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Dave
And you were saying that the audience is somewhat…some students, but is there another audience as well that listens?
Gary
I don’t…I can’t…I can prove that people are listening to it! I can’t prove who. I do think it’s primarily design educators, because that was the intended audience and that’s who I’ve been kind of advertising to, but it’s been applicable to students and actually I’ve heard this from anecdotal evidence that design firm owners listen to it because they’re kinda curious what other people are doing. Because I’m asking about things at such a nuts and bolt kind of level.
Dave
Right, yeah, totally.
Gary
Which I never would have…never really occurred to me.
Dave
Awesome. Well, that’s cool. You put stuff out there and hopefully someone reads it. I’ve been surprised at how the response has been to this article so far.
Gary
Well again, from a design education standpoint, we’re not doing any of what you suggested!
Dave
Yeah, I’d love to talk about that on the episode…
Gary
We will!
Dave
But what do you mean by that?
Gary
And again, this is my personal opinion, so I really don’t want to speak for everybody but like, some of the things that you’ve mentioned; just when you got into like the portfolio it’s like, oh I know, because OK: there’s a Facebook group for Design Educators. And they’re talking about what kind of printed, bound portfolio do you have your students make?
Dave
Right, OK, I see!
Gary
And I’m just like…umm…that’s the wrong question!
Dave
Totally, One hundred per cent.
Gary
Yeah, and so that’s still what they’re…and I’ve done a bunch of portfolio reviews through the AIGA where I’ve organized them and I’m like, some students are showing up with printed calendars, you know, their faculty are having them make calendars. Printed recipe cards. Just, I can’t imagine how as a hiring manager looking at that knows that they’re going to be able to work in the field that you’re working in.
Dave
Right. Cool, yeah, so I’d be happy to sort of talk about the field we work in and just the types of stuff we’ve seen because we’ve had people come in with a giant eighteen by twenty-four portfolio, and then we’ve had people come in with literally nothing but a Dribbble account. And the differences are pretty black and white and so when we take a look at that type of stuff, really the people who have gone and made a Dribbble account or have a Behance portfolio that looks and feels modern, looks and feels like it could hit the home page of any of those websites, even if it doesn’t, if those are the people who kind of understand design and kind of have a passion for it because they’ve gone out and they’ve sought kind of the opinions of leaders in the industry, they’ve sought the community of the industry, they’ve taken a real look at who matters and who doesn’t, whereas the people who’ve come in with the big printed, bound portfolios, they kind of had to be told to do that.
And that’s a pretty telling thing, right, if you had to be told hey, this is why…this is how you should do it or this is how you should get a job, then it becomes pretty transactional; it’s like, Do X: get Y, whereas if you’re really passionate and you really care about design or you care about web design or print design or advertising, you’re going out and you’re seeing what the contemporaries are doing, you’re seeing what the leaders in the industry are doing, you’re seeing how they present their work and where that work lives and you don’t necessarily need to go in and do all the formal stuff; you can just produce a body of work hosted on a platform that’s extremely easy to put your content on and if you can look the part and play the part on those platforms, that’s probably more than enough for a hiring manager, someone in design to kinda say, yep, that’s…this person knows what they’re doing and they care about this industry.
Gary
So, you just answered…like basically how to…how can a student show initiative, and it’s basically just by what they bring to the table because what you’re seeing. A follow-up to that. What could a design…what should me as a design educator be telling students to bring to an interview? Because they’re paying to go to School. I am Google for them. And rightfully so! So, what should I be telling them how to prepare their portfolio and secondly, what would you like to see in it?
Dave
Sure, I think that’s a really good question because people just don’t know what they don’t know yet. And when you start, when we look at portfolios; so I’ll preface this by saying what type of design we work in, in particular. So, we do a lot of dot-com, portal, UX, UI, mobile app design. We design a lot of the flagship applications and products that live on the web and live on your phones, and so when we talk about the type of design we do, we take a look at where the conversations are being had, where people are sharing the work that they are working on currently, when we look at the portfolio, so if you’re looking on Behance, you’re looking on Dribbble, you’re looking on these places where people who are actually in the practice of design are going to design, if you have a portfolio that lives on there, maybe you’ve put together a couple of pdf examples and it’s kinda tailored to the audience of the type of design job you’re sort of going for, that would be amazing.
You don’t necessarily need a big printed book or anything like that, you don’t need to walk in with a ton of examples, but we just need to see evidence of really care and forethought for the industry, for the type of job you’re applying for, so if you’re working in print, for example, bring in some print or bring I some stuff that looks inspiring and that really, really matters for that industry. Go and get an opinion on things, understand who the foundries are, those types of things, so make sure that stuff’s included in your portfolio, if you made a type decision be like, here’s a bunch of examples of how I’ve used Gothic type overlays, and that’s going to tell you about your care and passion for the subject matter itself. The presentation of the material could be anything form a pdf to a big printed book, to a website link to something that’s really easy to publish. I think that realistically it’s…as an employer and as someone who’s working in design, we’re looking for…do you have a recognition of what this industry is about?
