Hot off the presses, I thought I'd share with you the cover for my next book, Success by Design: The Essential Business Reference for Designers.*

I'm currently knee-deep in designing the 325-page book, from the cover (which you can see above) to the interior illustrations and typesetting the content.

As I get closer to completing the layout, I'll start sharing some sneak peeks into the content, as well as the process I've been using for bringing it all together. While the cover does share some DNA with Grace Ring's awesome art direction for Creative Workshop, the interior will balance crisp, informational charts and graphs with some tongue-in-cheek design humor that you've seen on this blog over the past few years.

The book will be out in November 2012 from HOW Books (10 months from now) and I'll let you know when it goes on pre-sale through the usual suspects, like Amazon.com and MyDesignShop.com.

P.S. If you're interested in being a final reader for the book when we complete layout and go into final proofreading, drop me a line at david at changeorderblog.com. Those who help me proof the final layout will be thanked graciously in the foreword to the book and get a free signed copy when it comes out.

* In previous posts, I'd been calling this book Design Business from A to Z, but that was a placeholder name through the writing process… this is the final title for the book.)

This is the second part of a recap that was written over 51 hours at the HOW Interactive Design Conference, then delivered to attendees as a 45-minute closing talk. Read the first part here.

Now, for those of you that know me, I have a penchant for pushing analogies to their breaking point, until they become so absurd that they start to resemble reality. So I'm going to start visualizing for you what kind of world our elephant lives in, and what might be stressing her at this very moment.

What does the elephant eat?

The elephant eats big, gnarly problems.

As you take on projects, ask yourself: How big are the problems I'm looking to tackle? You should look for problems that are valuable. You may be struggling with them right now. Find ways to identify those problems: in your client needs, your user needs, and your needs.

Improve your systems thinking, influence bigger problems. I just love this quote by David Conrad from Design Commission: "Find more valuable problems, make more money." The only way you're going to be able to solve those problems, however, is by becoming a better systems thinker. What we're going to be designing will only grow bigger, just as our problems will continue to increase in complexity.

Look to the work of Donella Meadows, and her primer Thinking in Systems, which is a solid introduction to how you can analyze and design systems. Then, explore and sketch the world around you through the visual language of a systems thinker. This will serve you well in being able to define and structure your content and your designs, paired with your skill in communicating ideas.

Help others change the world. Design with, not for. Above, I'm being very deliberate about the word "influence," for a few reasons.

There are many problems we're trying to change, such as reducing world poverty, or stopping the spread of infectious diseases. We can design ways to help alleviate the symptoms of those issues, with empathy and humility, but the problems change in ways we can't predict.

However, there is only so far our influence can stretch before we need to partner with organizations that have the expertise to extend our design thinking, as interactive designers, into what they create. But we can help people in ways you may not have imagined. This goes beyond just websites and applications, and into us communicating our approaches for non-designers to use outside of our direct influence.

You can communicate your skills and approaches as designers to others—especially those who may be in need—and it can help them transform their world, bit by bit. This only happens by having a servant's heart.

Designing with people, not solely for people, will be a major trend in our profession. It will impact how you fulfil projects, both for businesses and for fostering social change.

What does the elephant poop?

The elephant poops burnt-out talent.

This discipline has boundless opportunity, but sometimes we stretch our resilience so far that we reach our breaking point. Some of my most talented colleagues have migrated to other disciplines or exited the profession entirely.

Part of being successful in the interactive space is in knowing how to set your boundaries and stick to them. I had more late nights shipping websites and apps than all my years of print design combined, until I learned to set clear boundaries.

Even now, when I become excited about a project and want to dive in deep, I have to identify points that I can come up for air, refuel, and remind myself of what I'm most passionate about outside of the world of design.

Know what subject matter falls outside your life as a designer. Design is a learning discipline, and we're always borrowing so much from other disciplines. This can be wearying, but it's also what makes design so rewarding. For this reason, cultivate areas you can garden that feed yourself, not just your work.

"Be a designer, not a martyr," said Matthew Richmond from the Chopping Block. Identify your boundaries. Be deliberate in how far you will stretch them. Over time, your boundaries will shift. Keep yourself attuned to what new goals and priorities might be. Life must be lived first, then designed.

Why does the elephant stumble?

The elephant is running on unstable technology platforms.

Matthew Richmond said it best on Thursday afternoon: "everything's an arms race now" in the technology space.

Standards fragmentation. Platform fragmentation. Device portfolio fragmentation. Content spread all over the place. In 30 to 40 years, we may not have to touch the code? "At that point you, can look back and laugh," Steve Fisher said. I think that's a grail we'll continually reach for, but let's get real about what to do right now.

Cameron Moll had said that it's impossible to answer whether you should choose to use device optimization, or adaptive or responsive design, or create apps. Yes, when you're standing in the front of a room, and lacking essential information. But if you know the right questions to ask, and the answer will emerge.

A simple equation for tough UX choices. This is the litmus test we can use to decide where we should focus our energies: "value > pain." This little equation, by Creative Director Scott Jenson at frog, encapsulates how we can make the right call when presented with tough technology and UX decisions.

How much do people value the content you're seeking to provide? How much content should be exposed, and how? How quickly do people need to access it? How much time do we have to ship it? How much time is required for someone to download and install it and create an account and "get started."

Look at the value of what you'll create from user, technology, and business angles, and an answer will emerge.

How can the elephant run faster?

The elephant can run faster because of agile, scrum, and iterative processes.

We skirted around this until Jose Caballer hit it head on during his case study—though it did turn up on Twitter earlier in the day: "The hardest part about transitioning from print to UI design is adapting to working in an agile environment," said Caroline Wiryadinata.

Who's best at designing in agile right now? Those people mostly aren't in this room. Designers fluent in this working style live in the product, service, and startup communities. Graphic design has encouraged a waterfall process, and in many ways, it's led to better print work—it's kept us from making big mistakes through the process, and being able to craft the best solution for the substrate at hand.

But some of the most competitive veins in the interactive space run on agile and iterative methodologies. And if you want to enter into the world of going agile, you're going to need to be comfortable with iteration. Rapid iteration. Like, I show the client one concept and iterate it ten times change. I start with low-fidelity wireframes and while we're paper prototyping them with users, we're also building the back-end services and generating content. Multiple actors are working together towards shared goals, and thinking about shipping in small increments.

Today's print designers can learn to do this, if they want, but it’s a head shift.

Study the Lean Startup and Lean UX way. In many cases, this type of process may not fit your agency or business process. But know this: if you don't find ways to be more iterative in how you work, there will be someone else that is able to do it faster, and possibly better. Try experimenting with Lean processes. Check out The Lean Startup by Eric Ries and start exploring where in your process you can tinker. Google "Lean UX.” Adapt pieces of their process to accelerate the way you work.

Who's chasing the elephant?

Unicorns are chasing the elephant. Unicorns are riding at our heels.

Do not fear them. They will be our friends.

I've just joined the faculty at California College for the Arts in the interaction design program. When first seeing the work the students were generating at the freshman and sophomore level, I was stunned. These students have a deliberate hybrid sensibility, that balances craft with prototyping skills, research, strategy, you name it. We call them "unicorns" because they are the most desired skill set by businesses today, and also quite rare.

It may seem like unicorns are the real MacGyvers and we're the old fogeys in the retirement home. But I don't see the unicorns putting us out of jobs.

Unicorns can teach their skills to us, and we can teach them something too. This is a huge opportunity, because we have something the unicorns don't: experience. Lots of it, and in areas they can't easily acquire while in school. Because of that, we should see them as great collaborators. And they are going to want to collaborate, because that's the only way any project of scale can get done.

In the next five years, they're going to be the ones that help us learn the skills and behaviours we need. At the same time, we'll be imparting to them soft skills and an awareness of craft and storytelling that only comes from professional practice.

Where's the elephant going?

The elephant is running on data in the cloud and through connected devices.

In the ongoing skirmishes and battles between device manufacturers and developers, there is a silver lining. We are entering into a future of connected devices. We will reach a time that we aren't creating the lion's share of interactive work for use on PCs, tablets, and mobile phones.

This extends our reach as interactive designers into all sorts of devices and objects that don't resemble what we've seen so far in our careers. This goes beyond smart toasters and cars that tweet. It can be for people that are seeking to improve their health. It can be for the mother on a business trip, being able to see that their baby is sleeping safe in their bedroom thousands of miles away.

