A couple years ago, I was interviewing for a job as digital design director at a (well-known) branding agency. After the usual pleasantries, we landed on the details of what the role would entail. To my dismay, the agency’s interpretation of « digital » was simply putting a new logo onto website mockups at the tail end of an extensive guidelines document. It was clear that digital was very much an afterthought in their branding process and that the position was not for me.
This lack of understanding about the role of digital was disappointing, but unfortunately it was not surprising. Most friends of mine working at branding agencies use the same top-down, siloed process. And let’s be clear, I have a lot of respect for their talent and the great design work they do. But, I believe that the old way of doing things—developing the strategy, then designing the brand and then the application—is in desperate need of a rethink. At a time when brand experiences are often based upon touch, sound, and voice, how can a branding process that starts out from a purely visual perspective ever possibly succeed?
Graphic design is easily the most ubiquitous of all the arts. It is everywhere, touching everything we do, everything we see, everything we buy: on billboards and in Bibles, on taxi receipts and on web sites, on birth certificates and on gift certificates, on the folded circulars tucked inside jars of aspirin and on the thick pages of children’s chubby board books. It is the boldly directional arrows on street signs and the blurred, frenetic typography on the title sequence to E.R. It is the bright green logo for the New York Giants and the staid front page of The New York Times.
Simply put, graphic design is the art of visualizing ideas. Until World War II, it was better known in the United States as commercial art. Practiced by printers and typesetters, it was more a vocation than a profession, more a reflection of the economic realities of a newly industrialized culture than an opportunity to engage the creative expression of an individual or an idea.
En France, le système scolaire encourage les bons élèves à faire des mathématiques. Elles sont la matière royale, celle avec laquelle on prouve son intelligence avant d’accéder à l’élite de la nation. Maths et informatique orientent vers de belles carrières d’ingénieurs comme vers bien d’autres carrières qui n’ont rien à voir avec les sciences. Les entreprises raffolent des profils d’ingénieurs, même si c’est pour en faire des commerciaux. Dans le monde du numérique, les matheux sont particulièrement appréciés, surtout s’ils ont appris à faire parler les données, composer des algorithmes et extraire de l’intelligence. On recrute plus de data scientists que de poètes, n’est-ce pas ?
Aujourd’hui, peut-être. Mais demain, c’est moins sûr. Certes, les carrières scientifiques ont encore le vent en poupe. Mais si on n’a pas la bosse des maths et qu’on n’est pas un brillant programmeur, mieux vaut aujourd’hui cultiver l’art de combiner les mots. Les “poètes” sont en train de prendre leur revanche.
For professional athletes, facing and overcoming pain, adversity, and discomfort is all part of a day’s work. Knowledge workers, the majority of the workforce today, encounter a different type of adversity — intellectual discomfort.
You know the feeling of intellectual discomfort. It’s that gut reaction you feel when you prepare to start a project, and, as you skim the document, you think to yourself, Damn, this is going to be hard.
This will push your intellectual capacity. And that feels challenging, overwhelming and scary. In this moment, you might stall. You might even choose to give up. Or worse – not even give it a shot, delegating it to someone else. This is the work you know you were born to break through to get to your best future self.
In October last year we posted best sources to learn UX. We wanted to take this matter further since UX as well as discussing and exploring User Interface design(UI) is lately very popular. We know that a positive user experience can boost business and customer satisfaction.
Unfortunately, a study conducted by Uxeria.com shows that 44% of online shoppers evaluated online stores negatively. More than 40% of shoppers agreed that location of products on a site was unintuitive. No good.
Every UX Designer or Web Designer should seek to design an app or a website enjoyable to use. The main objectives on which designers should primarily focus are: functionality, intuitiveness, usability and in the case of eg. online stores — conversion. Frequently, however, many designers concentrate on visual effect rather than the function. Nice-looking site is not enough to engage the user.