Gary
OK. Let me back up. So, I think pretty much in every single episode, everybody has said, document the process, document the process and I’ve really kinda had my trouble wrapping my head around that but you kinda crystallized it. It popped into my head right now but it’s maybe not so much documenting the process but documenting the passion so…Dribble’s a perfect way to do that because you’re constantly throwing up experiments and you’re not really curating them; you’re just showing your passion for design and kind of how you work through a problem. So, does that make sense?
Dave
Absolutely. I think that when you come in and you do have process work to show, I think that is super, super helpful. I think it’s sometimes a little hard to dive all the way through the process and I think processes change so quickly in our industry, particularly in UX and UI. Every month there’s kind of a new expression or a new rule of thumb or a new best practice to go along with, but I Kind of allude to it in the article a little bit. It’s kinda like that curiosity, so if I see the end result of a product and of a project or as a product you’re developing or just a screen-shot you’re sharing of your work, or a snippet, and I see that there’s some interesting stuff in there, maybe you didn’t necessarily get there through a process that matches our process, but you probably had to do a lot of thinking and a lot of research and we can talk about that and we can talk about that in the interview.
I find being able to be passionate about that makes the conversation really easy. The amount of documentation I want to see in the process is the amount that shows me you thought about it. I don’t necessarily need to have you adhere to any particular…any particular methodology in order to get there, I just want to see, hey, the output is good, regardless of the tools used, regardless of the process used, this person has a care for their craft, has a care for Design, is probably the type of designer that we could work with, and now let’s talk about, let’s get in the room together and figure out how you made these decisions.
Gary
OK, so I’m gonna make a statement, then ask a follow-up question. So, to me, the kind of work that you do and we should probably have everybody tell you a little bit more about the company in just a minute: that’s the standard, I feel like that’s what most of the graphic design industry is now. You’re not going to find any print design centric companies in large quantities and besides maybe there’s a lot of branding that may be a branding for maybe a little different…so anyway, I feel like that’s kind of…you’re the contemporary example of what a company looks like. Do you think that’s appropriate?
Dave
Yeah, I see a lot of different design companies, you know, we have a lot of friends in the industry out there but I think the kind of loudest part of the market, let’s say, is definitely in digital, all right? And definitely in UX and product design. That’s not to say there aren’t a really, really large swathe of advertising companies, advertising agencies, pay per click or banner design agencies or digital agencies like that, that aren’t still out there and there’s still lots of people making fliers and making magazine ads and doing print, but I think that digital in particular, because of the way information gets spread, we tend to have the loudest voice because our work gets seen by the most people and we end up building the platforms for ourselves first, right? So, if you think of any of these places where you go and you share your work, those are built by digital designers, so you end up speaking to that audience.
Gary
OK, and so then my follow-up to that is, what does a contemporary portfolio look like? What should be in it? And this is for the entry-level graphic…you know, somebody coming out of school with one to two years of experience at the most.
Dave
Yeah, so I think when you think about your portfolio you should be thinking, one, what type of job do I want to get? So start there. And if you’re already thinking about what type of job you want to get, you should be passionate about that field of work, particularly in UX and UI design which I can speak to. We’re looking a lot for really the raw skills. The format doesn’t necessarily matter to us, whether that’s a pdf or big print-outs or websites, but it could be really anything and I think it should be built on a couple of things. One, you should have a couple of contemporary pieces in there, so you should be looking at Behance, at Dribble, at any of these places, even on Medium or other blogs and you’re kinda taking a look at the audience or…not the audience but the body of work that currently exists on there, so go out there; there’s things like design challenges if you don’t have experiences like the Daily UI Challenge.
Go out there and do a bunch of those. I hired someone who really didn’t have very much really formal experience and came from the Humanities as a major, but had a ton of just amazing work from the Daily UI Challenge where you looked at this and it’s like, hey, there’s just a ton of raw skill and a ton of passion here. No matter what happens, if they’re easy enough to work with, they’re gonna learn a lot, they’re going to teach us a lot about their process and then we’re going to be able to ingratiate them into the way we go about our design methodology here. So, start developing a vision for what you want to do and challenging yourself to kind of look the part. Don’t go and reinvent conventions, right off the back. Don’t to and try to design new icons. Borrow UK kits, borrow those types of things and make the modifications to solve a particular design problem. Two, if you’re… so if you are going to challenge yourself, come up with a design problem first.
I see a lot of people who just say, hey, I’m going to re-design this because, But the because becomes the afterthought, the because should be the first thing you start with, right? So I don’t connect well enough with my friends on Facebook any more: what is the insight there? So, show me some sort of insight-building tools before you hop into the design . And when we talk about design in process in those types of things, if you can be an insight-based designer, if you con come up with a reason you created these things, I think that’s going to land you a job right away. right? I think that’s the Holy Grail for people in this industry is that, there was a why and you can justify about why you can identify needs; you can empathize with the needs of people and then design something that’s going to be meaningful for them. So, if you’re starting with why your portfolio and where you’re going with your challenges, that’s really great. And then the last part is really, really like figure out who…who you’re going to model yourself against.
There are tremendous brand designers, there are tremendous UX and UI designers, there are tremendous traditional content designers online that you can really borrow from and you can see what they’re doing and see, hey I’d love to make a piece like that, so if you don’t have a lot of work yet, if you don’t have a lot of experience yet, go out and show me something that Jessica Walsh did, but you did your own spin and take-off on, you Know? Show me something that hey, I really, really love the icon set that...the team over at Facebook put together. Let me do a bunch of icons in that vein. And really just get into the practice of embracing and extending other people’s styles, because once you get into the real world and you’re working on client projects, not every project is like, re-invent this entire brand from scratch, right? It’s about embracing and extending to fit the new problem and fit the new need.
