7

Balancing
form & function

Design is not just how it looks but also how it works. Graciously balancing those two mindsets is the holy grail of a designer’s craft.

What if we told you both sides of your brain are equally valuable as a designer?

Goal

Explore basic concepts of graphic design and how they translate to digital products.

Illustrations by Michela Picchi

 

Let’s start by busting the myth that design is only about making things pretty. Given the nature of the medium we’re playing with, in digital product design most of our effort goes into figuring out the logic behind an interface: how things work behind the scenes, how users navigate through the experience, how the design system we are creating scales across various use cases and scenarios. A large part of our day is spent using the rational side of our brains and thinking through how to make sophisticated interactions work. 

We also want our products to look beautiful and simple. We know aesthetics play an essential role in how people perceive an experience, and consequently, a brand. Clean visuals, well-defined typographic hierarchy, harmonic grids—those are some of the ingredients a designer can use to build a visually balanced product. In addition to that, with the right use of color, imagery, and motion, designers can create products that evoke different emotional responses from users. 

This balancing act between function (usability) and form (aesthetics) is one of the most challenging and rewarding parts of being a digital designer. You will hear about this a lot. In some companies, those two mindsets are separated, and we end up seeing two different professionals looking at either side of this issue; while the UX Designer (or Interaction Designer) is more focused on function, the Visual Designer (or UI Designer, or Brand Designer) is more focused on form. In other companies we see one professional being responsible for both. The reality is that form and function can’t be separated. While some people might be more focused on one side of the spectrum, as a designer you need to understand and continue to evolve in both.

“Information is only useful when it can be understood.”

Muriel Cooper

Graphic Design can be defined as the process of visual communication and problem-solving through the use of typography, photography, iconography, and illustration. It is everywhere around us. On the cover of the book you keep next to bed. On the label of the orange juice bottle you had for breakfast. On the movie posters you keep on your living room wall. On the illustrations on this website. Creating visually attractive things, eliciting emotions, and telling stories through design is a concept that’s been around since the early days of humankind. 

The qualities of what is considered visually compelling have changed pretty drastically throughout history. If you click around the apps you have installed on your phone, you’ll notice that when it comes to digital product design, designers have been following a pretty narrow spectrum of visual styles. Even within that narrow style, we see specific visual trends come and go, year after year.

“Styles come and go. Good design is a language, not a style.”

Massimo Vignelli

It will be really important for you, as a designer, to study art history, as well as graphic design history. More important than memorizing the names and dates of art movements is to understand what they represented in their day and age. More often than not, art and design artifacts (be it a painting, a poster, a sculpture, a building) are a message that the creator sends out about how they view life, society, or politics.  

You might have heard about Modernism, an artistic movement that developed in the beginning of the 20th century that opposed the excessive ornamentation of previous styles. Or the Bauhaus, a German art school that aimed to unify the principles of mass production with individual artistic vision, merging pleasant aesthetics with everyday function. A lot of the work and design principles defined during that period still influence the digital products we see today. Understanding the past is important to help us create what's next: what are the principles worth keeping, and the ones we need to move away from to get to a better place as a society?

Studying the more foundational principles of our discipline, as opposed to jumping too quickly into User Interface (UI) best practices and trends, will ensure you are building skills that can last more than just a few months. Our reading list below is only a starting point, but feel free to explore each of these introductory concepts further as you find the ones that excite you the most.

Reading list

1.
Universal Principles
of Design

Clear explanations of foundational design principles featured with visual examples applied in practice. By William Lidwell, Jill Butler, Kritina Holden.

2.
Refactoring UI

How to design beautiful interfaces using specific tactics explained from a developer's point-of-view. By Adam Wathan, Steve Schoger.

Borrow these books from local public libraries or buy from local bookstores.

Watchlist

What was the design principle that surprised you the most? How does that principle apply to some of the products you use every day?

What does graphic design, industrial design, and digital design have in common? How would you explain their differences to a friend?

How would you describe the importance of typography, color, and space for digital product design?

