Discover, Design,
Experience, & Learn
Resources to Grow Your Knowledge of Design
When we care about something we like to keep our knowledge up to date on the subject, but sometimes life makes it’s hard to know what to read/follow/listen to/watch and keep up on it.
Raise your hand if you know what I’m talking about.
I thought about it and realized I had a great resource right in front of me through Zoom. So I asked my interviewees what resources they would recommend to designers looking to grow their knowledge and be a great inspiration. Because the more you learn, the more you can empathize, create, understand, and solve.
Here is a compiled list of the recommendations by categories. “By the time you’re sitting in an interview, these people want to know what is Elizabeth like. How does her brain work, what is she thinking about, and how is she going to fit and be a culture add to the team that exists here. ”
Books
Making of a Manager by Julie Zoo (a book about running but demonstrates how teams are being built)
The Culture Code
The Five Dysfunctions of a Team
Rework by Jason Free
Books by Eric Spiekermann
Books by Michel Bay Rue
Books by Louise Feely
Books by Stephen Heller
Books by Gail Anderson and Stephen Heller
Creativity for Sale by Jason Surfapp
Steal Like an Artist by Austin Kleon
Podcasts
New Layer—About product design
Design Details—About design culture and process
Debbie Milman—Creative director in the ad world
Overtime—Dribble’s podcast, hosted by Meg Lewis
People/Organizations to Follow
AIGA Eye on Design
Find them on Facebook and InstagramPablo Stanley—This is a newsletter, the interviewee believes this to still be available via Twitter.
David Carson
Stefan Sagmeister
Jessica Walsh
Jessica Hische
Paula Scher
Aries Moross
Software to Use
Adobe Suite
Invision
Asana
What is a User Experience?
Have you ever said:
“Geez, this website is taking forever to load!”
“What does the (drive-thru) menu say? I can barely read it.”
These are examples of bad user experiences. As designers, it is important to ensure that the users of our designs have positive experiences when engaging with them. If they don’t, it can cheapen the appearance of a brand.
A user experience is a small portion of a customer’s journey with a product or company. These small experiences can make or break the view of the product/company.
So how can you, as a designer become more aware of integrating user experience (UX) into your work and how? What can you, as a business owner, do to ensure your customers are receiving the best experience?
First, let’s understand UX design.
You can’t not have an experience.
Experiences can come in a wide range of types and sizes. Some are small and you won’t really notice while others are larger.
Some of these may be a child getting a sticker at the doctors, customer service, packaging, the product itself, the product instructions, a website, an app, a company office, business cards, and a whole lot more.
We have experiences in everything we do, and they aren’t always positive. But when we do have a positive experience, we often subconsciously remember it and will be more inclined to return to where that experience took place.
Someone once said, “Good UX design often goes unnoticed, as it is working properly and causes no issues for the user. Bad design is always pointed out and noticed.”
Let’s get into some positive examples
A major aspect of UX design is the accessibility of the designs. Take Starbuck’s drive-thru sign language ability.
A few years ago, a YouTube video was going viral about how Starbucks was signing through the drive-thru dash with a deaf customer. This showed that Starbucks thought about all of their customer’s experiences with them.
Having the drive-thru being deaf accessible is an amazing experience that will stick with this woman, as she now knows, “I can come back here and not have to worry about if I can get a drink or not.”
How about,
The ease of navigating an app or website. We are all too familiar with websites where you are unsure of how to get anywhere or do anything. A good site has easy navigation. It’s a site that you will always want to come back to. A website should be intuitive, informative, and functional.
Duolingo is a great example of a website with a good user experience. The site uses a minimal design approach, has an easy sign-up, and allows the ability for personalization. There is no question of, “How do I do XYZ?”
What’s a negative experience?
We have all gone to a website that we couldn’t find anything in or hated visiting, maybe a website like, Craigslist.
Craigslist’s site is hard to read in both contrast and size, visually busy, and is not responsive.
Having a responsive site allows for easy navigation and reading on a phone or tablet. Since Craigslist doesn’t do this, it forces people to try to zoom in and find what they can’t see.
This video shows how Craiglist looks on different sized screens.
The blue type is uncomfortable to read, due to its poor contrast. In the video below I used a color-blind simulator, called Colorblindly, to have an idea of how people who are color-blind view a site.