Gary
Yeah and I think that’s something I just recently started talking about on this podcast with a couple of guests is that when you go to graphic design school, you go with basically the idea that you are the inventor, you are creating everything from scratch, but that is not the real world, really. It’s predominantly…here’s a design system: we need this added to it, here is a style guide created by the advertising branding team. You need now to make an app or a …you know this website that serves this purpose within these contexts and when we originally started…when I started talking to you about being on the podcast, you talked about the fundamentals of design and you said that the good find…good design fundamentals are always good design fundamentals and so I wanted to follow up with that is: yes, the fundamentals haven’t changed but I think they’ expanded quite a bit. And so I think that might be a skill as being able work with other people’s work, so that was a really long ramble but hopefully you….what are the new design fundamentals….what’s been added to design fundamentals?
Dave
So I think we now all think of design as problem-solving, right? So, that is…I think it has become sort of a new fundamental is the ability to add problem-solving to your tool-kit, so, asking the whys of design, asking, you know, what does the end user, what does the customer, what does the human who’s going to interact with or see this design think, feel; those types of things. We have tools like design thinking now, which try to distill out the brains of designers and process but I think the fundamentals really start in that empathizing sort of area, being able to really get inside a problem or get inside a person to understand what’s going on there. I think the fundamentals of typography, of grades, of layouts, of imagery, of readability, of accessibility are all still stand and I think that those are even more important today than we give them credit for.
If you look at any of the modern websites or modern web experiences that people use on a daily basis, these aren’t whizz-bang experiences, right? They’re delightful experiences; they’re easy to read experiences; they’re optimized for the user experiences. They are about spacing and hierarchy; they’re about repeatable patterns, so I think that those things, those are the fundamentals you need to really see and I think the ability to establish a pattern and continue it, the ability to know when you have to introduce a new pattern or whether or not you have a tool to already solve the next need is a tremendous skill.
I can give you an example: when I look at portfolios and interviews, a lot of the times, someone’ll come up with a completely new tab bar for an iOS app that they did on spec, type of thing, and it’ll be a little bit bigger than the Apple one or a little bit bigger than the Android one, and the icons will be a little chunkier or a little thinner or a little more colorful than what the standard ones are, and I’ll ask why, like, why did you think that this was an important thing to spend some time on in the design solution, just to kinda see, was there a reason they added this or is this just sort of what they thought would be good, and I find that question pretty telling because a modern portfolio, you would just kinda say, oh, there’s probably a lot of thinking that went into the standard already; I’m going to embrace this standard and I might update the icon just a little bit but I’m probably going to use the same weights, I’m probably going to use the same selected states that I see across hundreds of thousands of applications or some of the premiere applications experiences, rather than create all-new ones.
I think that’s kind of a sign of solving a problem that isn’t there. And kinda using design as a hammer, being like, I’m going to design every bit of this. So I think being able to identify when a pattern is useful and why it is useful and not reinventing it but when you’re out of patterns or something doesn’t fit the mold, then explaining why you made that new design decision is super-important, so I think being able to recognize best practices, recognize when a pattern currently works and then showing me when you’ve solved a really novel problem.
Gary
Yeah, and I think that’s just basically…you can sum that up as understanding the medium, because from what I understand of iOS and Android development, it’s not exactly the easiest thing to change the dial that you use to select date ranges.
Dave
Sure, yeah, that’s a good example.
Gary
And so, instead of…and so that just…when they re-design it, that just shows that they don’t understand the monumental effort that it’s going to take to re-design something that maybe is it necessarily…may not be the most beautiful experience, but it’s clearly not broken!
Dave
Yeah, or was that new date-picker fundamental to the new experience you were creating? Or was it just like, I thought I could do this better and I didn’t know there was a default, so I think what you just said there, understanding your medium, is super-important.
Gary
Yeah, and so the other…the follow-up to that is, I don’t know: I don’t know why this never popped…oh, I wanted to ask about, so other contemporary design fundamentals before I ask this other follow-up question. I’ve kinda been beating the drum that micro-interactions, animations, for example simply making a button shake when you don’t properly fill out a form: to me that’s a new fundamental, because that’s when we teach typography, we teach layout, we teach color, but where do we…how are we teaching these micro-interactions? How movement, how animation can influence a user and so that’s what I meant by the fundamentals of graphic design have been expanded: they’re growing.
Dave
Yeah, I would agree. I think the principles of interaction design and where you’re trying to lead the user, those micro-interactions are certainly a tool for way-finding or indicating what’s happening. I think that that is super-important. I also think as things kind of become more…more complex and more…different…and the audience is expanding so much now, scale in digital design is so wide, I think accessibility and inclusion in design is a new fundamental that everyone has to have, so, understanding that you’re not designing for yourself and you might not even be designing for people like you, and adopting kind of inclusive design principles is super-important. And I think the last part there, and it kinda goes with that, is building a testing tool-kit: how to validate your design decisions as well. So it’s not enough just to design something now. It’s like, why are you designing it and how are you going to validate that that’s a good decision? So, being able to work with data or ask questions about your design or find ways to test your design I think is also super-important.