Matthew Richmond said on Thursday, "94% of traffic is not from mobile." But it's not about PC versus mobile, or tablet versus mobile. It's about the data that our devices collect, and how it's utilized to encourage seamless experiences from the companies, products, and services that help us throughout our lives. At that point, it isn't web or mobile data use. It's about the cloud holding our data, in ways that we can access, with assurance for its privacy and integrity.

We can help design technologies that better understand us. I'm really excited about this future. While each one of us may have worries about our personal information floating about the world and being used by companies and governments, we've already given up half our lives to Facebook. We already see value in it.

Now it's time for us to demand back the kinds of tailored experiences that free us up to better connect with our loved ones and friends, and reflect on what recharges and inspires us.

We can infuse that time back into our life and our work, reinvigorated.

Why do we need an elephant?

We've spent all this time focused on our baby elephant of a profession. I have to pause here, at the end of our time together, and ask why we even need an elephant at all. Is this analogy even necessary?

Well, for one, it makes us easier to focus on what to do. Every discipline needs a thing that we can focus on. For us, it used to be print. There was something in our hands, in our portfolios. You could very easily tell your mother what you did. Now, it ain't so easy.

But I think we’ve been laser-focused on technology through most of this conference, when really this work is about our humanity.

If you are what you make, and we’re always trying to tell people the thing that you do, then are we really just makers of websites and applications?

I think the answer is in what we already say to the world about what you do. You just may not realize it yet.

This is language I pulled from many of your company websites, as well as those of your competitors (emphasis mine):

We solve business problems. We're passionate. We create implementations of ideas. We create influence, belief, understanding, results. We have a proprietary process. We ensures your success. We inspire decisions. We change behavior. Anyone can come up with an idea -- we just come up with better ideas. We create compelling brands. Brand experiences. Brand propositions. Meaningful brands. Increase brand value. We create meaningful experiences. Design can be a powerful force of change.

The future of design is embracing change. Specifically, change, in human behavior.

Design's real opportunity in this coming decade is to step up and acknowledge that design has always been an agent of change. It just took this long for interactive, as a communication medium, to mature enough to make that change visible to the eye. We now have the data to describe it. This definition will only gain traction.

So, if code is our shared substrate, as I said at the start of this talk, then "behavior is our medium," to quote Robert Fabricant from frog.

It has taken us some time to move past the substrate and start talking about the impact we can make. None of this wussy "design can be a powerful force of change" that I saw on a leading design firm's Web site. No conditional language! Design is the force of change. We can own it, today. Interactive has the ability to spread ideas and inspire action, like a gasoline leak that's caught fire. Interactive is the water that has seeped into the space between all other disciplines of design. And, like water, it has the uncanny ability to permeate almost any substance, no matter how solid. However, unlike water, digital will not tear things apart. It will hold them together, and infuse them with new depths of meaning.

This puts us in a new space with our clients. In the past, clients came to us understanding what they wanted to change, and we would use design to try to make that happen.

As we continue to mature design as a discipline, bolstering it with our learnings in research, technology, anthropology, economics, psychology, sociology, any other -ology you can think of, companies will retain us to promote change separate of just making websites and apps. Some of us already live in this world. Hopefully more of you will, if this is a change that you desire for yourself and what you do.

Are designers really equipped to take on this challenge? Not fully. It’ll take some strength training. We will have to work together and gain the resources to pay it off in the long term.

You being here was that first major step. Connecting with each other is the next step. Beyond that, we really can do anything we put our minds towards.

So, let's embrace the elephant in the design zoo, and be fanatical about changing the world.

This is the first part of a recap that was written over 51 hours at the HOW Interactive Design Conference, then delivered to attendees as a 45-minute closing talk. The second part will appear on Tuesday.

During the first day of the HOW Interactive Design Conference, I was having a conversation with Richard Hassen of To the Point Design Studio about the challenges that designers with deep expertise in print are having adapting their skills to interactive design. He said: "How am I going to bite into the elephant? It's just too big."

I loved his analogy—that acquiring the necessary interactive skills to be successful in our careers was equivalent to chowing down on a elephant, spoonful by spoonful.

What's inside this elephant? Us, of course. Then tools, clients, technologies, frameworks, methods, you name it. And this is a baby elephant, not a full-grown elephant, since interactive design is much younger than the disciplines of industrial and graphic design. (Baby elephants are still heavy, mind you.)

Based on Richard's analogy, I felt obligated to thinking about just what we were trying to eat. What follows are the four top themes from the conference that describe our proverbial elephant, and further thoughts about what forces are being exerted on our baby elephant, out there in the world.

Part 1: What's inside the elephant?

HTML5, CSS3, Javascript, and web standards are now our shared substrate.

Chris Converse, Matthew Richmond, and Cameron Moll spoke over the conference about up-to-the-minute advances with scripting languages, markup, and style sheets for browsers, and how these changes will impact us. You have the religion now, including some good reasons regarding when you incorporate responsive or adaptive design methodologies. Like Cameron said, these new approaches help us to create:

• Greater extensibility across screens
• Greater longevity for our code and designs
• Greater efficiency in maintaining and updating content

But there's another issue lurking in the corner, if you want to execute well on this vision.

Rethink what technologies you need for group collaboration. You need to focus more on collaboration with your co-workers and teammates, from all disciplines. And your computers are getting in the way.

Many of you told me that using a pencil and paper to plan out a website design was "interfering with your design process." Really? Is a pencil really standing in your way? Or is it something else?

To quote David Conrad, Studio Director at Design Commission: “Technology and tools should not get in the way of your ideas. The second this happens, you're screwed.” UX Director Steve Fisher said yesterday, "Tools are bullshit," and I agree with him.

If we want what we create to be future friendly, there should be a clearer understanding of how whiteboards and shared spaces and pencils and paper can help align a team towards reaching a collective vision. Only then can the right computer-based tools come into play for realizing a great interactive design, including how we translate our ideas into code.

Beauty in interactive design goes beyond the interface. Arlene Cotter from the University of British Columbia told me on Wednesday, "No one is talking about creating beauty." I think she's bang on, and through the past two days, it has been only a subtext in the conversation.

Yes, we can bring the craft we expect from our trained graphic designer past into the digital future. We can bring grace and poetry. But you'll need to broaden your definition of what "beautiful" may mean in the interactive space. For a beautiful interactive design, you'll need to fuse visual craft, motion design, information architecture, and great content as part of a compelling user experience. The epitome of pulling this off effectively for a large-scale system is through the use of elegant metaphors.

How do we reach this kind of beauty? This happens by bringing our ideas closer to the medium through which they're embodied. By starting with big, raw ideas and continuing to iterate their elements at increasing levels of fidelity. As I noted earlier, once your ideas have been prototyped in code, or live within heavy design or development tools, you are limited by the output of those tools. Don't start there. Start with the vision.

Know your substrate, even if you don't code for it. John Buckle said via Twitter, "Print designers must understand limitations of press. Web designers must understand limitations of coding languages." Could you produce a well-executed beautiful print design if you didn't understand how PMS colors were mixed, or printed on a 6-color Heidelberg press?

Become intimate with your medium, whether that means exploring HTML by diving into coding sites, taking classes, or sitting down with a developer and having them explain how they do it.

Loosen your grip on pixel-perfect control. Reframe for yourself what control means. "I understand the horror of not being able to control our designs," Scott Fisher said. We need to get over that horror, and fast. This is good for your design practice, as it makes you focus on where beauty will be most evident from the design.

The Internet is no substitute for your ingenuity.

I love Patrick McNeil's great insight from the first day of the conference: have a system for how you gather information about how to do your work. Track patterns in what's happening in the world of interactive. That way, you don't have to remember all of that information—you just know where to get it. If you're looking for an answer to almost any question of how to accomplish something with a design for the web or an app: Someone has probably thought of a way to do it. You can either find it yourself or know where to look. You can then tear it apart to know how it works.

But what Patrick said made me reflect on all the great interactive designers I've known. They behaved a lot like a TV character that I adored in my youth: Angus MacGyver.

MacGyver was always able to combine the materials around him to get out of sticky situations. And he always had two things readily at his disposal: a Swiss Army knife and a roll of duct tape.

