This course will look at the role of design in the world around us. Our emphasis will be on features, feel and function rather than on the aesthetics of design. We will consider why some designs work well and others work poorly. We will think about how and why things are designed in particular ways. We will look at the economic and environmental implications of design choices.
The broader goal of this class is to develop and refine skills necessary to succeed in college and in your career. We will work on discussion skills, presentation skills, analytic skills, and writing skills
1. Research & Discovery
Jumping into any design project before examining the problem or task at hand might spin the wheels, but won’t get you very far. Any project, no matter how big or small, can benefit from research and planning before the work begins.
2. Competitive Analysis
Another helpful task in the process involves looking at pre-existing ideas and executions created by peers, mentors, heros, and/or competitors. Competitive analysis identifies the strengths and weaknesses of those existing designs.
3. Exploration
When tackling a design project with limitless creative boundaries, I like to begin by creating lists of relevant words, topics, and phrases. By creating these lists, I try to gain a broadened perspective of the problem I’m attempting to solve, and often uncover additional ideas and concepts which weren’t so obvious at the outset.
4. Thumbnail Sketching
Once I exhausted the idea branching, I started drawing thumbnail sketches on a pad of paper. Thumbnails are small sketches which can literally be as small as your thumbnail, or as big as a couple inches in width and/or height.
5. Typography
To me, typography is a crucial element in setting the formalness or informality of a design. Evocations of different typefaces are subliminal to most people, but a designer will go to great lengths to ensure the selection and construction of type complements the mood of the piece.
6. Imagery
Imagery is not always necessary in design. In fact, some of the most beautiful designs use type alone. However, selectively chosen photography or illustration can create enormous visual impact for a design, adding dimension, implication, and a deeper level of understanding far beyond a well-written headline or paragraph of text.
7. Execution & Implementation
I started writing the CSS for the design at a high-level, focusing on the layout structure, major backgrounds, and large regions of the page. Groups of elements were positioned in correct locations.
8. And More
The ever-changing design process does not end here. This summary is not an exhaustive one. Additional review and approval cycles, more design iterations, and frequent user testing all may be inserted anywhere into this process.
1. Set the theme.
2. Demonstrate enthusiasm.
3. Provide an outline.
4. Make numbers meaningful.
5. Try for an unforgettable moment.
6. Create visual slides.
7. Give 'em a show.
8. Don't sweat the small stuff.
9. Sell the benefit.
10. Rehearse, rehearse, rehearse.
Everything that goes into your web site must have a purpose.
Every single element and decision must help users achieve their goals and support the site's goals.
They move quickly because they don't like looking at the screen
They're impatient - they tend to click the first promising link, and often don't wait for pages to finish loading
They don't like to read, scanning text quickly for clues
They're looking for things to help them do what they want to do
1. Know what you're doing
2. Know what the site needs to do
3. Know what the site's visitors want
4. Get a good picture of the personality and style of the web site
5. Sketch out highly successful scenarios
6. Organise views into a site map
7. Sketch the essential features & look
8. Map your visitors' attention
9. Arrange the visual elements to work together
"Once you start to examine the question, it's surprising how much different fields' ideas of beauty have in common. The same principles of good design crop up again and again.
Good design is simple. When you're forced to be simple, you're forced to face the real problem. When you can't deliver ornament, you have to deliver substance.
Good design is timeless. Aiming at timelessness is a way to make yourself find the best answer. Aiming at timelessness is also a way to evade the grip of fashion.
Good design solves the right problem.
Good design is suggestive.
Good design is often slightly funny. Good design may not have to be funny, but it's hard to imagine something that could be called humorless also being good design.
Good design is hard. If you look at the people who've done great work, one thing they all seem to have in common is that they worked very hard. If you're not working hard, you're probably wasting your time.
Good design looks easy. Like great athletes, great designers make it look easy. Mostly this is an illusion. The easy, conversational tone of good writing comes only on the eighth rewrite.
Good design uses symmetry.
Good design resembles nature. It's not so much that resembling nature is intrinsically good as that nature has had a long time to work on the problem.
Good design is redesign. It's rare to get things right the first time. Mistakes are natural. Instead of treating them as disasters, make them easy to acknowledge and easy to fix.
Good design can copy. [The greatest masters] just want to get the right answer, and if part of the right answer has already been discovered by someone else, that's no reason not to use it. They're confident enough to take from anyone without feeling that their own vision will be lost in the process.
Good design is often strange.
Good design happens in chunks. Nothing is more powerful than a community of talented people working on related problems.
Good design is often daring.
"Great work usually seems to happen because someone sees something and thinks, I could do better than that."
There is no single "father of the iPod." Development was a multitrack process, with Fadell, now on staff, in charge of the actual workings of the device, Robbin heading the software and interface team, Jonathan Ive doing the industrial design, Rubenstein overseeing the project, and Jobs himself rubbernecking as only he could. ... He would pick up the device and say what he liked and didn't like, and he would fire questions at everyone, pushing hard: "What are you going to do about it?" ...
Sometimes his pronouncements would astound his employees. When one of the designers said that obviously the device should have a power button to turn the unit on and off, he simply said no. And that was it.
Don’t put them on the screen. Put them in your hand. Now, you can use the cue cards you made to make sure you’re saying what you came to say.
Create slides that demonstrate, with emotional proof, that what you’re saying is true not just accurate.
Talking about pollution in Houston? Instead of giving me four bullet points of EPA data, why not read me the stats but show me a photo of a bunch of dead birds, some smog and even a diseased lung? This is cheating! It’s unfair! It works.
Put in as many footnotes or details as you like. Then, when you start your presentation, tell the audience that you’re going to give them all the details of your presentation after it’s over, and they don’t have to write down everything you say. Remember, the presentation is to make an emotional sale. The document is the proof that helps the intellectuals in your audience accept the idea that you’ve sold them on emotionally.
IMPORTANT: Don’t hand out the written stuff at the beginning! If you do, people will read the memo while you’re talking and ignore you. Instead, your goal is to get them to sit back, trust you and take in the emotional and intellectual points of your presentation.
If your presentation is for a project approval, hand people a project approval form and get them to approve it, so there’s no ambiguity at all about what you’ve all agreed to.
The reason you give a presentation is to make a sale. So make it. Don’t leave without a “yes,” or at the very least, a commitment to a date or to future deliverables.
a. appearance of store entrance (from outside)
b. sounds (inside the store)
c. how the merchandise is displayed
d. floors
e. signs
f. cashier area
1. To what extent is packaging important in marketing a product? Give an example of how a package influenced your decision to buy (or not buy) something.
2. What other products have iconic packaging?
3. What usability issues exist for packaging? Give examples of particularly good or bad packaging from a usability perspective.