Gary
Are there some ways that students could test their projects at a…at a simple level that shows that they’re…they can’t show proficiency in that, but they can at least show awareness of that idea of testing their design decisions.
Dave
Absolutely. I think that that is…I think about going back to Grade School where your teacher was like, show me the first draft and then show me all the edits that you had on the draft and then give me the second draft type of thing. Kind of thinking about it like that, think of the users that you’re going to have, whether they’re other students or other people or someone you recruit off craigslist or you go on usertesting.com and get the cheapest package, type of thing. I think just getting it in front of someone, setting a goal; if this is a usability test or an effectiveness or efficacy test; setting a goal and kind of getting their feedback and using that to inform your next design decision, right? So, being able to form a hypothesis about why you made a decision or some element of your design and then testing it and seeing, was I on mark or was I not? We have to make a lot of judgment calls on what to do but ultimately, it’s up to the person consuming your design to tell you whether or not you’ve been effective.
Gary
Yeah, and I just wanted to follow up on one of them. You mentioned the scale of design is so radically different than…earlier and I think that’s…and so accessibility has become so important because of that scale. And I think for my students, the example that I give to them is always just like they’re online banking, because Wells Fargo, Citibank, whoever it is, is an international company. They can’t afford to exclude anyone; not out of pure empathy, not out of just it’s the right thing to do, but just out of a bottom-line business sense, they can’t exclude…anybody because of the massive scale of their product and I think that’s…so anyway, that’s how I explain it to my students but it’s something that’s hard; they don’t grasp that when we assign…they don’t grasp the scale of the things that they’re working on now and I think that’s something we should be…I need to be doing better at anyway.
Dave
Yeah, I think, and with scale comes impact as well, right? Like when you think about…we do a lot of work in fin-tech ourselves here for a couple of banks and those types of things and when you get, you know, when you get something wrong for a set of users or a set of people, there’s cascading impact that might happen, right? If you don’t explain what it means to pay off your minimum payments on your credit cards or where the interest rate is or those types of things; that affects people’s lives in a pretty significant way. It’s not just like, oh, they weren’t able to click this button it’s like, no, you’ve changed their life and there’s a certain responsibility and a lot of people don’t realize that you might have unintended consequences of some of your design decisions and it’s important to always be measuring and going back and making sure that things are OK.
I know now, one of the big things people talk about is that design isn’t done, ever. There’s no such thing as a finished design any more; you need to continue to iterate, you need to continue to learn and we have so many tools to continue to learn through that process, so we want to be able to articulate that. This is based on information and this is based on our sort of approach, but this design is going to change. I mean, Facebook used to get tons of hate every time they made any small change to their website until they started changing it every day and it’s different for you than it is for me and it’s different tomorrow than it is today. We are getting used to, and we are expecting constant change in our platforms now.
Gary
That’s a good one. So, I wanted to follow up on some of the stuff that we were talking about with the portfolios and just to give you a little bit of back-story. So, when I think as a design educator and again, I can’t speak for everyone, when I think of a portfolio, always think of it as project-based. Does it have this project? Does it have that project? And for whatever reason, literally to sitting here talking to you, I just like…no, the portfolio needs to, instead of it being project-based, it needs to be skill-based. The projects need to demonstrate these skills. And how…and whether, regardless of the project, as long as it demonstrates the skills, that’s what’s important. So, in that context, what skills, what skills should you be seeing on that portfolio, that online portfolio that gets them that first interview?
Dave
So, I think that’s right, I think I agree. I also think that projects are important because projects add the context. Like this project happens to be a…editorial design project or this project happens to be a product design type of project or a mobile design type of project, so I think that those things are interesting. When we look for skills I kinda think it’s skills on the spectrum and they are going to be guided by a person’s experience, so I think when I’m looking at skills, one I’m looking at the raw ability and the raw output of their design. So, does their design look contemporary? Have they thought about spacing and color, contrast? Have they thought about layout? All of those types of things they come straight out of the fundamentals.
There’s other skills that we start to look at later on, particularly in product design, so, is this an interactive project? What are the flows looking like? What are decisions made? What is the hierarchy and cadence of these things? Did they spend some time thinking about Information Architecture? Did they spend some time thinking about navigation structure? Did they take some time to think about the priority of different information and features, and how did they arrive at those decisions? I think those are really important skills to look for. The other thing we think about in skills is whether or not they’re keeping up with digital design in our industry in particular. So, can you show me an example of responsive design? Can you show me an example of responsive type or a fluid layout versus a fixed layout for a website? Gimme something like: hey, this is going to be a real thing when you work on a project here.
Have you had any experience working through those types of things? Very few people at the junior level will come in with a lot of accessibility experience, for example but at least give some buzzwords, give me some key-words on what you think about it, so that we can see if you will be able to develop those skills or you’re entrusted in those types of challenges. So, I think there’s a couple of skills we’re looking at right off the bat. And then resourcefulness, right? So, what tools did you use? How did you learn those tools? Did you learn them by yourself? Did you go out and try some of these design challenges to figure out a new tool, so figure out how to make an interaction design pattern inside of something like Principle or Sketch or InVision? What tools did you try to learn along the way? Because one of the most helpful skills and I think kind of the recurring theme of the article that I wrote was kind of about the ability to learn and I think that is the number one skill, period. If you have any one of these fundamental skills but a really, really strong ability to learn and an ability to show me that you can learn and show the people around you that you can learn, that’s going to go so far.