The Swiss Army knife represents the skills we've gained via tacit knowledge. Every so often, we add another screwdriver or corkscrew to the knife, but this is a hard-fought process. And this knife does have a capacity for what we can add to it—we can't know everything!

The roll of duct tape represents our willingness to bind different ideas, technologies, and tools together to see what sparks are created that we can exploit through the design process, then rebuild in the development process so it's well engineered. The roll of duct tape helps us to quickly create prototypes of things that begin to address a gap we've observed in people's needs.

It takes more than just some duct tape, however, to get through crisis. In those cases, create a community that supports your search for knowledge. They'll help you apply your ingenuity in the right ways, to create your best work.

You wouldn't be here if you didn't want to find your tribe. So don't feel like you have to return to your work life and not be able to learn and build from what we've discussed in just three short days. It can take years for this to sink in through practice.

Write up a list of the things you want to know, now that you have a sense of where the industry is headed. Consider who can support your efforts at your skill level, and collaborate on learning and making what you need to get traction. Identify who could be a mentor for your future growth and approach them about having them guide you with the right questions, rather than just providing answers.

Coding skills do not forgive poor research, information architecture, or lack of usability.

On Wednesday, I pointed to Dieter Rams's mantra "less, but better" as a litmus test for how to create great information architecture from well-curated content. But how do you qualify what's better? You can only know what’s better from doing qualitative research, and understanding the people you're designing for. Personas that you make up are half right until they're informed with real data.

Christopher Butler said it on Thursday: "information architecture and usability should be part of a designer's arsenal." These should not be black art activities. We need to demystify the process and utility of doing these things as part of our design process. Julie Beeler said yesterday: "It's the users who are going to use it. So they should see it before it's done."

But that isn't enough: "to sell clients on the value of it, you've got to show the power of it," Julie said. So, it's not just doing the research. It's how you translate what you found in your research into actionable opportunities that you demonstrate its value.

This isn't something you sell to a client as a line-item service. It's just what you do. It's part of how you operate. Don’t give them an option to take it away.

Learn to identify gaps in knowledge. Design experiments to gather that knowledge. Deepen your skill set in research. This means more than "asking users" or "trend research." Assemble a war chest of methods that help you address gaps in knowledge. This includes taking your designs and testing them at varying levels of fidelity.

And, by the way… the reason we've been evangelizing prototyping isn't just so you start making things that begin to resemble the final design you're going to ship. It's so you can embody some of your design hypotheses in experiments that users will react to. Put early prototypes in people's hands and see how they use them, then adapt them based on what you learn.

Storytelling with data will transform the depth of what we can design.

Julie Beeler said on Thursday, "the world is full of bad content...our job is to elevate the content and bring it to life."

We bring it to life through stories. Meditate on how you can bring more storytelling into your design process, your client conversations, your deliverables, and the way you engage and delight your users. You can craft user stories that accurately and deliberately express human need. You can create alignment across teams in your organization, because they understand and empathize with people's real everyday struggles. You can define brands by telling the right stories, supported with the right data.

This is a huge opportunity, as Karen McGrane pointed out on Wednesday. Our skills in exploiting data can elevate what we create far beyond what we could have imagined designing ten years ago. We now have access to new types of content that weren't available before. If we are good curators of that content, there's really no limit to how far we can take users.

Discover what stories you tell best. See how you can best express your stories, both to users and your clients. Explore how they work. Start to tinker with them.

Study the new personalized storytelling vehicles that are emerging, which mash up data and visualization in ways that are stunning. For example, the Wilderness Downtown site for The Arcade Fire is haunting, as well as the recent video for Mirror by the band Sour, which brings your social world into their music in a disarming manner.

Practice telling stories with data in ways you find liberating. To quote the user from Christopher Butler's usability test in his talk on Thursday: "I was primarily looking at structures, because that's what I see when I look at websites."

A structure isn't just page layout or wireframes. A story has a defined structure. It can be a combination of text, photos, video, audio, and data visualization. Magic comes from the mixture of those types of content with the concepts you're seeking to express, told through a human lens. Learn what stories you tell best through interactive media, and practice them in ways that you find them exciting.

In sum: how you think about and use raw data can radically transform a site or application. It can define a brand. It can radically shift how people live their lives.

The above slides are from a talk I just gave at the HOW Interactive Conference in San Francisco on November 2nd, entitled "Information Architecture: Making Information More Accessible and Useful." The talk was about how designers can help people make use of information—both find and act upon it.

The core metaphor of the talk was centered on a recent trip that I took to the SFMOMA to see a career retrospective of Dieter Rams's work, whose ethos of "Less, but better" is a challenge to any designer seeking to create better websites and applications. (Go see this exhibit!)

I re-explore this trip multiple times over the course of the talk, considering the overlap of information in physical and digital systems—and how conceptually we merge them.

From there, I provide best practices and principles for how to approach information architecture and user experience design in a more iterative, agile fashion through in-line prototyping.

In talking with entrepreneurs of many stripes over the past year, I've heard the following hypnotic refrain repeated over and over again: "If we design a beautiful user experience, we've got what we need to launch a successful business."

Whether uttered by corporate executives or designers fresh out of school, I've been surprised by this near-religious belief that great user experience is the silver bullet that will attract a huge audience base to your company's products or services. Surface solutions trump business plans. To quote Enrique Allen, founding member of The Designer Fund—a community of designers that invest in designer startup founders (of which I’m a member):

“UX can be a 'grabber,' like the shiny materials we buy but then don't end up using after a few days. Without a solid tech and business model 'holder' that provides lasting utility, startups will peak but then crash…”

Yes, to your customers, the user experience (UX) is everything: it's how your product or service is utilized by the world. But if you are a designer trying to create a sustainable business from your product and service ideas, the UX for your product is one important facet of creating a successful business. The user experience you design, the technology selections you make, and the business model you generate: all of these decisions support how you make money from your products and services. They are interrelated, to the point that you can't truly sustain a business in the long term without them all in place.

This may be obvious advice for those who have spent time creating products and services, or worked at a startup before. But for any designer that is looking to jump into the software game and bootstrap their own products or services, closely consider the following perspectives in the early stages of any new business venture.

Are You Going into Technology Debt?

I wouldn't call myself a technologist, but in working with them closely over the years, I've discovered that just as designers make well-informed choices to generate a compelling design, the quality of the decisions any startup makes around technology can have a dramatic impact on their success. These choices include what solutions you develop internally, what platforms you utilize, what data you draw from third-party services, and what infrastructure (such as hosting) keeps things running smoothly in the long term. It's never enough to launch your product or service—you have to sustain it. “Decisions you make early affect your technology DNA,” says Enrique Allen. “Shipping crap will eventually build up as technology debt.”

Many startups fail when they dive deep into IT rather than realize that it isn't (and shouldn't) be a core competency. Even perceived successes such as Twitter or Facebook initially struggled due to weak technology platforms, which cost them credibility until they could stabilize themselves. Any startup must consider the time and expense of devising their own technology solutions, and regularly evaluate whether their efforts can be quickly duplicated or improved upon by others before they release their creation out into the wild. If you invest the time and energy in building your own code base for delivering a service, or set up your own hosting to drive your business, you're making an investment in your technology infrastructure independent from how it's provided by your partners and other third parties. At a fork in the road, your startup may need to abandon its homegrown technology solutions to adopt a more cost-effective one provided by a partner, while attempting to retain whatever key inventions or services give your businesses its "secret sauce."

If you don't have your own "secret technology sauce," there are plenty of people out there that seem to proffer them. In a world where it doesn't take massive effort to prototype a website or cobble together an iOS application, we have a vast swath of technologies at our disposal for building next-generation UX on existing platforms or trying to generate our own. Add to that the multitude of APIs provided by third parties, and we can mix and mash up data to our hearts content, constructing new recipes for novel products and services.

However, this is not an idyllic dream world of technological unicorns and rainbows. In this playground of possibilities, we can be held hostage by the changing constraints of those platforms, technologies, and back-end services. One of my co-workers and an Associate Technology Director at frog, David Phillips, described today’s situation to me as when desktop publishing became the rage. Once authors could bypass the editorial process and provide their work directly to the populace, there was a flood of poorly considered publications. In short, he said, “Having the tools doesn't lead to superior use."

