Claire worked with the input of the whole team to refine the visual language:

And, at the end of the process, Meg brought the whole thing together into a 3-point presentation that was delivered to the client, who was (of course) happy with the result.

Still up for grabs was the 1/2 stickers. Sticker? Marker? Easy to remove? Place it under the flap of the bag?

Kudos to all the students for rocking this assignment -- especially considering in the midst of all this work, the class was still carrying on with a number of other individual class assignments!

Target, you gotta pick these diapers up for next season!

Work 21 / Mr. Blue: Student Designs

2009-02-09T16:50:43-08:00

The most common color? Blue. And yet there are so many variations on this hue... Can you design a masthead for a new magazine that’s solely about the topic of blue? This includes its name, suggestions for art direction, and what kinds of articles you think the editor should include.

True Blue by Mark Notermann

BLUEMAG by Meg Doyle

Blue by Donnie Dinch

Collaborative Design Methods: Group Critique

2009-02-07T08:30:57-08:00

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.

I started as an editor for writers. Those who ply their trade with words, just like designers, can get very attached to their thematic ideas -- the big thinking behind their work -- and the stylistic choices that make the line-by-line writing unique. When couching feedback, making tweaks or changes in the name of improvement can't just happen without context. Otherwise, you aren't honoring their intent.

With this in mind, when I critique work, I like to start at the top and work my way down. I like to discover what the designer had in mind with the work, and based on that rationale, help them to either re-orient how they think about the business problem or to consider alternative points of view for their design execution.

1. Consider the context of the critique. Are you talking about concepts? Final executions? Depending on where you are in the process, adjust what level of feedback you need to provide. Don't heavily critique sketches or screen comps if you aren't very far into the design process. Being mindful of context is more than half of being constructive.

2. Solicit a statement of intent from the designer. Let them talk about what they wanted to accomplish with the work, and how it fulfills the business goal. Most feedback in a critique comes from the friction that occurs between the description of the designer's intent and what qualities the work exhibits that the designer may not have intended.

3. At the start of a critique, always point out what you like. Begin by describing in the work the elements that you really like. Be positive, affirming, and always save one detail for after you've given constructive feedback.

4. Talk about elements that can be judged against the brief first. Based on your understanding of the business problem, address any concerns that you might have about specific elements of the concept or design from a strategic point of view. Make sure that when you note problem areas, you also include a possible direction or two that could help to address that problem. If you don't help with at least half a solution, you're just passing the buck. This also will help the recipient of the feedback to better understand your point of view.

5. Leave your aesthetic judgment as next to last. If you want to critique color, type, photo direction, or other surface attributes that could be considered outside the realm of the brief's scope, then be sure to point out that you're talking about art now, not strategy. Invite a dialogue: "There's something about the type use here that I'm struggling with... let's talk it through..." Be sure to note that you're sharing your artistic point of view, not passing judgment.

6. Bring up one last great detail you love. Reassert the qualities of the design that are really strong. Leave things on a positive note, and the feedback will always go down smoother.

Of course, this sort of process is easier if you're delivering feedback to a single person, one on one. It gets a little more challenging when you are collaborating as a group and you are all responsible for the quality of the end product.

In the case of group critique, you need to assign one person who will "own" the final result. That person should strive to solicit everyone's point of view and consider those various angles on the final result. However, in the end, the work needs to have a cohesive vision or "art direction." It isn't about what any specific member of the team wants the work to look like if you're working as peers. It's about what the work wants to look like, based on how your team has agreed to rally around a desired result. This result needs to be described at the start of the project, or at least partway through, in order to confirm the result.

You'll know that the work is past critique when you're just making fine-grained details over and over again instead of giving big thoughts about how the work could better align with the business strategy or the client's overall needs.

Let's try this out in our next class and get some practice on giving positive, supportive critique!

Collaborative Design Practices: Choosing Your Tools

2009-02-01T18:14:02-08:00

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.

The difference between mediums, media, and tools

If you began your journey into design from being an artist, then you're very familiar with the specific mediums that make up the genre of visual art.