Gary
Yeah. I mean, I’ve said it and I kinda stole this from, I think, Kate Bingaman-Burt: she’s a design educator, but we’re basically the best we could do is just be cheerleaders and get the students about design and excited about learning and they’ll take care of the rest on their own if they have that excitement.
Dave
Absolutely, and I tell people all the time: design is an excuse to be relentlessly curious. It’s just like this excuse to dive deep into the minutiae or the macro-level or anything of a problem. You can justify it like sitting outside and people-watching all day; if it’s feeding the brain to solve a problem, so design just allows you to develop this tool-kit to just observe and empathize and challenge yourself and to go out and learn and see things and everything can be just fuel for the fire.
Gary
Yeah, I actually make my students do that. I make them go ride the bus or…especially for students coming from the suburbs, like: OK, go ride the bus in the city, watch how everybody interacts with everything. Look for problems!
Dave
Totally! I love getting off the plane in a city and seeing if I can navigate to the public transit to get into the city square. I think that’s such a really interesting design problem that affects so many people and has to work for so many different types of people, whether they speak the language or not, whether they have low vision or not; whether or not they intended to take the bus or not, you know, there’s so many really, really interesting small decisions that get made. And start reverse-engineering some of those decisions in your head. Whether you’re right or wrong you’re kinda exercising that muscle.
Gary
Yeah, like just teach in the minute to look for, OK, are you feeling uncomfortable? If you’re feeling uncomfortable, that means there’s a design element missing that could’ve eased that comfort for you.
Dave
Totally. And did the carpet on the floor change? What’s going on around you?
Gary
So, the reason that I initially reached out to you was your article and for the listeners of the podcast: read the article! There’s a lot of good stuff in there and so most of these questions that I’m going to be following up with are just, they came from that article and that I was more curious about digging into, like you said, the minutiae of that. So, my first question is, and you alluded to it, but can you kinda go into a little bit more detail for the listeners is, can you describe Playground Incorporated and some of the work you take on?
Dave
Sure. Yes, so Playground is a digital design agency here in Canada: we call ourselves a human design agency because most of our work, we don’t necessarily design humans but we design things for humans and it’s kinda something we arrived at over time, and the type of work we take on is primarily in what we call flagship or customer-facing experiences for large companies across North America, so we’ve had the opportunity to work with so many really cool organizations over the years, so we’ve done like the dot-com websites of big banks here in Canada, big TV stations of things like the Grammys, of things like Business Insider, so we’ve worked on businessinsider.com which is a top two hundred website on the web by traffic; they produce do much tremendous content. We’ve helped build businesses and invest in little side projects like Canopy, which is like a…ecommerce experience; we’ve built mobile banking apps; we got to work with a great company up here in Canada: Rogers, they’re kinda like your…they’re kind of like Comcast where they own a bunch of TV channels and those types of things.
Gary
Oh yeah, Rogers Center: I’m a baseball fan!
Dave
There you go. So we design SportsNet and the SportsNet apps, in particular the SportsNet apps and kind of that main touch-point, like the ESPN app or the Sports Illustrated app where it’s a kind of big, customer-facing experience, so we’ve gone to work on really large-scale design challenges on those dot-coms and apps and for the last nine years we’ve kind of been experimenting and perfecting our process and kind of using this company as a vehicle to kind of indulge our own interests and get to work on really cool things.
Gary
Cool. So…and this is another thing that you, I want to tell the listeners about. In the email when we were setting this all up, you specifically asked me, how should you, in what context should you be answering these questions and you said, should you be coming from the field of UX? Is it web design? Is it digital product design or is it graphic design in general? So, those are all different areas, specializations within design. So, what does a team who’s working on a project for Playground; what does that team look like?
Dave
Yeah, that’s…you know, there’s no one-size-fits-all answer but I can give you kind of an impression of what sort of a team looks like when we try to take on a challenge. So, traditionally a team will have a…what we call a Product Owner which is kinda like a super project manager. It’s someone who can talk both languages of both design and technology to kind of bring them together as one. Someone that empathize and workshop and run through the product needs and be able to really read between the lines of user testing, those types of things, so they kinda have a grasp of a couple of disciplines and being able to kind of navigate a project from beginning to end.
And then we’ll have a couple of Designers in the best case on a project, where we’ll have a team of multiple designers. Generally we’ll have a discipline lead like a Design Lead who might be, we call them…we have Associate Designers which are kinda like the junior or first person in the door and then we have all the way up to kind of Creative Leads or Creative Directors and Product Designers and Product Leads and so we’ll have two or three Designers who get to work on a project.
And they kind of work with the product owner throughout the course of a project. And then there might also be technologists on the project: people like Developers, Engineers, Technical Strategy team members who will work together with the team as well, so a project can be as few as two or three people or as big as, you know, eight, ten, twelve people: it really depends.