If your online product or service idea requires utilizing someone else's technology platform, then you are assuming that company's long-term risks. This was underscored in Farhad Manjoo's recent article "The Zynga Conundrum" in October 2011's Fast Company magazine, where he noted that being dependent on other people's platforms is like being a barnacle on a ship: "there can be a quick buck in being a barnacle…. though, the success is short-lived, because barnacles have no say in where the ship is headed." He uses Zynga as a case study for a business that draws $600 million dollars from the use of its games from a social network it doesn't control. You can ride this train, but you have to know when to jump off, and hope you don't get bruised in the process.

Beyond building off a third-party platform, you can also assume risk just by using third-party services to drive critical features of your product or service. For example: You could create a camera recommendation service for people that utilizes the Hunch application programming interface (a.k.a. API), which would allow you to provide recommendations drawn from their extensive database.

It takes a non-trivial amount of effort to build this kind of recommendation service, so partnering with Hunch sounds like a great idea, right? Designers shouldn't be afraid to partner with other businesses in this manner—but you need to know exactly how much risk you are assuming by utilizing their services as part of yours. If Hunch were to go out of business, your product or service won't function unless there are equivalent services available for the same cost—and even then, you'll likely have to redraft some portion of your back-end services to work with the new service. To quote David Phillips: "This is partly a matter of architecture as well. One of the main advantages of abstraction layers is to control such risk. You may have to refactor an API, but you protect your core code base at the same time. There are some sacrifices to efficiency and performance—but hardware is cheap compared to the time spent rebuilding major parts of your product."

The same thinking goes in using a pre-existing framework for your front-end development efforts: the platform that you select can free you from a lot of heavy lifting, but at the long-term cost of dragging you down or forcing you to re-develop the same code base independent of that framework. The rallying cry around HTML 5 and open standards isn't just for convenience and continuous improvement—it's to help us create products and services that can be more easily deployed across platforms. (Wonder why so many web designers and developers have been beating up Adobe Muse?) In at least the near term, you'll still have to choose between native and web-based solutions for your products and solutions—risking an investment in more performant UX versus device/platform portability.

As you may have intuited, the way you construct your product’s UX can be more susceptible to market and technology timing than you ever thought possible. So how does a designer make good technology decisions in an ever-shifting technology landscape? Identify co-founders with deep expertise in technology that can help support a startup venture, bring in advisors that can provide you with the right perspectives, and consider partnering or pairing with a community of startup designers that can help support you through the first iterations of your product or service.

Who Will Pay to Use Your Great Product?

Designers often have amazing, beautiful ideas that need to be brought into this world. But only a select subset of them will ever make money for the designer, and an even smaller subset of those products and services will be able to sustain themselves. The latter have the following characteristics, which divide passion projects from sustainable businesses:

• People want to use those products or services, as they fulfill a perceived need
• Someone wants to pay for those products or services to be around (this isn't always the people who use the product or service!)
• There aren't many other people doing what you do, but you see an emerging or established behavioral pattern you could support

If you can't clarify how these characteristics are addressed by your startup, you are assuming around your business model.

Let's return to my example of the camera recommendation service we were going to build off the Hunch API. Is this an idea for a product or service, or just a well-constructed content site (a.k.a. blog)? Can you beat Amazon.com, Retrevo, or B&H.com at their own game? Is this something Google or Bing has already baked into their search engine?

You might think, "Forget the competition—let's just give it a try with a small release! People always struggle with finding cameras. Those websites will pay you for traffic to their site—especially if they're ready and willing to make a purchase. Let's just put it out there and see what happens."

I'm a fan of taking risks when it comes to bringing an idea into the wild—but those risks should be calculated. Other people may already doing what you want to do. You should use simple math to work back from the amount of time, money, and people you think the service would require to run at a slender profit margin, at different scales. If the math doesn't prove out, then you should consider a new business model, technology choice, or starting over with a related (or new) idea. Enrique Allen says, “Creating a baseline model is critical. Input your assumptions before you launch, so you can see if your hypotheses hold true.”

Supporting that new business model may take methodical planning on your end. Instead of the above scenario, imagine you've worked with a developer to create your own back-end service that lets you draw from and select the best information from various public-source APIs. (There is strength in intelligent recombination of existing services, as creating new services and sources of data can be prohibitively expensive.) You decide to make money by referral fees to other websites, and directly negotiate with them to achieve more favorable rates. You've created what you believe is an effective UX for it. Then, you put it out into the wild as a beta release.

You may have lost some time in getting your product or service out to market. But you may be in a much better place to get traction on a customer base that can make your business sustainable in the short- to mid-term.

A side note: venture capital can help startups circumvent these issues, but only until they see they’re about to run out of "runway" before they’ve determined how they can shift the onus of payment from the venture capital to paying customers, related businesses, or third-parties that want to leverage their customer base in unique ways (including data mining or building services off their APIs). Or, perhaps a larger company that wants to own their technology platform and user base for their own purposes—an exit strategy that doesn’t always play out how founders might expect.

When Well-Intentioned Startups Get Tipsy (and Fall Down)

Let's go back to the diagram at the start of this piece. Now that you understand how technology choices and your business model factor into the stability of your startup idea, you can see how a business can flop rather than grow in the long term if there isn't a solid foundation.

If a business has a strong business model and good UX, but was built on a poor set of technology choices, it can suffer or die when a critical piece of infrastructure is yanked out. To flog Twitter: it took an eternity in Internet time for them to get the platform more stable in terms of uptime. If they hadn't fixed this, it's unlikely they would ever have had a chance. Can you imagine only 80% of your SMS messages to your friends going through from your phones? 90%? Customers will only tolerate so much.

If a business has made smart technology choices and has good UX, then it has a better chance of attracting and sustaining a user base. However, there may be no hope for the product or service to make money in the short- or long-term if their business model is flawed. It's hard to start a business by losing money with every transaction. (Remember Kozmo.com from the web boom?)

And if a business has a great UX, but no stable technology behind it or thoughts regarding a sustainable business model—I think you get the picture.

If you're looking to create a startup, consider these three elements and how they balance each other out. Make sure you don't lose focus on how your long-term success is determined on the interrelationships between these three elements, not just any one of them. Don't be afraid to find the right people and partnerships that bolster your weaknesses in any one of those areas, so you can more quickly gain traction with your ideas.

Enrique Allen says, “Balancing UX, tech and your business model will always be at tension for priority, and it's up to the founders to synchronize them in harmony and sometimes focus on only one area.”

And be ready to shift your priorities when moving from idea into implementation. David Phillips says, "As an idea scales, things get bigger. They not only have more inertia, but they become far more costly to modify. On the technology side, scaling usually means creeping toward a more waterfall model, while the vitality of a UX will likely continue to depend upon rapid iteration." For this reason, build time into your schedule to regularly back away from designing the minutae and assessing the big picture. This will help you navigate building tension between your beautiful design work and the foundation that supports it.

Have any opinions on what it takes to sustain a designer-led software startup? Leave them in the comments!

In previous posts, I discussed the building blocks that comprise studio culture, and the first "hard" building block, the type of work you're seeking to fulfill. But once you know what kind of work you’d like to create, you’ll need a space where you can generate it! Design business owners must carefully consider the placement of their workspace, the studio layout, the use of the studio environment, and whether a dedicated studio space is even necessary to get the design work done.

Placement

You may be tempted to lease or purchase space in a far away, yet "up and coming" neighbourhood that is great for your budget. However, getting to work shouldn’t be hard work for your employees or your clients. Otherwise, you are implicitly charging your employees time that they could be using to take care of their life needs (and wants). Well-placed studios can help support those needs, by being near local coffee shops and restaurants, gyms and yoga studios, public transit or the freeway.

Layout

The layout of a studio helps facilitate the flow of conversation and the style of work taking place. Studio layouts can be open, closed, or some combination of open and closed elements.

Closed environments are manifested through closed-door offices, cubicles, and other areas where people can seal themselves off from others and focus on their work. My first years as a designer were in studio environments where each designer had their own cubicle, and any ongoing conversations required people peeking their heads over tall walls. At one point, we had joked about sawing holes in the cubicles to allow us to see each other’s faces without having to stand up. (This was before video chat and pervasive IM, mind you.) The layout of the space was a direct reflection of the work that was taking place, Ford assembly-line style.