Usually when we talk about tools in the creation of art, we're discussing the things we use to create a piece of art in a specific medium. For example, if the medium is oil painting, there are specific tools that you need to create your finished work. The canvas, the oils, the palette, the brushes, and your turpentine are all tools that cohere into your finished artifact.

Design isn't a medium. It's a process of making. The application of design making encompasses any genre or medium of visual art that you can muster. The end result, a designed artifact as opposed to a piece of art, is crafted to be mass-produced. Design's closest analogue in the art world is conceptual art. If you want to dig deeper into this subject, this piece from last year unpacks some of what I'm getting at.

Because of design's all-encompassing domain, we spend an inordinate amount of time negotiating how we'll use tools (which may be derived from the specific mediums of visual art) to implement ideas in specific media. Most often, we need to choose media that allows mass production. We may generate an oil painting as part of a brochure we're designing, but in the final delivery of our design, the medium becomes part of the final printed media. For that printing to be successful, we need the tools of a camera or scanner to capture the painting into a digital medium, a computer that can translate the raw scan into a Postscript file that can then be "RIPed" and burned into a printing plate that will allow ink to be impressed in specific patterns on a sheet of clean white paper. Once you select your tools and start working through how to use them on a project, things get hella complicated.

Planning how you choose and use your tools is design

We've spent a lot of time in class talking, sketching, and realizing ideas. Our design tools in that venture have been pencils, Sharpies, whiteboard markers, and sometimes some scissors, crayons, and glue. Instead of being limiting, this palette of materials has afforded us some freedom from the wide array of tools that would be required to execute those ideas. We can say, "This package would be perfect if it was made of glass," and voila, in our minds, the package is made of glass. We don't need to worry yet about the machines and processes necessary to actually make the glass package.

Planning how you use and apply your tools is a design activity. It doesn't need to happen with Adobe CS and a Mac. Some designers that have spent their whole life with computers, cell phones, and other technologies assume that the computer is the tool of choice for getting nitty-gritty with your design work. I argue the opposite tack: the computer is very useful in realizing final designs with tools of mass production, but it is hobbling when you're trying to solve fundamental design problems.

Did you choose the computer, or did the computer choose you?

Opting to use a computer instead of a pencil can have dramatic consequences on the amount of time necessary to shape a strong idea. Not a great visual design, mind you. Even if you don't have a strong idea, a good span of uninterrupted time in the computer will always yield a somewhat attractive result. But the most powerful design making most often emerges from having a solid core of an idea, around which you wrap the appropriate visual language to yield a beautiful artifact. Great design often happens in an organic fashion, but if you're totally under the gun, organic design methods will always take longer than if you did some cursory planning. And you can't scale those methods onto a team without something breaking down in the process.

Now, moving from the idea to a polished comp or mechanical... The computer has become the number one timesaver in bringing an idea to full execution, compared to the good old days of manual typesetting and pasteup. Is this truth or illusion?

This is a beautiful illusion. The computer provides a luxury of options for making, and furnishes the illusion of polish through each iteration of your design. But it isn't quite configured to solve specific issues quickly that underpin your final artifact. Even the most adept Photoshop artists and Illustrator whiz kids need to do some form of preplanning when under deadline. They work through specific types of layout, type, and surface concerns that can always be iterated more quickly on paper. I've agonized hours over creating a texture in Photoshop, and then defaulted to throwing together a hand-painted background that I've realized with a paintbrush and acrylics in a few minutes. Then again, there are specific executions that can only happen within a computer. If you're choosing to go down that road, you simply need to know how much time it will take to work the problem out (and what your Plan B is if the techniques you apply don't work.)

Design fundamentals require drawing

It goes without saying that when concepting an idea, the quickest method to find a high-level solution is working with pencil and paper. We've spent the past month in class using pencils and our minds to come up with strong ideas to solve design problems. I've observed all of you getting a little faster in getting to execution as a result. You've also been able to work in groups to reach this goal.

Now, what happens past the concept? There are a number of other visual problems you can solve more than halfway before you even get into software. You can solve the problems of overall layout and grid, selection of type style and application, art direction of photography and/or illustration, and tone of voice for copy before you even touch the computer. The computer then becomes the place where you iterate the possibilities to create polish.