Gary
Yeah, I mean, I get it depends on the scope of the project. You need the skills that are needed for the actual project, but that answered the question. And so the reason I ask that is again, just in the classroom, I’ve got sixteen or so Graphic Designers. So, even if I have them work in teams, they’re working in teams that are in groups that are with the same skill-set. So, there’s real…they’re just like no diversity of thought, there’s no actual process there because they’re not working alongside a Developer. I guess that as the educator, I guess I’m kinda playing that super, you know, the Design Lead or the Project Manager if you will, so I think that’s something that’s like, really lacking, is that…design, again, it’s gone from…it needed a symphony of people produce a print piece before the computer, and then it kinda all funneled in when you have the early…like in the early two thousands, late nineties, when designer can do a whole bunch, to now where it’s spreading back out again.
And I’m kinda struggling with how do I teach students that they’re going to be…to work like that? It’s a different working process. But…so, do you have any kind of advice just, how to…make strategies for…how should students be working? How do they work alongside the Developers? How does that relationship happen?
Dave
Yeah, I think everyone’s trying to solve that problem.
Gary
OK!
Dave
I don’t think I have a definitive answer but I think there’s some really, really interesting trends that I’ve noticed throughout the years and you think about kind of digital transformation and those types of things that happen inside of an organization and organizations becoming design-centric or user-centric or customer-centric in that process. I think that there’s a really, really interesting set of skills that go into building out really effective teams but there might not be a really great cadence for making that all work together so we have things like agile work extremely well in development methodology sort of standpoint but usually what they do is they require Designers to define a lot of stuff for them up front and then they go and they develop a lot of stuff and then you iterate together, later on, so I still thing there really isn’t a really great, agile design process to be able to bring in all these people working together in a way that ships super-fast, where you get a lot of those benefits from, from agile, but you know, people are working on it.
I think with us, the way we sort of think about working together on a project is, if you really go in and you kind of try to build a shared platform of understanding and in particular when a lot of people have the same skill-set or are in the same skill-zone, I think you can start looking at different interests or different areas of focus that a person might have. If someone is really into the content piece of things or really, really into the layout and content side, let them kinda run with it and let them work with someone who’s really, really into Information Architecture or really into the interaction designs and kind of let them specialize or self-select for the specialty there, so that they can learn and bounce things off each other. Kinda let someone take the domain ownership over a particular piece and allow other people to work together and get input but ultimately, set up some governance so that someone is the decider there, based on that area of interest.
I think once you get into the real world that ends up happening all the time is someone is the Art Director; someone is the Creative Director, someone is the product owner and they will ultimately make a decision. Now, they might not have the same experiences to make sure that all those decisions are great, but it’s a great kind of like mini case-study and being like, oh, how do I navigate the governance of working on a team or when people have different responsibilities to a project, so making sure that you kind of do that might be a really interesting way to kind of get the most out of those teams and show them kinda like what it’s like to work on a bigger team that’s going to have varying skill-sets or varying experts working on different parts of the problem.
Gary
OK. So, in the article, you also stated, we never hired anyone who specializes in Information Architecture or Wireframe. We also never hired somebody exclusively for UI Design, Illustration or Motion Graphics. So, for listeners, you can go read the rest of that in the article, but what I’m curious about is, if you’re going to hire a Graphic Designer and throughout the article you definitely have said, you’ve mentioned balance of skills, that you’re looking for. What are those balance of skills? What do you like to see, for a Graphic Designer, I guess: let’s start there.
Dave
Yeah, I think when we think about the balance, we look at someone who isn’t necessarily, right now, saying…this is specifically what I do and I never go from there, although they might come and say that exact thing. I think the balance is about how they’ve learned, what different types of things are in their portfolio; if they produced a…editorial-style piece, there are things about hierarchy and design language and layouts and grids that they’ve thought about in that sort of piece, sort of project. We’d love to see kind of like hey, I’ve done a little bit of editorial, or I’ve done a little bit of app design or I’ve done a little bit of interaction design; I think that we, like I said earlier kind of in the article it’s like, I can take a look at your portfolio and it’s kinda on met to figure out if I think that you’re able to keep up with the industry.
It’s kind of on me to say hey, there’s definitely some raw skills here: there’s some really, really great talent here. And then we get together and we talk about it and I just kind of figure out, how did you learn to do those things, right? So, give someone something like to kinda chew on. All the pieces in the portfolio are all the things the diversity should be like, kind of like a little tasting menu of different things to ask questions about, and…be a little bit thought-provoking, like, Oh that’s an interesting decision, or that’s a cool little thing, so what I think about diversity of skills it’s really like, hey, is the portfolio contemporary?
If they don’t a little bit of thinking; even if they don’t show me the wireframes; it’s probably required some wireframing to get here. If they don’t show me that they did the…that…no one’s going to develop a type-face but if they show me, hey I made…there’s a couple of selections here, a couple unique selections here about the way I laid out this type; then we can kind of say, OK cool, what’s…their work looks good; let’s bring them in and let’s talk about it.
