The tiny imperfections you see in these hand crafted goods are the signatures left by their human creators. They go onto show that they were painstakingly crafted by humans just like you and me and not mass produced in a factory floor. There is a beauty in these tiny imperfections, a beauty that is beyond the eyes that got tuned to seeing products manufactured by machines and I have slowly learned to celebrate that beauty.

Read the full article here

The most important thing a designer needs to have is a good taste. A good taste at identifying great work. It doesn’t matter if your work doesn’t match up with your taste yet. It will slowly but steadily catch up. Ultimately your taste ends up defining your style. In fact your taste will be few steps ahead of your talent in the initial years of your career. Your taste can tell the difference in quality between what you want to make and what you have made. You should listen to this video by Ira Glass of ‘The American Life’ fame if you have not already done so. He talks about taste by analysing his earlier works in a candid fashion http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BI23U7U2aUY

What shapes your taste?
Your taste is shaped by a lot of factors, the most important of which is the culture you grow up in. One pattern that I have seen amongst most Indian designers is the extravagant usage of colour. You can see that from the hoardings and billboards that adorn the streets of India to even the very common ‘lorry art’.

Fig: Billboards competing for your eyeballs (IMG Credit)

Fig: Colorful images like this adorn the lorries of India (IMG Credit)

Maybe this has got something to do with our culture

Fig: The Indian festival of Holi is celebrated with lots of colors

or maybe it has got to do something with competition. The only way to stand out from the crowd will be to be more colourful and hence get more eyeballs.

Unlike hoardings and billboards, the web has no single culture. It is an amalgamation of many cultures and hence the design aesthetics of the web never had any solid rules. It was good to an extent as a lack of  rigid structure made it a playground for experimentation and the consequent rapid progress it made. But this habit of constant experimentation gave rise to something called a ‘flavor of the month’ phenomenon. Remember the flash websites of the noughties and the web 2.0 revolution. When such design revolutions come around a lot of designers blindly start following these trends without thinking why and the result would be their obliteration along with these trends. These styles that were meant mainly for web, even made entries into print media. People started using glossy buttons in their brochures and ads. Now who presses those buttons, no one knows but this phenomenon clearly showed that designers easily fall prey to trends because it somehow shows that they are keeping up with the times. What they don’t realise is that good design transcends trends and withstands the test of time. The works of designers like Stefan Kanchev and Dieter Rams stands testimony to this fact.

Fig: The timeless works of Stefan Kanchev (IMG Credit)

Fig: Many a works of Dieter Rams served as inspiration for Apple products (IMG Credit)

By looking at those designs you can’t predict which era they were designed in for sure. This is what we call a timeless design.

These days a new phenomenon has been going around in the design world which I call ‘iOSification’ of design. iOS is one of those platforms which owes a lot to its design for the success it had. iOS apps had to follow a set of strict guidelines to be accepted into the ecosystem and consequently all the iOS apps look like they have been designed by the same person. For an ecosystem this type of uniformity in the visual language is good but it rarely encourages innovation in design. True, every now and then something comes along which breaks this rule but more often than not this rule holds true. Everything would have been fine if it all happened within the iOS ecosystem but sadly that is not the case. Many web apps and websites have also undergone iOSification.
To get a glimpse of this phenomenon, just visit dribbble or any other portfolio site and search for UI design. Almost every result that is shown looks the same. The personality of the design is compromised when you try to conform to trends. The personality of any design is ultimately a reflection of the style of the designer. How much of a personal style a designer can bring to a project is very debatable especially in the case of projects in which a team is involved. Such works always have a collective identity but the whole is always the sum of parts.

You would never blindly follow trends if you just ‘THINK’ about the ‘whys’ before you start doing anything. Thinking about your craft is very essential if you want to stay ahead of the herd. Writing and talking about your craft helps even more because it can happen only if you think. Talking to people who are better than you challenges you. It refines your thought process and ultimately your craft will benefit.

How trends level out in end
There is a thin line between simply following trends and building on something that is in trend. It is at this fine line that the negatives of exploring a trend finally levels out.  Everything in this universe has a natural cycle where in it tries to attain an equilibrium by losing what is unnecessary and retaining what is necessary. Design is no exception to this rule. Sometimes when a designer has worked on a design for a considerable amount of time the design attains what is called a ‘local maximum’. No matter how much you work on that design, it is not going to get better than what it already is. In such cases what a design needs is a fresh perspective, a new set of eyes. This is one reason why the design community is tolerant when someone tries to build upon a work done by another designer. Although the design-challenged mistake this for copying or ripping off, this is exactly how progress was ever made in the design world. Where you draw the line between blatantly ripping off someone and building on some-one’s work is a very delicate matter. Let’s leave that debate for another day.

There is a new movement going on in the online world. A movement in which a heavy premium is laid on the tastes of users. Until now sites like FFFOUND were used solely by designers and design enthusiasts. They have not managed to percolate through to the rest of the world but with the rising popularity of pinterest more and more people get recognised for their taste. There is a taste for identifying good work and a taste for producing good work. While these curators in pinterest can get away with a taste for identifying good work, a good designer needs to have both in ample quantities. The taste for producing good work is largely dependent on your talent. It is something you are born with and as you continue to develop your taste to identify good work, some of it also rubs off on your talent. Both keep feeding each other and helps you become a complete designer.

