So this is something I’ve been considering for a while.
There’s far too much darned noise that surrounds the so-called design process. Countless diagrams, flowcharts, squiggles and flouncy terminology that serves to confound rather than clarify in most cases.
Design Thinking has been used like Steve Harrington’s nail infused baseball bat to bludgeon corporate ‘unbelievers’ into submission, only to have it used against us in corporate lingo, to the point where – if I’m honest – I often don’t really know what it is anymore. There’s certainly a case for a whole article discussing the pros and cons of Design Thinking and it’s misuse alone, but I’ll leave that for another day. I need to heal my spleen before attempting that one.
Anyway, discrete process aside, I wanted to explore the ‘things’ that I think are useful as a designer. The ‘toolkit’ as it were. My proverbial utility ‘bat belt’ of design bits and bobs that I use or deploy when attempting to tackle a challenge. A hotchpotch of ways of thinking and ways of doing.
It’s funny how we are ‘trained’ at school and University to deliver projects and come up with ideas, but we are often left to our own devices to define the ‘ways’ we do it. The way we think or the approach we take when we are faced with a blank sheet of paper or a flashing cursor or an empty 3D CAD sketch plane. At least when we take our driving test, we’ve been taught how to specifically operate the car and adhere to the rules of the highway code, but in design we are very often packed off to wander our own roads and paths and left to discover which tools work best and unpack how our own brains best tackle problems, software, people and systems.
So, as is customary, here is my list…in no specific order of importance. It’s certainly not exhaustive, and like taste, it is entirely unique to me. I’m not suggesting that everyone should do what I do, nor am I suggesting that anyone else’s own tool belt is inferior. This is just mine and the tools that I like to use the most. The ones that have started to warm to my middled aged grip over time.
1. Scribbling.
Designing is superficially synonymous with sketching, and by sketching we imagine the swooshy delightfulness of a concept car or a sneaker. The apparent carefree mark making of an artist with the imagination of a dreamer. If it’s any consolation, I don’t consider myself a very good sketcher. For sure I can draw stuff pretty well…at least if I put my mind to it and have a bit of a plan…but when I’m thinking about new stuff, and wrapping my grey matter around a new challenge, I tend to simply scribble.
To my mind, there is zero point in spending superfluous hours drawing stuff that looks incredulously considered, when the primary intent of your activity is to convert synaptic zaps into visual evidence. Evidence that you can then process with eyes and brains with others. My ideas need only be good enough to communicate a thought, a notion, a direction so either myself at a later point in time when I choose to review my thinking, or to others when I wish to canvass opinion and harness the hive mind. Which is why I use the word ‘scribble’.
My hand is connected to my brain and is the plotter to my thoughts. Thoughts are rarely clarified the minute they form, nor are thoughts typically linear or ordered (at least not in the phase I’m talking about), so why would I expect my sketches to be clear, ordered and perfectly formed.
So I tend to fill acres of paper with ‘scribbles’ and thoughts. Some are better formed than others. Some are paused halfway through as my brain dismisses them for whatever reason. Some are repeated a few times as my brain attempts to decipher a thought in more detail. Some are bits of things. Some are the thing itself. Sometimes it’s just a side notion or a word.
As a father, I started to liken the idea generation process to breast-feeding (which sounds a little odd – and a bit creepy – when you start explaining it to people!) when my wife explained to me what it felt like. She described the initial, rapid, slightly chaotic flow of breast milk when the baby first attaches and then the gradual, timely, slow delivery of nutritious, thicker milk as the baby picks up a rhythm and settles into the feed.
That is how idea generation feels to me. There’s an initial ‘dump’ of the immediate, obvious, easy stuff that anyone can do or suggest, but if you stick at it, your brain starts to work a bit harder and the proper stuff starts to form. It’s hard work and requires a bit of persistence, but once the brain is free of the obvious stuff, it kinda flexes and starts to drill down into the complexity with the benefit of time, space and plenty of scribbling.
2. Storytelling.
This is something I’ve come to realise I tended to do in my head as a younger designer, but never treated it respectfully enough. The idea that you can build a story around an idea before actually putting pen to paper.
I tend to use this a way to sense-check the rationale of a direction before doing the ‘designer’ thing and sketching the living shit out of it, only to realise that I’ve wasted a whole tonne of time and budget. I like to build stories that try to explain the building blocks of a particular direction, theme or hypothesis. Almost like a slightly extended elevator pitch…but with visual collateral to bolster the imaginative potential of the idea.