Gary
Yeah, OK. And the reason I ask that is about the balance of skills is two-fold. So, what made me really start this podcast in the very beginning was the simply fact that one day, I looked up and I realized that I’m teaching in a graphic design program, I’m teaching Graphic Designers how to be Front End Developers and it’s like, OK, I need to step back here; they don’t need to be front-end developers; they just need to understand the media. And so now that I feel like I kinda got a handle on that balance…UX. So, you know, does UX, User Experience, kind of need to be its own program or…because Graphic Designers end up becoming UX Designers, so are they getting enough in their Graphic Design training that they can be serviceable UX Designers and so I’m kinda curious about your thoughts on that whole balance in that between UX and Graphic Design.
Dave
So I think like…could it be its own course? It absolutely could be. I kind of…I have a controversial opinion in saying like, UX has become almost ultra-specialized where you’re kind of like, OK, I did the wireframes and I did the IA; that’s like UX. And I think there’s…and that’s kind of like where some people think UX stops and I think UX is actually a really, really broad category of skills, so maybe it is its own program, but it could also be part of the Graphic Design; it could also be part of Customer Experience Design or Design Thinking or Lean or any of these methodologies. Because what UX to me and UX to us here is, is really about thinking holistically about a user problem or a customer problem.
And then using the tools at hand to be able to solve that problem, so you would use wireframe to articulate an idea, to articulate a design hypothesis or a flow or something that’s going to help a user accomplish a goal. But UX also requires some testing, right? Even though you have people like UX researchers that come in and they do specific types of testing in that process. Now, is that part of the skills of a UX Designer? I’d like it to be: I’d like them to have some experience in doing a little bit of their own research but they don’t have to be a researcher, necessarily. So I think that there’s a wide, wide variety of skills inside of UX.
And I think if you look at stuff like on the design-thinking sort of spectrum where you think about empathizing and defining and ideating and those types of things, I think those are all super-useful skills for a UX designer but those don’t even talk about wireframes, so they don’t talk about those little individual micro-skills that you would necessarily develop, so I think that UX is kinda like this really vague term, I really just like the term Designer. We don’t really like the terms like UX or UI; so people like IXD, like Interaction Designers, those types of things. I love Product Designers; I love Web Designers, I love Digital Designers. I love Production Designers. I think that all makes a lot of sense. I think the UX Design field on its own is certainly a huge practice but I think it’s like…the designer is using UX principles to make better decisions.
Gary
OK, yeah, I’m with you on the whole title because to me, I just generally use Design. I’m a Designer. I don’t care if I’m making letterpress; I don’t care if I’m ideating, like you said, going through a designing-thinking process to find a problem within an organization; It’s all design to me. So anyway, just kinda looking at where we’re at with time, I don’t want to monopolize your time too much longer. There are just a couple of follow-up questions and they’re pretty broad, and so one from me personally: in all these interviews that you’ve done, is there, based on that, are there any projects that you think design educators should be assigning to make it easier for you to hire a Designer?
Dave
Oh, that’s a really good question. Are there types of projects that I think would be interesting for me to hire a Designer? I…so this is going to sound kind of counter-intuitive; it may be a little un-creative, but I’d love for maybe there be a design project where you start with the problem, like there’s some sort of problem, and you actually don’t get them to design anything new; you let them download maybe the Google Material Design tool-kit or the Apple iOS tool-kit and say, use these tools to come up with solutions to this problem, or this new app idea, or whatever the case is.
And like, see how they kind of interpret the human interface guideline or the material style guide and follow its rules and how closely they can follow the rules of those guidelines because those guidelines are heavily researched and I think, now you’re kind of like taking away the subjectivity of the process, right? Like, oh, I’m not really that great a Production Designer; I’m not really that great at colors or gradients; you’re taking away a lot of that stuff and you’re seeing if they can think through the problem-solving process and you’re seeing if they can embrace someone else’s work and embrace a set of tools to solve a problem.
Gary
Yeah, I also think…correct me if I’m wrong, but just handing them a design system: here’s a design system from X Corporation that has their design system online. Create this new thing for them, but you stick within its existing design system.
Dave
Yeah, I think that’s terrific; I think that would be a really cool thing to do because so much of our work is like that, whether you’re coming up with a design system or not. I think it’s helping you work backwards through why this element is in the design system and how flexible it can be.
Gary
And so I don’t know if this is a weird question or not and I don’t know if you even can see this or not, but do you see a difference in portfolios from Designers in the United States versus Designers in Canada and this is kind of like a reflection of, is design education in the United States doing something different or the same as design education in Canada?
Dave
I would say they’re actually fairly similar. I see a lot of stuff here. I think here’s a really interesting thing: I think European Designers are somewhat different, or at least the education programs are somewhat different there. When I think about a lot of the Eastern European résumés that I see, we see a lot of Production Designers.
Gary
Oh yeah, yeah!
Dave
You know what I mean? So we see a lot of people with just tremendous skills in making graphics, you know, like they can really make some really beautiful and cool looking things. But not as many people who have gone through that UX, IXD, you know, Interactive making apps sort of design process. So we see a lot of that. And I think the major difference that I’ve seen between Canadian and US Designers is maybe a little bit of confidence.
I think in the US there’s a lot more scale opportunities; if you’ve worked for someone like Facebook or Uber or one of the big studios in the States, generally they understand a little bit more about working with data and those types of things but that’s really changing here in Canada too, so we do have all the big companies now have offices here; we have companies like Shopify; all of our big banks are building tremendously large digital studios, digital factories and design practices, so I think that’s really interesting as well.