This becomes even more critical when designing for interaction. Since visual design is removed from coding/building an online experience, any missteps along the way can have a drastic impact on how your design is implemented.

Once you get into the computer, there are some practical considerations that you should take into account if you're working in a collaborative manner, such as:

Using the right program for the right deliverable (i.e. You wouldn't use InDesign to mock up a Web site UI)
Scanning sketches and other materials in and placing them on the pasteboard, if there are tons of reference sketches
Labeling layers in your files ("Woman | Getty Images J2018101", not Layer 271)
Naming your files in a consistent manner, so you can manage version control
Keeping file folders tidy, and sweeping unused files into your archive

Pencil on paper = you + idea + plan

I know a number of talented designers that use the computer as their thought process -- it's a tool to enable their design execution. If they aren't working in a collaborative setting, they can "lose themselves" in the flow of being creative. The final result can be quite polished. I know I delight in having a few hours of uninterrupted time with a design. But a pencil and paper has always brought me my best work, and helped me plan out how I'd finally realize each idea in a final execution. Perhaps the humble pencil will be your tool of choice too.

There are tools out there that let you collaborate in real time with design comps, and perhaps you'll sample some of them before we get to the end of this class. But all of them are meant to recreate the collaborative working environment we're looking to establish in the classroom, the workplace, and beyond. There really is no substitute for the world outside of the machine.

Collaborative Design Methods: Simple Sketching

2009-01-26T21:41:24-08:00

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.

The quality of your sketch can never hide a weak idea. Spending too much time making your sketches look perfect can eat up time spent coming up with stronger ideas. As designers, we only need to draw things well enough, since we're usually executing our ideas in the computer or in tandem with a creative partner. (Photographer, illustrator, etc.) If we are on the hook for executing the final designs with illustrated assets born from our hands, then it's an added bonus that we can make the final artwork.

Most designers use a repertoire of symbols and marks that they use to convey an idea for a visual design. Here's a bunch of them from my repertoire, and how they can cohere into an idea fast. Most working designers already have these in their deck, but they're worth going over to make sure you've got them all in your arsenal. Also, if you're working through a collaborative brainstorm, doing these rudimentary sketches along the way will help you pin down ideas more quickly and start to iterate possibilities out of how they exist on the page -- a.k.a. make them better sketches for internal or client review.

Creating a Page Boundary

Sounds obvious, but rapidly defining different boundary shapes can suggest a wide range of results for your design idea. Just starting with simple boundary variations can spark ideas fast.

Setting Up a Page Grid

If you're crafting a long-form layout, sometimes it helps to sketch out a bunch of different grid types. Adding in a grid after you've got a concept direction going can help shape the layout / try out different page formats independent of content. If you're going for pure speed, this can help you iterate through the options quicker.

Scribble Copy

Using various scribble densities and sizes, you can quickly imply visual hierarchy, from headline down to body copy and beyond.

Using Photo Boxes

If you don't know what art you're using on the page, just fake it with a big X. When you know what's going to in the box, erase the X. Easy peasy.

Keyhole People

I used to think drawing people was difficult. Then my art director told me to stop drawing "real people" all the time and start drawing keyhole people. Suddenly, things got much easier. Treat the keyhole-like shape as a paper doll, where you can add and subtract elements as necessary.

Emotional Indicators

Yes, these are just like in comic books, anime, etc. Surprise, confusion, and so on.

Motion Indicators

If you're doing storyboards for Flash, motion graphics, TV, and so on, indicating motion is likely. Simple arrows do the trick for rotation or sizing in/out of objects. If you're going to zoom in or out of the layout, then you'll need to "take over" the box with them, as noted in the illustration.

Mingle these elements with detailed type and other simple page elements, and you should be able to convey pretty much any kind of idea really fast...

After a few years of working with the same people over a period of time, you usually begin to have an interchangeable shorthand that get used teamwide. Not consciously, mind you... it evolves.

Simple sketching methods are gaining a lot of traction both in the design community -- in the form of interaction sketching -- and in the business world. Dan Roam's The Back of the Napkin has been a recent bestseller and promotes some great ways to think about extending this sketching language into communicating business concepts. His Web site has a number of great tools to draw from. (Ooooh, that was an unintentional bad pun.)