Reflection

See it in practice

The secret to honing our user interface skills is to learn from everywhere. The more techniques and repertoire we have, the easier it will be to convey our ideas and solutions on interfaces. See it in practice with case studies from other designers starting their careers, watch redesign walkthroughs, and read how companies like Slack approach their big interface projects getting their users involved.  

To learn visual design, you need to practice. Try to rebuild interfaces of apps you like on the design tool of your choice and use this opportunity to also learn how the tool works. There are many design templates and guides to copy, experiment, and build on top.

Illustration of a colorful banana
Abstract shapes
Book: universal principles of design
Book: refactoring UI

8

The job of
a designer

What does the day of a designer look like? What are we expected to do and deliver when we get to work?

Hint: mockups and prototypes are only one small part of our job.

Goal

Understand some of the designer’s responsibilities beyond designing.

Illustrations by Michela Picchi

 

As a designer, you’ll be assigned to projects. Depending on the company you work for, one of those projects might be to add a new feature to their existing mobile app, or to map their customer’s journey of shopping online so that you can improve it. In some cases, you might be working on a larger website overhaul, building an interactive screen experience for a fashion retailer, designing the experience of having a conversation with a chatbot, or creating a landing page for an up and coming startup.  

In certain companies, you might be working on a single product for a long time. Launching a product is just the beginning of the journey. Once the product is live, there’s still a lot of work to be done: optimizing flows for better conversion, iterating on the design to solve for pain points users are having, adding more features, accommodating for evolving use cases and business needs—the list is long. One skill that is very particular to digital product designers is perseverance—it takes time to make a product successful, and in some cases you might spend a whole year solving the same design challenge.

“It's through mistakes that you actually can grow. You have to get bad in order to get good. You have to try a lot of things and fail in order to make the next discovery.”

Paula Scher

You are not designing anything alone. You will be collaborating not only with other designers, but with a multidisciplinary team of product managers, developers, business specialists, marketers, and analytics experts. There are a lot of moving pieces needed to make a product successful, and design is only one part of it.  

Design is not the protagonist in the product development process. In fact, there aren’t any protagonists. It takes a village to make a product work seamlessly for the users and the business, and being open to collaboration, feedback, and many rounds of iteration is one of the best qualities a designer can have. When everyone is working toward the same goal—without ego—the process flows much more naturally and people feel a sense of ownership over the final product.

Creativity, optimism and great collaboration skills will become essential as you start to work side by side with other disciplines to build digital products and services. In this chapter, you’ll learn about the designer’s process and get a better sense of what’s expected from the role of a designer in the team.

Reading list

1.
The Shape
of Design

The mental state of a successful designer while they go through their creative process. By Frank Chimero.

Borrow this book from local public libraries or buy it from local bookstores.

1.
Design is in the details
(Paul Bennett)

2.
Happiness by design
(Stefan Sagmeister)

3.
Design and the elastic mind
(Paola Antonelli)

Watchlist

Reflection

Now that you’re further along in this guide, what do you expect your day to be like as a designer? How is it different from your initial perception? What excites you the most about it?

You might have heard "everyone is a designer". How do you see cross-functional colleagues being part of your design process?

What do you expect from your first job as a digital product designer? What do you want to learn and develop?

See it in practice

Companies like Figma, Webflow, Zendesk, Intercom, and many others have been doing a great job at writing about their team structure, process, and career paths. While these articles are mostly focused on the positive side of their teams, they are still a valuable resource to understand where you want to focus on as a designer and what your job might look like. 

After carefully looking at these examples, what has changed from your initial perception about the job of a designer? What did you miss from these articles? What do you expect your day-to-day as a designer to be?

Illustration of a person upside down
Illustration of a colorful banana
Book: the shape of design

9

The road
ahead

Becoming a designer is a long but exciting journey. Now that you have a better understanding of our discipline, it’s time to start planning the next steps towards shaping your design career.

Join

Oh, the things you’ll create.

Illustration of a unicorn

Goal

Get clear on the next steps for starting your design career.

Illustrations by Michela Picchi

 

We’re hopeful that at this point, you have a good understanding of what it takes to create digital products and services that are truly designed for humans. From knowing your purpose as a designer, to understanding the importance of bringing users into your process, to learning about the design methods you can use to create experiences that are both useful and delightful. 