Recently there was a discussion in twitter about the various titles for a design professional. One side was of the opinion that titles do not matter and at the end of the day they are all designers while the other side was of the opinion that it is important to pay attention to your titles especially when you are working in a large organization. I can understand where these two points of view come from. For a designer working in a small startup titles are the last thing they are concerned about. In a start up almost every employee is required to wear more than one hat. As far as I know that is one of the most fun part of working in a start up. You learn a lot on the job. Even if you screw up something no one is gonna give you the stare. They all know that you are trying as hard as everyone else and it is through mistakes that you learn. The organizational structure itself is so fluid and bureaucracy doesn’t even exist. Whereas for the guy working in a large MNC, titles are as important as the pay check at the end of the month. It is regarded as a status symbol. A title like UI designer kind of gives the feeling that you are doing something brainy rather than just setting fonts and pushing pixels.

Why does such a divide exist between designers themselves as to whether they should give importance to titles or not. The only reason I can find is that designers are not the kind of people you would put in cubicles. They are not the kind of people who should be working 9 to 5 jobs. A lot of designers realize this after working in MNCs for a year or two and they break off from the system. During their time in these companies they pick up a number of unhealthy habits and one of them is this obsession with titles.

The bitter truth is that specializations are not the forte of this industry. In most other professions skill and interest level often push people to take up specializations. It takes a lot of skill for a physician to specialize in surgery while the skill level required for a UI designer and that of a print designer are almost the same. It just requires a different set of KNOWLEDGE but not a different skill set. A surgeon might decide to go for a specialization in cardiac surgery or Orthopedics based on his interest. Each is a field vast enough and people dedicate their entire lives to be masters at what they do. When it comes to design the curiosity that almost every designer is born with pushes him to try his hands on other specializations as well. There is no knowledge barrier that is blocking him. Almost every designer I know started out by mucking around in Photoshop. I am yet to meet a designer who specializes in Print design alone. Almost every one has tried their hands on web design either for the bucks or for the fun. When specializations itself are so vague in an industry, titles don’t make any sense at all except in a large organization for the sake of the organizational structure.

At the end of the day, just let your work define what you do rather than the title on your business card.

I have been working on a project which has the Follow/Unfollow functionality. The above pic shows how designers usually think about the Follow/Unfollow buttons but while implementing it in the UI I came across some unforeseen issues. Below is the best fit solution I could find.

1) The Follow button instead of Grey should be Green in color to catch the Users attention. A grey button can go unnoticed with all the white space in the background. Clearly the button needs to beckon the attention of the user as it is a ‘kind of’ Call To Action.

2) Once the user has clicked on the Follow button and started Following the user the ‘Following’ button can have the Grey color because now the button need not compete with other elements for the attention of the user. The major action of following the user has already been done and now all the button is doing is displaying that information.

3) A better management of the screen space available will make use of just one single button. ie: one button to Follow and Unfollow an User. So that means on hovering over the ‘Following’ button the button will change to ‘Unfollow’ with the red color. This means that the unfollow button need not have three states but just two (normal & active state) and for the ‘Following’ button just the normal state.

Pic courtesy: Matteodicapua. You can download the PSD for the buttons from 365PSD

A lot of people confuse perfection with closure. Making sure that the edges of the text-boxes in your comp line up is not a sign of obsession with perfection, it is just an effort to attain closure while testing 41 shades of blue
to find the perfect shade is.

Rather than trying to attain perfection I try to attain closure in every work I do which means that if I have 5 minutes to create an artwork and send it to the printer I will spend the last one minute pre-flighting the files.

To be continued (may be )…

“It takes 10,000 hours to become a genius at something” – Outliers by Macolm Gladwell

No one is born a genius. It takes hard work and perseverance to become one. One thing that separates geniuses from ordinary people is that they realized their calling in life. This realisation didn’t dawn upon them one fine day. It took years of trying, failing and retrying to realize what they they wanted to do in their life.

One common misconception I hear often about creative people is that their success is not dependent on hard work but mostly on talent. Well, success in any field depends upon talent but only partially. Hard work is the basis of success in any field and this hard work involves being constantly updated in your field, adding skills to your repertoire and honing the ones you already have. No one can afford to remain stagnant and complacent especially in a field crowded with amateurs and hobbyists who are gladly willing to take your position. By improving, I don’t mean to take giant leaps every day, it could be as simple as learning something you didn’t know perviously. I believe that the best way to learn something new is to go ahead and do it. Stop reading a hundred books about something before you go ahead and do it. I am not saying that you shouldn’t read books, of course you should, but just as important as reading books is to go ahead and take the plunge. You will learn a lot in a day from doing something than by reading 5 books about it. Once you have taken the plunge it might be a good idea to explore more about it by reading books and tutorials.

One simple thing that I do every night is to take a pause and think what I have learned that day. Well, if I can’t think of anything worthwhile then I might as well have not gotten up from my bed. I make it a point to learn one new thing everyday. It need not strictly be something related to design, it can be anything, sometimes as simple as learning a new word.

Carpenters who become contractors at one time had a need to drive a nail straighter than any one else. – What they don’t teach you at Harvard Business School by Mark H. McCormack