On the other end of the spectrum, I have been working the past 6 years in entirely open studios, with little to no privacy possible without exiting the studio floor. The complexity of the work product—much of it rooted in designing and developing interactive products and services—required constant collaboration. An open studio plan encourages ad-hoc conversation and a cross-pollination of ideas that otherwise would never see the light of day. However, an open plan also requires pockets of privacy, whether via conference rooms or closed-door “war rooms” where the staff can work without distraction. In these environments, a pair of noise-cancelling headphones is the new “Do Not Disturb” sign.

Use of environment

You may choose to utilize some or all of your studio for other uses beyond billing for design work.

For example: Design Commission, an interactive design studio in Seattle, leases an affordable studio space within the Tashiro Kaplan Artists Lofts. As a requirement in their lease, part of their design studio must be run as an art gallery. This means that every first Thursday of the month, they have to put on a show as part of a community art walk. Year after year, they have exhibited work from a range of international artists, as well as created their own interactive art installations.

Other examples come from design studios that intentionally preserve a portion of their space for bringing in visiting artists or fellows; running a small retail store or "pop-up shop," such as the recent Stumptown Coffee in the Sid Lee office in Amsterdam; or subletting office space to like-minded businesses.

Co-location via virtual and temporary spaces

Some businesses choose to forgo a leased office space and work virtually, using by-the-meeting office spaces for face-to-face meetings with clients. In these situations, design teams can work from home or the coffee shop, connecting regularly through email, IM, phone calls, video chat, and online collaboration tools such as Basecamp, Campfire, WebEx, etc.

Plus, with the further increase of drop-in and shared spaces, such as Citizen Space in the Bay Area and Las Vegas, you can have the benefits of a studio environment on demand—providing the needed infrastructural perks (and ability to socialize) at a fraction of the cost of leasing a full-time space.

Got any great examples to share for how to build studio culture through your studio space? Share them below in the comments!

After 10 years living in the Pacific Northwest, Mary and I have decided to move to the sunnier climes of Oakland, California.

I will continue to be a Principal Designer at frog, now working out of the San Francisco studio. In addition, in 2012 I will be joining the faculty of California College of the Arts as an adjunct professor of design, teaching in the new BFA of Interaction Design program helmed by Kristian Simsarian. I'll also continue my involvement with The Designer Fund.

Mary will be a candidate in the Master of Fine Arts in Poetry Writing program at St. Mary's College of California, as well as a teaching fellow there. (Thankfully, Mary is not going to St. Mary's College within St. Mary's City in Maryland, which would have been an exceptional tongue twister.)

August has been our month to make the transition, with full time off from all work and school commitments. As you've noticed from the radio silence on this blog, I've also been decompressing from what has been an extraordinarily active summer. Between wrapping a busy period at work, to packing for the move, to delivering the manuscript for my second book Design Business from A to Z to HOW Books, I've needed some time for focusing on this change, recharging my batteries, and stepping away from design for a bit in general.

Moving into September, I will be rekindling ChangeOrder with a deeper look at some interactive design topics, as well as sharing a few meditations I've been mulling over this past year. I'll also be blogging some of the material I've been generating for the HOW Interactive Design Conference in San Francisco this November. (I'll post separately about this so you can get the full details.)

Seattle friends, we'll miss you and will visit soon. But California, here we come!

P.S. For more details on some of the above, check out this recent podcast I did with Donovan Beery and Nate Voss from 36 Point at June's HOW Design Live conference.

This is an extensive rewrite of a previous ChangeOrder post for my next book Design Business from A to Z—so much so I'm reposting it!

The website went live last week, and the entire staff is throwing a party to celebrate! The developers are huddled in the corner with some microbrews, plotting how they'll splice into the agency intranet to add a virtual dartboard. Designers are mingling with the copywriters and account people, clinking wineglasses and bonding over the ads they saw during The Office.

Yes, the job went way over budget—and the last thing your team wants to think about is who needs to take responsibility for it. Not the best time to mention that tomorrow, you're scheduling a post-mortem meeting (a.k.a. lessons learned, post future, etc.) to talk about how the project really went.

Was the estimate wrong to begin with? Did the designer spend too long tweaking those page comps? How come the developer pulled so many late nights wrangling with the content management system, when he said he knew .NET?

Discovering how a creative agency fails to make profit on a project usually boils down to a series of in-project decisions that, while intended to contribute to project success, lead to cost overruns and errors. Isolating and clarifying those agency decisions, role by role, can be punishing if conducted incorrectly. But if carried out in the right manner and in a safe group setting, a post-mortem meeting can galvanize a team and bring them closer together. By being aware of everyone's perspectives, your team members can see repeated problems in patterns of behavior and discover ways to change them. Plus, the ongoing learning that comes from open communication and active collaboration is what makes businesses more sustainable—especially on large, multi-phase projects that continue over months, if not years.

The flow of a well-structured post-mortem meeting

Here’s a draft agenda for an hour-long post-mortem meeting. Make sure you are meeting in a space that has a large whiteboard, so you can capture what everyone says as the meeting unfolds. And when scheduling the meeting, think about what you can attach to the meeting request that help ground people in what you’ll accomplish during the meeting.

1. Set the tone for the meeting (3-5 minutes). The post-mortem process requires the same deliberate care as the facilitation approach you would take for any form of client collaboration. Post-mortems should always be constructive, and be conducted in a manner that is professional and respectful. It often helps to have the meeting leader be someone who wasn’t on the project. They will be responsible for taking notes on the whiteboard.

Kick the meeting off by letting everyone know the goal for the meeting: understanding what went well and what could be improved about your recently completed project that you can apply to future projects. There must be a clear balance between the two buckets, or the room may only linger on complaints about everything that went wrong.

Everyone in the room should be aware that nothing said by any team member will go down on their permanent record. You are all taking part in the post-mortem to learn from your colleagues. Nothing will be taken personally against anyone who offers deep feedback. If mistakes were made along the way, more respect will be given to those who own up to causing them. No finger-pointing!

Let everyone know that if an issue is large enough to warrant at least five minutes of group discussion, promise to follow up with the team members individually to talk further and outline next steps to address similar situations in the future.

2. Describe the business problem and the proposed agency approach (5-10 minutes). Clearly describe what the client wanted to achieve from the project. Move at a very high level through the proposal the client signed, if anyone in the room wasn't aware of the agreed-upon terms. Ask your team to consider how the proposal did (or didn’t) guide the team towards the final delivered project. Common questions during this phase of the post-mortem may include:

• Were there challenges that could have been foreseen from previous agency projects that weren’t factored into the proposal?
• Were there any issues with how the proposal was structured or written?
• Were there deviations that occurred during the project that could be traced back to poorly defined scope?
• Were promises made in early meetings, but not in writing, that influenced client expectations?

3. Walk through how the agency executed the project (30 minutes). This portion of the post-mortem is a deep dive into what happened, and why, over the life of a project. Discuss the major milestones of the project process and key points where there may have been rework beyond your usual creative process. The staff can jump around in time as appropriate; this doesn’t have to be linear.

If necessary, have on hand the artifacts that supported project completion: creative brief, technical and functional specifications, client communications, vendor input, and the paper/digital trail of design work occurring over the project. You shouldn’t be using the time to re-proof or critique the minutiae of each deliverable. They exist in the room to provoke your team’s memory banks.

Here’s a sampling of common issues that crop up during this type of discussion:

• Did you fulfill what you'd promised in the proposal?
• Did the deliverables line up with what the agency actually created for the client? If not, why?
• Was the creative brief an accurate reflection of what is in the proposal and the strategic direction from your agency?
• Were there client requests that changed the project strategy from the approved brief while the project was in process? If not, did the agency absorb into the project cost getting the client to the right strategy? Were you paid for that extra time investment? What were the repercussions?
• Were there technical challenges that occurred during the life of the projects that were unexpected? Should they have been expected and factored into the schedule?
• Did the team have a complete knowledge of what the project required?
• Were you penalized for the team verging outside their area of core expertise? Did you factor that time into the project budget to support the time they needed to gain the knowledge necessary to succeed? (Another way of phrasing this is: Did you bid the project for your best case scenario, while knowing full well that best case scenarios rarely occur if they are contingent on technologies or unique deliverables that are new to your team?)
• Did the team spent time scrambling to address client concerns without proper triage?
• Was the chain of command followed through each phase of the project? (Is there one?)
• Did your vendors fall in line with your agency process/timeline? Did they contribute to your success or provide further hurdles to surmount?
• Did lack of communication or personality friction dictate staff behavior? (This is something that may not be discussed in the post-mortem, but will need to be acknowledged to said parties.)