Here's another good recent article about sketching: "The Role of Sketching in the Design Process" by Sean Hodge.

In the next few weeks, we'll talk about interaction sketching. That's a bit more complicated, but very rewarding.

Collaborative Making, Part 4: Role-Setting

2009-01-25T20:58:12-08:00

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.

There are three layers of responsibility we carry in design projects. There are roles, hats, and tasks. They are different animals, really. Let's address them in turn.

Establishing Your Role

Roles are the domains of expertise you'll fulfill through the life of a project. For example: I am an art director at my day job. That's my role. My designer, copywriter, account manager, and other collaborators maintain their roles through the project. If my designer is out sick, I may have to fulfill their project tasks. But in the end, they're still a designer, and I'm still the art director.

When you're working collaboratively with other designers, you may need to assume multiple roles beyond being just a designer. You may be the copywriter, account manager, project manager, production artist, or developer at various times.

It's good to be mindful of what roles you carry in your work. Being a designer can be an accumulation of various skills that add up to an arsenal -- but you often reach a point where you're taking on two or three roles repeatedly, and that can get hard to manage.

Claiming a set number of roles will allow you to clarify what details you own in the final artifact you're creating. If you start out as the copywriter, for example, you should be owning the copy.

For the class assignment that you took home, some of you assumed the roles of copywriter (Claire), art director/final execution (Meg), and project manager (Mark), whether you realized it or not.

Over the life of the class, we will need to consciously rotate these roles from person to person so you get a strong taste for each of them.

Putting on the Proper Hat

Beyond your role, there are tasks that you fulfill to keep the project moving along, and the hats that you wear in meetings to help facilitate those tasks and shape the material at hand.

I'd mentioned in class that when you are in meetings, there are certain roles you'd need to fulfill. The word I should have used was actually "hats". The hat is a metaphor for how you structure your experience during the meeting.

Last class, I shared with you what I'd like to call "procedural hats." You put these on in order to maintain the boundary of the meeting and what needs to occur during it:

A. The discussion leader: Drives the meeting agenda and intent for the meeting.
B. The notetaker: Makes a record of what happens during the meeting.
C. The timekeeper: Ensures that the meeting stays on task, schedulewise.
D. The free radical: Focuses on being present and contributing to the meeting.

There can be more procedural hats than this, but then again, there are only four of you. :)

Hats are not tasks. You aren't going to spend all of your time in the meeting keeping time or taking notes. You still participate through the life of the meeting to accomplish what tasks are included on the agenda. The hat simply helps to reinforce basic meeting structure.

There's also another level of hats that you can apply in a meeting. Edward de Bono's "Six Thinking Hats" is a method of developing balanced brainstorming and critiquing habits. Think of these like lenses that you use to color what you're talking about. The thinking hats are a way of keeping the dreaded "Devil's Advocate" from rearing its ugly head through your meetings. When you have time, go read the Wikipedia article about his method. We'll be dragging this method out near the end of the class and kicking its tires, just so you can see how it functions.

Fulfilling Your Tasks

Now that we've established roles and hats, tasks are fairly easy to define: they're the action steps you need to take individually that add up to the final, designed artifact.

If you are working on a team with multiple designers, your tasks need to be discrete. Otherwise, you might duplicate the same work. That is troublesome if you're billing hourly and/or not wanting to piss off one of your colleagues.

On your current take-home project you are all taking on design tasks, such as: establishing the form factor of the design; crafting a color palette; extending a visual language from color to type and illustration; designing a final logo for the brand; and bringing it all together into a completed design presentation. (And I think you're probably noticing that without in-person collaboration, getting the ball rolling on these tasks is much more complex and time-consuming than we'd care to admit.)

In our next class, we'll debrief on how this assignment is going and share learnings and strategies for our next out-of-class collaborative project. We'll also work to develop a streamlined process for getting through steps #1-5 from the top of this post, so more time is freed up for designing.

Type Alphabet from Marian Bantjes

2009-01-21T21:13:09-08:00

I stumbled across this piece by Marian Bantjes tonight. I can't believe the timing worked out so well; it's the perfect post to follow our own type alphabets. (Although, as inspiration, it may have been better a week ago...) I only wish she had given more details about how she crafted the alphabet.