But there’s still a lot of work ahead of you.

Learning design is an ongoing process. If you ever feel like you’re done learning, it’s because you still don’t know what you don’t know. As a designer, it’s important you maintain a curious mind and continue to absorb knowledge from the people around you. Question everything you know to be true and invite other perspectives into the conversation. That’s how you grow. 

There are so many ways to learn more. Continue to expand your references and sources. Connect with other designers, join online communities, participate in events, find a mentor, and read more in-depth articles and books.  

There’s an exciting journey ahead of you, and we can’t wait to see what you’ll create next.

Next steps

Set new goals

1. Think back to when you defined what design is to you, and your dream job. How has it changed?  

2. What you have been learning about design can be applied in many ways, beyond a traditional design job. Reflect on how you want to apply what you learned.  

3. Define your career goals. What type of projects do you see yourself working on? What kind of design role might help you achieve that?

 

Build your community

1. Find people around you that are also learning, working in design, or working in a related field. Team up with them and find ways to support each other on your journeys. 

2. Join Slack and LinkedIn groups to meet people, ask questions, and practice some networking skills.

3. Find online meetups and conferences to join.

 

Find a mentor

1. Create a high-level outline of what you want to ask and learn from a design mentor. 

2. Reach out to designers you admire (like someone you found in Chapter 2).  

3. People might be busy or take a while to respond, so it's good to reach out to a few people. To make the most of the opportunity, after finding a mentor, focus on what you can learn from them before contacting others.

 

Keep learning

1. Reflect on all you learned in the past classes. What topics are you curious to learn more about? What are the ones you struggle with the most?

2. This class was just the beginning of your journey. Decide how you want to keep learning! There’s plenty of content out there for you to take in. 

3. Before signing up for a specific course or program, find people who have gone through it before and ask how their experiences were.

 

Keep practicing

1. Design is thinking and making. Both require practice. Don't rush to find a job in design or to publish your portfolio, focus first on learning, and finding your voice in design. 

2. Go beyond what you’ve done so far. Find more exercises, examples, and practices beyond the ones listed here.

Abstract shapes

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About

Our industry needs more designers. Most importantly: a different type of designer.

THE PROGRESS we have seen in the last decade in terms of making our discipline more accessible to up and coming designers is undeniable. Really great. Still, quite slow. Digital product design remains an elitist discipline: hard to break in, overshadowed by unnecessary jargon, lacking organizations that genuinely represent all of its professionals’ best interests, and not as diverse as we all have dreamed it to become. At the end of the day, if design is not actively working to dismantle established exclusionary systems, it is simply perpetuating them. And that goes to how much we include or exclude people from our industry.

When you don’t lower the barrier to entering the design industry, only a really specific type of designer with a really specific type of background is able to get in.

Courses and bootcamps present a similar challenge. It’s not that there aren’t great classes out there — but those classes can be cost-prohibitive for a lot of people. Especially people who are still in the early stages of starting a career in design, in which case signing up for one of those courses can be a risky move.

WE OFTEN receive messages from our readers asking for tips on how to take their first steps into the world of digital product design. What should they be studying? What should they be reading? We noticed a pattern, though. When we reply to those messages giving people advice, there are usually a handful of articles, links, and pieces that we keep going back to. Articles that resist the test of time, that continue to be relevant several years after being published. Documentaries that will help designers look at our industry through a more critical lens.

For those reasons, we decided to put together this guide. We want this guide to serve as a reminder that when it comes to design, there’s no such thing as ultimate guides, magic formulas, or UX unicorns. There’s a lot of discipline and hard work, that’s what there is.

There won’t be a design job waiting for the reader at the end of the guide, and it is not a replacement for traditional education. The Guide To Design (for short) will give people a glimpse into what digital design work is really like, so they can decide if a career in UX might be right for them.

The UX Collective is a community of designers and writers who believe knowledge sharing can lead to a more diverse, smart, and future-proof design community.

Feedback: hello@uxdesign.cc

 

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