4. Solve for perceived problems (10 minutes). At the end of the previous phase, you should have a whiteboard list of your team’s thoughts and impressions regarding what went well and what could have been improved on their projects. Now is your chance to be problem solvers and suggest changes to your agency process! Circle pain points and ask your team to brainstorm ways to keep them from happening in the future. When the brainstorming is over, copy down everyone’s ideas and send them to the team after the meeting. Seek out owners and action items for making sure the changes stick.

5. Show the team, in a pleasing visual format, where the time and money went (5 minutes). In any agency, your staff should have no illusions: time equals money. There must be a balance between quality of work delivered and profit for your company. So, if you can, show your staff what your financial targets were and how the agency performed against them. With this visualization in hand, you can ask your team (and yourself): Based on what we know now, how would we approach a project like this in the future? Was this project an investment in a new discipline for your agency, a great piece for your portfolio that came at extra expense, or something you're never going to attempt again?

This kind of transparency and candor is rare for most agencies. But when you hear this kind of feedback from everyone across your organization, it can be worth millions to your staff morale. I’ve even worked at agencies where the final post-mortem has included detail regarding how each team member billed their hours. (This means your entire staff needs to keep accurate timesheets, and not lie if they’re going to go over their allocated hours on a project.)

Some of your staffers may not run the business, so why should they know how profitable their project is for the owners or parent company of the agency?

The answer is simple: if designers see how their behavior influences stability (and profit) for their employer, they can think more holistically about how their actions in the future. Did mismanaged client expectations burn up staff time and profit? Did the team suggest placing a few “bonus concepts” in front of the client, causing extra rounds of changes before down-selection to the final direction? All of this comes out of the company's pocket, and can be gauged in this closing discussion. Your staff will likely appreciate seeing real big-picture thinking around exactly what this project meant to the agency—just as long as it's always delivered in a constructive manner. You can then fold this into the solutions you discussed earlier.

6. Highlight the most important thing each team member learned (5 minutes). To close your post-mortem meeting, ask each person in the room to put two stars on the whiteboard. One star is drawn beside the most important positive thing to remember from the meeting. The second star is drawn next to the one thing that should be changed going forward. When everyone is done, the facilitator should ask any last clarifying questions regarding everyone’s selections, then thank everyone for coming. Notes from the meeting should go out to everyone in a day or so.

Don’t wait until the end to reflect on project success (and failure)

The post-mortem gives staff a chance to fully comprehend what challenges hit each member of the staff and create a dialogue about how everyone can be supported by their agency peers. Think of it as an anthropological journey into exactly how your agency functions.

But you don’t wait until the end to reflect on what’s working for your project. You can hold a Pre-Mortem, a Mid-Mortem, whatever you want to call it! See how your team is doing, and start to solve for open issues before the project comes to a close.

Got any tips for designers looking to conduct post-project evaluations? Share them in the comments!

Photo 3202963823 by Sudhamshu on Flickr, shared via a Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic License.

This weekend, I participated in HOW Design Live, a U.S.-based conference intended to help designers, in-house design managers, and creative freelancers gain the information and inspiration they need to succeed with their design work. One of my contributions to the conference was a talk about facilitated collaborations with design clients.

Why collaborate with your clients? Because when clients and designers work together as equals towards a shared goal, they can feel like they're part of the design process. Facilitated collaboration can inform and inspire your design team, so you are empowered to create great design work. It can also create alignment, which contributes to ongoing trust and ownership from all parties involved.

The above deck shares principles and perspectives that any designer can use to plan better client/designer collaborations. In the coming months, I'll talk more here about this topic!

I'm happy to announce that in the coming months, I'll be increasingly involved in a new nonprofit called The Designer Fund. This is a community of designers that will be investing in design founders through education, angel funding, and access to a network of people and resources to help them create their own businesses.

If you have ideas for your own business, or an existing prototype or early-stage app or service that you've been trying to get off the ground, this is an awesome opportunity to get serious about it. As you'll see from the other people associated with this venture, you can potentially be mentored or receive angel funding from some of today's top designers, both from early-stage designers at YouTube, Facebook, Google, and Twitter to designers at IDEO, Cooper, Jump Associates, and Method, as well as current designers at Path and Flipboard. (And me.)

Why? Because recently, I've seen a number of online discussions about ways that designers can have "a seat at the table" with their clients. How they can be part of helping to formulate product, service, or marketing strategy. How they can be seen as adding more value to businesses than just providing an aesthetic perspective. How they can collaborate more effectively with their cohorts in technology and business. These discussions are valuable for those of us who work in-house, or are hired by companies to provide the right kind of influence, at the right time, to create the meaningful impact. Designers may yield profit from providing services to these clients, but it's rare that they get to profit from creating and deploying the products themselves.

In conducting my research for my next book—talking with a wide range of designers both at design studios, within in-house studios, and working at their own startup ventures—I've come to the (perhaps apparent) perspective that both fledgling and seasoned designers can be extraordinarily effective at designing and running businesses. It's not just about having a seat at the table with senior-level executives, changing the course of how that company makes their customers' lives better. It's that they can own the table. Their passion, knowledge, skill, and artistry are all brought to bear with the right partners to create businesses that transcend the common billing-for-services model. While that model is an important path today for many of us (myself included), it is not the only way to make what you love.

A hypothesis needs to be borne out: that designer-led businesses and startups could perhaps be more valuable in the long term than traditional startups. In the best case, designers can launch the next wave of innovation. In the worst case, more designers understand how to create awesome products and services, and then enter into employment with today's leading agencies and companies.

Jump on in and apply!

Type of work is one of the largest cultural building block of any studio, as the majority of the time in any studio is spent immersed in the work.

What follows are the questions you should be asking yourself before the phone rings and prospective clients ask you if you’d like to take on a project. Your answers to these questions, and how they may overlap (or not) with your staff’s answers, will help you better understand where you can take your studio portfolio.

Customer types

What industries do you want to work with? As an example: health care or consumer electronics?

What size of client do you prefer? Working with small companies or solely the Fortune 100?

Are you working with for-profit companies and ventures? Or are you focusing on opportunities from the nonprofit sector?

How deeply are you entrenched in helping to shape your client’s business? Are you a strategic partner, or seen more as an executional vendor?

What types of brands are you seeking to work with? Startups or established businesses?

What ethical stance do you take on certain types of clients? As an example: for some studios, working with a religious organization may not be considered appropriate, while others would jump at the chance.

Discipline and practices of design

What types of design does your studio want to practice? Print design or interactive? Industrial design or service?

What tangible things do you want to generate? One of the benefits of working on physical products, designed environments, and brand is that there is evidence of what you’ve created, which staff can point at. For interactive products and advertising, however, you may blink and miss it.

On what scale do you want to operate? As an example: If your firm focuses on branding, do you want to create simple identity systems or ones with hundreds of moving parts?

What other disciplines might you want to partner with? As an example: An interior designer may partner with an architecture firm to design a space.

Style of delivery

What length of projects do you seek? Do you prefer short-term projects, or would you enjoy working on an engagement that may last years?

Are there specific delivery processes you would prefer over others? As an example: some designers like to work in a controlled waterfall-style project process, while others like the close collaboration and constant change that emerges from an agile or scrum-based project process.

Where are the clients located? Are you fine with working with clients in a completely virtual manner, or do you prefer face-to-face interaction?

What level of security do you want as part of the client relationship? As an example: Do you desire a retainer with a client, where you have guaranteed revenue at the cost of freedom? Or do you generate revenues from flat fees, causing the staff to regularly propose and secure new work as part of their work life? This can influence the studio atmosphere.

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Anything you'd add to this list? See last week's post if you're interested in how type of work fits into the building blocks of design studio culture.

Studio culture is everything people in a design studio do that supports the process of making work happen. Culture can create joy, while process can facilitate profit.