If you look at the “event calendar” and the “new” in the side navigation you can watch how its contrast changes and how poor, it can become. This can cause users to avoid Craigslist since it’s too hard to use.
Marion, a marketing and design company, beautifully discusses six more bad UX aspects of a website or app (check it out).
How to ensure you think about UX in your designs?
Never assume.
When we assume, we avoid major points and design opportunities. When we assume, we ignore issues that may lie within our designs that could cause offense, struggle, or be inaccessible.
Insert it into your process and always ask yourself, and others:
Is this working?
Do the users understand this as I do? Is it intuitive?
Does this fit my target audience? Should I test this?
Testing is a key aspect of ensuring a positive user experience. By testing, you will be able to discover if your designs function properly. It also allows for discoveries along the way of development rather than at the end when it is out in the world. These discoveries can show you that the colors chosen aren’t conveying the proper tone or that the navigation on that app doesn’t open.
As a business owner,
Some ways you can ensure your customers are having their best experience possible could be as simple as a survey. Ask how their experience was for firsthand input.
Or hire a UX designer, to go through your company, website, pamphlet, etc. to help discover where any issues may lie and design solutions for those problems.
Go through the experience yourself, do you find any problems?
We live in a world of experiences;
it is important that our designs leave positive impressions and be remembered. Test your designs along the way, ask yourself questions about their functionality, and assume nothing.
It’s Kind of a Process
As designers we have a process for everything. A process to solve and understand our task, a process of iterations to push the designing of the task, finalizing, and production.
Even though there are tasks for many aspects within the design world I am going to focus specifically on the pre production and printing process. Which will talk about spelling and grammar, print marks, file names, colors, fonts, and production forms.
Spelling & Grammar
Your designs are done! Now double check them for grammar or spelling errors, you don’t want to be the person who writes, “buzy” instead of “busy” or “there” instead of “They’re.” Just do yourself the favor and double check it. Often what I do is I give it to a fellow classmate or friend who I know is good at English and ask them to check for anything I might have missed.
Print Marks
You are getting ready to export your design but don’t forget to click the add document bleeds. Didn’t use them when you made the document? Then add them! You can add in bleed marks if you forgot to do so when you first created the document by going to (in Indesign) File, document set up or option + command + P.
Having the crop marks and bleed on your file for printing is a necessary thing to make sure the prints are cut to size and for any colors that may come off the page are flush and not speckled with white from no bleed being present.
File Naming
Now even if we do file naming, let’s be honest we still now and again (with personal documents) often do “holiday-cards-christmas-FINAL-v02-seriously-FINAL.pdf” and if you still do that with school or job files here is what I do.
When I am naming a file, specifically for school, I always use the first 6 letters of my last name followed by my first initial. That allows for my teachers to know who’s document they are looking at. So my name and then the project name and the aspect of that project that is in the file example: “smithj-personal-brand-letterhead.pdf”
Colors
This is a big aspect of the production process to understand because CMYK colors print out differently than RGB colors do. Always check to make sure that your file is in CMYK since you want to be printing in CMYK and not in RGB. RGB is meant for screens not print and CMYK is meant for print not screens.
This is also applied to images. Make sure all images in a document are converted into CMYK before printing.
Fonts
Fonts are not there for everyone to use even if you send the document with them in there, that font is localized to your computer. Unless someone also has that typeface then they will be unable to print the font and a substitute will take its place. To avoid having filler fonts you want to make sure to package them (as well as images) in your document files.
Production Forms
Pre-Press Check List
The pre-press check lists ensures that all aspect of the design are included and made sure are accounted for before being sent off to production. To make sure that everything mentioned above is accounted for and so minimal or hopefully no mistakes are made during production.
Print Specification
This forms is to make it clear to your printers of what it is that you want for your prints, this includes size, single of double sided, paper type, paper weight, binding, number of copies, as well as extras like if you want foil stamping, embossing, debossing, UV treatment. Whatever it is that makes your design goes here.
Print Estimate
You send this off along with the print specifications because the printers can then send you it back so that you have an idea of how much it will cost to have what is wanted done.
Knowing now all that I have told you about the process for production are there ones you might install into your own process? Or has it maybe inspired you to create a process for yourself? Whatever it maybe the aspects I have mentioned above are important for the success of a project and are things to not to be taken lightly and should be handled with care to make sure your work is produced to the best of its abilities.