Anyways, I just think her work is really cool, inspirational, and unusual. It's great to see how she uses her amazing talents as an artist and designer to make a living. It turns out there is demand for the kind of meticulous, off-beat, incredibly versatile artwork she's known for!

Detail:

Work 05 / Easy as ABC: Winter 09 Class Alphabets

2009-01-20T21:24:43-08:00

Here are the found alphabets from our first take-home assignment! Everyone did great work and took a completely different approach to this project. Click on each letter to see the full alphabet on Flickr.

Denim Alphabet by Donnie Dinch

Circuit Alphabet by Meg Doyle

Liquid Alphabet by Claire Kohler

Shoestring Alphabet by Mark Notermann

Pin Alphabet by David Sherwin

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

2009-01-18T21:35:00-08:00

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

2009-01-18T21:21:00-08:00

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:

The sketch on the right was meant to show our current working process. The copywriter would hatch an idea with me and the art director, and then we'd go off into our separate worlds. Then, right before our review meeting with the team, we'd try to marry up our words and the visual design. Inevitably, things wouldn't quite mesh, we'd show it partially baked, and the work would get spun with feedback.

The braid pattern, shown on the left, was the ideal working process for collaborative making. This gave me time to refine the visual design while the writer could make revisions to their copy or spend more time refining how we could describe the visual design to the client. Also, in an agency setting, it's hard to think of the work as "your design," considering how many hands touch each project. The braid pattern forces you to consider alternate points of view and drop any pretense of ego. (And ego is definitely your enemy...)

In order to form a braid with your design team, you need to establish some very clear rules and stick to them without tension. To do so, you'd need to answer these basic questions:

1. Who is taking what role on the project? If you have multiple writers and designers on a project, divvy up the work with clean boundaries. If you were working on an annual report, one designer may own researching stock imagery to find the perfect photo direction for the photographer, while another designer may spend her time determining the chart styles and proper use of typography in the grid.

2. How frequently will we meet to review the work? Figure out what milestones you'll need before you enter the design phase and show it to your extended team. It doesn't matter how complete your work is, you still show it to your peers with a certain frequency.

3. Who has the final say on the work, and in what context? There must be a determination of who will weave all of those pieces into a final, cohesive vision. Though those decisions won't happen in a vacuum -- they should be discussed with the overall team to ensure that everyone perceives alignment.

Over time, as your team begins to gel, the braid becomes tighter and tighter. You intuitively bounce ideas back and forth from person to person. The work becomes stronger more quickly. Design work begins to be uniformly good, and often great, without a massive amount of struggle.

Keep in mind that the braid is not a substitute for self-critique of your own work. That's what the final part of this series is about.

Continue on to the next post

Collaborative Making, Part 1: Workflow

2009-01-18T21:10:00-08:00

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.

What isn't often talked about in design school is how you need to conform your design process to the design firm's business process. I know that before I worked at a design firm, my personal design process looked something like this:

In a personal practice, especially with small-scale clients or pro-bono work, you've got a big swath of time and energy available to devote to exploring a range of design executions. There aren't hard boundaries.

In a design firm, however, you're usually billing on time -- unless your boss has noted that time is no object on the project -- so you have to work within constraints. Otherwise, you're going to go over budget, jeopardize the profitability of the project, and cut into other projects that may require your attention. None of those are good things. Creative and art directors that manage you will usually lean very hard into your process and meddle with your working methods until you "get it." Otherwise, they may peek at your work too late in the game and freak out if they don't like where you're ending up:

It takes most designers fresh out of school a year or so a bit of time to click with agency process and rein their thinking into the company's business process. After a while, most designers' workflow begins to resemble this:

At many agencies, designers explore a wide range of executions, then bounce them off their art director, copywriter, creative director, account manager, and/or other designers to get feedback before refining them down into final comps. When the clock is ticking and you're under a very hard deadline, you often don't have that kind of luxury. This is usually you have to get very collaborative in the making process.