A studio’s culture is not created solely by the business owner. It is generated from ongoing contributions and discoveries from both studio owners and employees. With this in mind, the following are some building blocks of a design studio’s culture—some of which the studio owner can invest in, and others that studio staff can own in order to create their ideal working environment.

They are divided into two groups: hard building blocks are created through a budget (money and time) as a formal part of studio overhead. The soft building blocks can be created through the decisions employees make over the course of their daily work, life, and play (with little material investment by studio owners). Both types of building blocks provide emotional and material stability to studio employees in the face of ongoing work challenges, and are often perceived by clients, family, and the general public as ingredients of the company’s brand.

Over the next few weeks, I'll be writing about these building blocks in greater depth (see above). I'd love your comments on what building blocks should be added or edited, and further insights and stories into we have regarding what actions may have generated positive working environments for you in the past. This will be rolled up into a chapter in my current book-in-progress, Design Business from A to Z.

The above chart was generated by me and David Conrad, Studio Director at Design Commission, for our workshop this Wednesday about how to structure design agencies for success.

The failure most of us frequently face in the business of design? The failure to recognize that a client project is something you should decline. Here are common situations where working designers fail to decline an opportunity that may be a poor fit.

The client thinks you want the work they're offering, no matter what.

This is the beauty of establishing strong client relationships from your first contact—if you connect during those initial dialogues, there will be a strong reservoir of trust that will fuel your first projects. They like talking with you, and expect that working with you will be the same. They genuinely care about your shared success. They just don't realize that what they're throwing your way is not the best fit. Right client, wrong project. And we're afraid to say no, for fear they won't come back.

Your long-term client knows you need work badly.

The studio has been quiet, except for your primary client's big project. This client, when they're in the studio or communicating with you, is aware that the studio needs business. You might have even asked them directly for more business. And in return, they bring you a project that can keep the cashflow running, but is a poor fit for your short- and long-term goals. So, you take it.

The client doesn't know that you lack competency in an area… and you don't tell them.

Designers don't like to admit weakness in a specific area, especially if they are hungry to keep work rolling in from a client. Example: You design their identity system. They're offering you some motion graphics work to animate it for a video. You've never used AfterEffects or Flash. Now may not be the time to crack the manual and dive in. There's too high a risk of failure. This holds even more true for facilitating development work. Are you really going to learn enough HTML 5 in three days to do front-end development for that hybrid mobile app? Disaster comes in many flavors, and this is one you don't want to inflict on any client. Bring in the appropriate specialists. Mark up their time. Get it right.

The client doesn't want to work with anyone else.

This is similar to the previous situation, except the client knows you don't have the expertise they seek—and they still want to give you the work. They are willing to trust you with something they know you may not fulfill effectively, either out of trust or desired convenience. This is dangerous. Making an error on a project in a known area of weakness is still an error.

The client wants you to do work that's part of their job responsibilities.

Designers are frequently hired to fulfill tasks that are outside their client's job description. But sometimes design projects come along that are part of a client's everyday work responsibilities, and you often don't recognize that you're doing their job until you've signed the contract and started the project. The risk with these kinds of projects is that you usually don't get to follow your standard agency process and have to work through the same politics as your client to gain approval on the work. This can be a burn on your time and resources, making a prospective project an unprofitable venture.

The client desires your bid to establish agency selection criteria.

"If you say no, there are plenty of other agencies yearning to tackle this project." This threat is always half true. If a client threatens to take the work to another agency, they're taking this tack because they want something from you: your participation, your investment, your attention. Either that, or they just need a third estimate to see who is the best fit.

You really do need the money.

Yes, you need to pay rent. Yes, this work is not beneath you. Yes, the work will hopefully lead to better things. You have staff you need to keep busy. It'll be over quick and then you'll be on to better things. Projects stroll through the studio that are purely money-makers and never appear your portfolio. (Does the Regional Design Annual accept PowerPoint templates as a category?) But if word spreads that you are really good at the very projects you don't want to specialize in, you risk being offered those projects over and over again. The old adage reads: "Be careful what you're good at." Can you afford to promote yourself as an expert in one area and end up spending your time working in another?

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You will be continually thrown opportunities you don't really need or have the depth of knowledge to fulfill well. You need to be prepared to walk away gracefully as part of any ongoing negotiation. So you've recognized that you should be declining a prospective project. How do you do it?

• You need to show humility. Declining work is a form of power that you hold over your shared client/designer relationship. You should not let the client feel like you are declining the work because of ego.
• You need to do it early enough in the new business process. Once you’ve moved too far down the sales cycle, such as the point where you’ve already generated a proposal, it can be unprofessional to say “No” to an extended offer on your part.
• You need to leave the door open for the possibility of “No." You should be honest that a project may not be a 100% perfect fit for your studio in early discussions, until you've gathered the necessary background information.
• You need to encourage future opportunities. “The trick is to turn down work, but have the client remember you as a positive person/agency that they want to work with in the future,” says project manager Fiona Robertson Remley. “No” should never be the last thing a client remembers about their interaction with you.

"I’m sorry, but it looks like the project we’ve discussing won’t be a good fit for us at this time. Let me refer you to another designer (or two) that would be able to help you out with it. And we should put something on the calendar for coffee in a month, as it was really great talking with you this week about our shared passion about Web analytics.”

This is a subtle art, especially in the midst of any critical negotiation with a long-term client. But remember: this is not the last project opportunity you will receive. And if you do it correctly, your potential for reward may only increase in the future.

I'd love to hear your stories regarding this topic. I'm sure we all have a few of them…

This post is part of an ongoing series I've been publishing every other week on PRINT Magazine's website, Imprint. Read the most recent ones, which are about risk assessment, client confidentiality, and proofreading like a pro, which have been previously discussed on ChangeOrder.

Working in New York City more than a decade ago, I was always charmed by how the cost of umbrellas would magically increase during a downpour. Those umbrellas never lasted. They just worked until you reached where you needed to go.

Riding the subway, watching people struggle with their half-broken umbrellas—aren't all umbrellas half-broken?—was an object lesson for me in the value of selective innovation. There's a reason GORE-TEX jackets cost so flipping much: a guarantee of staying 100% dry is almost impossible to deliver. This is a valuable problem, with a valued solution for products that last.

But there are so many short-term solutions, it's almost overwhelming. Mr. Wikipedia says that there are four people at the patent office employed to sift through patent proposals for umbrella-related inventions, and a fellow at Totes was quoted saying that "it’s difficult to come up with an umbrella idea that hasn’t already been done."

That's some market for innovation for the problem of "staying dry." It's a valuable problem that people keep solving over and over again, seeking new niches to monetize.

Now, let's think about web pages. Proper placement of where the search box should go, and how it should behave: pennies or millions, depending on the scale of traffic flowing through a web property. The impact of poorly considered design decisions can be like accidentally nicking an artery while shaving. At times, this is the value we provide to our clients, often in the context of seemingly small yet critical decisions in creating an existing product. But such decisions map back to a much larger context, grounded in customer and business considerations. People will always be searching for content on web pages. Do they need an umbrella or something more durable?

Back away from solving small problems at key points in each of your projects and consider: How valuable is the larger-scale problem I'm trying to solve? With regard to human need? From a business standpoint? Where do I need umbrellas, and where do I need to invent something that will durably last? That can't be easily copied?

This kind of thinking is useful when clients come in crowing about their new umbrella idea, when really they need a waterproof jacket. When discussing a potential new project, ask your client about what problem(s) they're trying to solve. Then, ask them how that problem came about. Usually, that points to a much larger, more valuable problem—where the rain is currently pouring. Gauge the value of the largest problems you can help your client solve, then consider the effort (and decisions) that will be necessary in your current project to move you towards influencing them. It takes more effort to make that waterproof jacket, but it'll last them longer and retain its value better.

How does that change your conversation with the client? Is that a problem they're willing to let you discuss openly? Look at it from a few different angles or higher-order perspectives? Change the nature of what kinds of projects you'd like to retain?

Once you start seeing what you do as a designer in this way, you'll have greater clarity regarding exactly what kind of value you're providing as a designer. Solve valuable problems, charge your customer what the market will reasonably bear. And remember that people won't pay much for umbrellas. At any price point, they always vanish into the closet.