And another thing I notice is that Designers are just becoming more sophisticated so before it was enough to kind of just have a great body of work. Now it has to…have you practiced design thinking? Do you know how to form an insight? What are some…what are some things that you’ve…what are some new tools that you’ve learned? How did you embrace those tools? What are you doing? So I think there’s kind of like a ramping up of the sophistication.
Gary
So, this is a new question I’ve been asking recently of every guest and it’s, what’s one piece of advice you would like to give design educators to better prepare students for their life post-graduation?
Dave
I think, I’m sure you’re already doing this, but the learning never stops; that’s super-important. When I think back to my education, and I studied entrepreneurship and innovation in school and so I didn’t necessarily even come from a design background per se, but I think the idea that you have to kind of find your passion; figure out what you love about the craft, kind of do that, as sort of Montessori as that sounds, kind of find the thing and let it kill you type of thing, but really…really try to develop a point of view; really try to find interesting people around you, interesting people online, people to learn from and to read from.
Try to understand who’s doing this at the largest scale and understand that design is everywhere right now. There’s so many people talking about it, there’s so many people doing it. The information is so free-flowing so develop that framework for loving and learning and developing your craft and thinking about it and finding heroes and sticking to that and just being able to do that I think will so, so far and really says a lot about a person, when they can just talk effusively about like, look how cool this thing is and I can’t believe they’ve got it to this point, and do you remember where it came from? Kind of becoming like a mini design archaeologist in a way is such a cool thing and will really help you when you’re thinking about how to make decisions and how to present your decisions and how to present your designs and think through problems.
Gary
You know, that’s one thing I’m always baffled that students don’t have is their design heroes. Because there’s not a single musician student that doesn’t have, this is a musician that they emulate, they really know the history of their craft, but that just seems to be lacking, that enthusiasm or that interest. And I don’t know where that comes from. OK so then, just one last question before I let you go. Is there anything that you’re working on, whether it’s Playground, whether it’s you personally that you want to promote or you want to talk about?
Dave
So, things that we’re working on? So right now Playground’s working on their new website so everyone here’s kinda like, we got the shoemaker’s kid problem where, you know, we can’t work on our own stuff and it’s so hard to talk about ourselves. It’s been a real initiative to go out and do some writing, so this has been extremely validating for me that you’ve read my piece and you had questions for me, so thank you so much for making me think I’m not crazy. And the …we’re working on our website and one of the big things that I’m working on and I hope it sees the light of day soon when our website launches is I’m developing what we call the Playground Design Tool-Kit which is a giant document of basically anything we’ve ever done in any of our design projects;
so it’s kind of…I think there’s now up to like eighty-four little tools that you can kind of go into and kind of do everything from starting a project plan to building a sprint plan; those things are actually the same thing but going through the design exploration process and the design thinking process and insights gathering and user testing and how to do…when you should do usability testing versus just gathering some feedback, so all of the little tools we use, just documented online somewhere because I think one of the things that happens a lot in design is you’ll read an article and there’ll be like, here’s the new IBM design thinking method and it’s like…it seems like it’s, OK, here’s fourteen things and you put them all together and…yep, at the end comes a project. Or, do Lean and Lean is this, this, this and then you’re done.
We’re like, there’s so many little things you do, so we’re trying to capture all of the little things that happen in a project; like how do you actually…how do you set up a milestone? How do you make a decision? How do you set up your project governance? Those types of things so it’s very…we’re trying to get more specific whereas everyone kind of wants to be as broad as possible to cover as much ground as possible. We’re trying to get very, very specific to be like, hey, there’s so many things you could do in a design project and here are just a document of the things that we’ve done. You might not use them all; you might only use five or six, but there’s a depth and a breadth to this industry and the things you make.
Gary
That’s…I’m so glad you said that because I’m not going to…I’ve not used every single tool-kit but I’ve downloaded enough of them as an educator and I’m looking at them and I’m like…you’re missing the fundamental starting point. Like there’s always some crucial information that they’ve kind of forget, that makes the tool-kit not applicable. You need…you just need, when you throw those things out there, it’s great but you need more documentation!
Dave
Yeah, I mean, how many of the Lean methodology ??? have design critique as part of the process? And you’re like, well, you are designing a thing and someone’s got to look at it, so where’s the critique part or where’s the part where you do all your estimations, or where’s the part where you throw something out and start again? We’re kind of…I was looking around and I was just looking at this and I’m like, hey, we’ve probably learned a thing or two; let’s start writing stuff down and once we started writing it just, you know, kept flowing out of us and we just had so many items that kind of came out of there and we were like, this is the reality of doing project-based work or designing products; it’s just a lot of steps and we wanted to create a document that was more about the minutiae and less about the macro themes.
Gary
That’s fantastic; I can’t wait to actually see that.
So, that’s all we have time for today on episode sixty-three of Design Edu Today. I want to thank today’s guest, Dave Senior for being so generous with his time. I want to thank the audience for listening and I want to thank the Design Edu Today hosting sponsor DigitalOcean and CDN sponsor Fastly for making the hosting and distribution of these podcasts possible. Finally, I want to thank the AIGA and the AIGA Design Educators’ Community for their generous support of my research that lead to this podcast series.
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