I know of many other firms where they spin out a dozen very polished comps to settle on their final design to present to the client. Depending on your speed to execute, that can be very quick in the computer. The zone of refinement that I noted above, however, will still be of critical importance. It's where you apply the polish that makes your idea really shine. If you're still doing big ideation during that time period, it's going to be a rough ride.

In the next post, I'm going to talk about the working models for collaborative making.

Continue on to the next post

WORK 13 / Class 2: Book Report

2009-01-17T17:08:56-08:00

Pictured above is a screen capture from a great resource for you to research current trends in book cover design, The Book Cover Archive.

The assignment from class: Bring in a book that you really like that most people probably haven't read. Each of us will give a brief talk about the book and why we like it. Your book will be randomly assigned to another designer in the class. You are now the book designer at Knopf assigned to create the cover for the new paperback edition. (Let's ignore that Knopf doesn't regularly do paperbacks.) Come up with an idea for the cover design + a single chapter page/spread of the interior. You may not read any part of the book other than the back cover/inside jacket flap.

Since we'd run out of time in class, we didn't get to do what I hoped, which was for us to give a very short talk about why we loved the book so much that we'd brought in. Because of that, I'd said that you could check out the book reviews on Amazon.com to try to get that kind of emotional flavor regarding the text. On reflecting upon it, I'm going to open up things here so that we can share a paragraph or two about the book we brought in. I'll start with my book, Veronica by Nicholas Christopher. Feel free to leave comments to this post with your brief blurb about your book as well!

The following text is from Nicholas Christopher's Web site:

On a snowy night in February, at the improbable point in lower Manhattan where Waverly Place intersects Waverly Place, Leo meets Veronica for the first time. Starkly beautiful, mysterious, aloof, she leads him into a world where illusion blends seamlessly with reality -- a luminously transformed city where powerful underground streams crisscross beneath the streets, a city of dragon-points and Tibetan mysticism, where real time is magically altered. Ten years have passed since Veronica's father, the famous magician Albin White, disappeared while performing a dangerous feat of time travel before a packed theater audience. White's disappearance was no accident. He was sabotaged by his apprentice Starwood, who interfered at a critical moment and sent him hurtling into the past, free to explore other eras but with no means of returning to the present...

I'm going to cut this quote off here, because any more would just give the whole plot away...

The thing that I love about this book is that it flows from moment to moment just like memory. And just like how we fall into a reverie when remembering something potent from our past, this book becomes deeper and more intuitive as you dive into it. After reading it, I realized that this book is crafted almost like you're falling down into a well -- but instead of hitting cold water when you reach bottom, you are left gasping as you stare up into a frigid, starry sky.

Collaborative Concepting, Part 3: Sharing your Ideas

2009-01-11T18:15:22-08:00

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:

Show a wide range of ideas. Don't show variations of an idea in multiple executions. Show wildly divergent ideas that are expressed in very different ways.

When you're presenting ideas internally, always start larger than the goal set in the client's contract. If you have to show two ideas to the client for review, have three or four in the internal review meeting to shoot at.

When you present the work, treat it just like a client meeting. For each concept, give a high-level overview of the main idea of the piece, supported by three key attributes that map back to the brief. (In a few more weeks in class, you're going to have this constraint on a number of presentations in critique.)

Be confident, but not overconfident. Speak loud and somewhat proud, but be open to debate and criticism. Some of the best ideas inherently cause a bit of friction.

Be open to change, as long as it's strategically on point. My peers are my best educators at work, and I've learned everything I know from them, basically. If they think my ideas are totally off the reservation, chances are they're right.

And if all your work gets killed and you shut down, apply the 3% rule. A good way to mitigate getting raw, negative feedback on your work is to apply the 3% rule. By that, I mean that I will accept that 3% of what you are saying is true and valid criticism, and try to discern what that 3% is (instead of killing you). That way, I'm not just beating myself up over and over again for missing the mark and/or reacting in a hostile manner. Chances are, after you consider that 3%, it's going to end up more like 25%, but that's okay. From small seeds grow large insights that help shape our ideas more properly.

In my next long essay/post thingy, I'll chat about what happens in the next link in the chain: the making of the design. If you have any questions regarding this stuff, please feel free to comment, email, or bring it up in the next class session.