Now, please excuse me... this was one of the few sunny days we've had in Seattle all year, and I'm going to go get my yearly Vitamin D allotment.

This post was inspired by recent discussions with David Conrad, studio director of Design Commission and the co-presenter with me for an AIGA Seattle Design Business for Breakfast next week about how to structure a design studio for success.

Traditional meetings are often more about socializing decisions than making them. A case for rethinking how we generate ideas.

Perhaps this situation hasn't happened to you yet at work. But it probably will.

Your entire team has been corralled into a conference room and told by your boss to become more creative as a unit. To collaborate more efficiently. To generate breakthrough ideas that will transform your business, your industry, the world at large. To hone your group's collective creativity in ways that makes a team of three or four people more effective than dozens. No pressure—only your career is riding on it.

With the emerging dialogue in the popular press and blogosphere about fostering creativity in business, there is no lack of desire for collective creativity. Take this recent quote by Bruce Nussbaum about looking beyond fostering "design thinking" and instead encouraging "creative Intelligence":

I am defining Creative Intelligence as the ability to frame problems in new ways and to make original solutions. You can have a low or high ability to frame and solve problems, but these two capacities are key and they can be learned.... It is a sociological approach in which creativity emerges from group activity, not a psychological approach of development stages and individual genius.

Yes, group activity can provide the impetus for better framing of problems, which can lead to original solutions. But creativity is the "end result of many forms of intelligence coming together, and intelligence born out of collaboration and out of networks," to quote one of my co-workers, Robert Fabricant. When we collaborate with different kinds of thinkers, sometimes from different cultures and backgrounds, we individually struggle with ingrained behaviors that reduce our likelihood of manifesting creativity.

One of the joys of working in teams is the cadence and flow of dialogue between people, and seeing how ideas grow and change through discussion. We often become lost in these exchanges, and delightfully so.

They seem to be core to the notion of design and creativity, but they aren't.

Continue reading my article on TheAtlantic.com.

Here's a question for you: How should a design leader behave?

My hypothesis is that any effective design leader must know how to coax, push, cajole, and conjure awesome work out of their team (and themselves).

Leaders coax stellar work out of their teams by creating space for creativity to flourish. This space is protected from harm, so incursions such as rogue client feedback or organizational politics will not derail ongoing effort.

Leaders push their teams towards a vision, no matter who suggested or informed that vision. It can come from anyone on the team, then be harnessed collectively. However, the leader must motivate the team to realize that vision. The best leaders know how suss out internal motivations and encourage them, rather than enforce a motivation from an external pressure, such as deadline, quality bar, fear of failure, and so forth. The leader can also choose to allow others to lead, trusting their direction and encouraging ownership in the process.

Leaders cajole through critique, by asking the right open-ended questions—at the correct time—to encourage the flourishing of great ideas. To quote Pelle Sjonell, Executive Creative Director of BBH LA: "If creative direction is done right, you should never have to select. You never need to resort to the role of a bouncer. Or simply giving things thumbs up or thumbs down."

Leaders must also conjure compelling design work in their own right, when pressed into service. Otherwise, they may just be serving in a managerial capacity.

Design leaders that employ these modes effectively, in concert with design teams jamming on well-considered design work for engaged clients, is what can make working at a design business transcend being mere work and become delightful.

What do you think? What would you add, remove, or change? I'd love to share your perspectives at next week's Design Business for Breakfast on Design Leadership.

I was recently invited to deliver a talk at Emily Carr University of Art and Design about what interaction designers do and how interaction design factors into the worlds of design and art.

My talk "The Language of Interaction" (slides above) was my attempt to summarize the critical role that language plays in our efforts as designers and artists. In doing so, I touched upon the three challenges that all designers and artists face in trying to craft interactions:

• Establishing a vocabulary, which allows you to articulate what discrete points of a systemic problem you may influence
• Considering what metaphors may aid you in the modelling of an interactive product or service
• Understanding how we weave together what we've experienced from our interaction with lateral disciplines to become better at practicing interaction design

To illustrate the last point, I created a timeline of my lifelong explorations as a designer and artist, and discussed how I couldn't have been an effective interaction designer without traveling through a range of related (and seemingly unrelated) disciplines. Over time, all of them were threaded together.

Many thanks to Haig Armen and Laura Kozak of Emily Carr, who invited me up to Vancouver, BC for this talk.

This afternoon I spent half an hour with a few hundred South by Southwest attendees, sharing how my book Creative Workshop: 80 Challenges to Sharpen Your Design Skills came about. I presented the above deck, and answered a ton of diverse questions from the audience. I've tried to capture some of the questions and my responses below.

What do you do when you get stuck? I mean, you'll always reach a wall on any design project.

Yes, there are always moments on design projects where it seems like the well has run dry. I've found that in those situations, it helps to construct situations where you have to dig even deeper in the well to find more water.

One trick that seems to help is to set a goal to come up with 100 ideas on paper in one hour. Sure, you may not reach 100, but you'll have a moment (or two) where you'll stop thinking about making good ideas and draw on your intuition and subconscious. Sure, crap happens during those moments, but so do moments of gold. The point is not to decide whether it's crap or gold until you've had a chance to get a distance from the material, and let it speak for itself.

Do different personalities or dispositions gravitate towards specific types of brainstorming methods and design processes?

I find this a fascinating question, for a number of reasons. First, designers always gravitate towards more rational or more intuitive processes, just as a matter of how they incubate and execute ideas. So if you give a fairly intuitive designer a highly rational brainstorming method, it's likely that there will be some friction and potential fireworks.

However, rote repetition rarely leads to deep design intuition. The point of exploring different brainstorming methods—especially those that oppose your everyday tendencies—is to step outside what you know and explore what you don't. Sure, failure will happen, but taking risks requires such an effort. There's nothing to be afraid of except throwing away what didn't work… so if you're deeply attached to what you create, it's going to hurt.

I'm a developer and want to become a designer. What should I do?

Be tactical, observing how the designers around you work through a design problem, from initial research to conceiving ideas. Try out activities that utilize those processes. See which ones feel natural, and generate ideas in similar manners. Take on design problems and try to solve them only on paper. Stay out of code and technical architecture, examining how things could be made if there were no reality constraints. Then, when you've started to fall into a rhythm, see what happens when you bring implementation technologies into that process.

How should designers work with project managers?

As partners, with an appropriate level of give and take. I don't mind project managers drawing wireframes on the whiteboard when the team is grappling with a tough problem. However, they should also feel comfortable if the team begins negotiating dates on the GANT chart. Essentially, a collaboration with open communication and trust, as well as some fluidity involving roles.

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If you're seeking more design challenges, I've posted on Scribd 10 bonus challenges that I couldn't fit into the printed book. Enjoy!

In the shower, the best idea of your career hits you like a runaway bus. Years of hard-fought labor melt away, as the details clarify themselves in your brain like pristine, hand-rendered architectural blueprints. You pump your fists in the air, giddy with triumph. This idea will define your career. It will leave your clients awestruck. It will make your company rich.

Sadly, no one will ever know your idea. Because in this hypothetical situation, on your way into work you are hit by a bus.

Contingency planning—being prepared for the worst that could happen, even though it's likely that it won't—is a necessary part of running any business meant to outlast yourself. Business owners need to understand where critical information and actions happen across their company, while individual employees must stay aware of who does (and doesn't) have access to the results of their labor.

This is no laughing matter, but we bring it up every time we say: "If you were hit by a bus tomorrow, who would know what you know? Who could do what you do?" It happens more often than we'd like, especially when working in a freelance capacity. Your bosses worry about it. If you're in charge of a business, you have probably experienced times where such lapses in institutional knowledge have hobbled projects.

Matt Conway, an Associate Creative Director at frog design, has a great turn of phrase for identifying what project details are shared amongst employees. When a project contributor tells him something important, he asks: "What's your bus number?"

His turn of phrase is shorthand for, "If you were to be hit by a bus at this very moment, how many other people besides you and me know what we just discussed?" If your bus number is low, then you will need to capture and share your knowledge before you progress further. If your bus number is high, then you're in a good place to keep your project moving.

So, take a look at your current projects and ask yourself: What's my bus number? Who needs to know what I've been doing? Are there any new ideas that need to be socialized, and quickly? And how can I share these ideas with my cohorts most effectively? Then, take action.