I tend to write short stories for each direction and support each story with some quick thumbnail images to provide some visual anchors to the storytelling. These tend to be about 500 words – maybe longer, maybe shorter. Sometimes they are just a few sentences. But they have helped me no end to do multiple things at very early stages of a project.
They prevent me from wasting time on a direction that – when told out loud – feels superficial or pointless….almost vain. They help to consolidate the way you might ultimately present or frame the idea to the client, particularly if the client isn’t as creatively minded or visually aware as you and your team. They also help me ensure that all directions have weight and sufficient balance. I have no doubt they are informed by the time I’ve spent working with some of the world’s biggest brands. Brands that rely on storytelling and projection to appeal.
It helps me to focus my thinking and release my imagination a little more. It appeals to my base childish self, that loves to hear stories and let me mind wander off into places I wouldn’t normally go by staring at a blank sheet of paper with some nominal constraints swimming around in my brain. Stories are universal and are designed to make us imagine and dream.
I think they are invaluable and that’s why I tend to do this early doors.
3. Staring, thinking, walking.
The assumption that being sat a desk is the best environment for creative thought is utter bonkers. For sure, the act of sitting at a work ‘desk’ probably focusses the mind and puts you in a productivity mindset, but creativity requires the oddest of jumpstarts to get going.
I appreciate that under normal work circumstances, there is a reluctance to allow people to wander off whenever they need to think, but I’m not so sure it’s a bad idea. Walking (alone in this case) deliberately gives you time to think, and without the distraction of a screen (unless you choose to stare at your phone while you walk!) or anything directly requiring of your attention – other than the immediate world around you. I personally find it incredibly cathartic and beneficial to allowing me to ‘mind drift’, because it is this mind drift that will lead you to odd and unexpected places. These, in turn may provide you with ideas and inspiration or, if nothing else, a step outside of the box you were thinking within.
I’m also a huge fan of the middle distance.
I like staring into it. It helps me to mentally bounce around and formulate an idea, however absurd. Visible activity rarely indicates quality of thought. Maybe my brain just works slower than other peoples’, but my synapses need a bit of middle distance to operate.
For some people, it might doing the ironing, or walking the dog, or cooking.
I often found that my lengthy commute each way to work was the time my brain used to process stuff and wrap itself around whatever was sitting in my mental inbox that day. Not that I’d encourage lengthy commutes, but it simply demonstrates that your brain needs a bit of space and non-screen based isolation sometimes to fire properly.
4. Elevations.
I’m not sure why I do this, but I tend to sketch and form ideas in elevation view. It might possibly have derived itself from an insecurity in drawing in full 3D, or the feeling that it took too long to translate the thought quickly enough to move on if I tried to draw it ‘properly’. Who knows.
All I know, is that I tend to scribble in 2D elevational views. It’s not that I’m blissfully ignoring the overall form either, as I’ll typically draw a side or top elevation alongside the scribble in the first place, and it some cases actually draw a 3D thumbnail alongside to ‘explain’ the elevation.
But what most likely started out as a coping mechanism has ironically become quite a useful method in getting to 3D quicker, as I tend to try and sketch (as much as possible) at scale in elevation, which in turn allows me to quickly translate successful ideas into more considered elevations in Illustrator (or whatever I choose) which in turn allows me to import these crafted elevations into SolidWorks and build the form quickly.
I’ve found that if my initial scribbles can be used to cut out some of the ‘translation’ work in the subsequent stages, I can move an idea from thought to 3D form much more quickly than if I’d sketched in 3D and then had to interpret the scribble into elevational thoughts. It also tends to make me think through some of the ‘later’ detail at an earlier stage. Things that often get overlooked like battery access, connection points, split lines, screen size….all the dull shit that can actually destroy your idea if you are not careful.
It might also be that I was slightly obsessed with ‘curves of intersection’ when I was learning technical drawing at school and Uni, so I fear my brain may have been inadvertently programmed at that point.
5. How will it be put together?
There have been so many instances of product ideas that I’ve seen that have seemed astoundingly brilliant but have fallen flat when the conversation about assembly or manufacture lands.
How do you put it together, and – more importantly in our times – how does it come apart?
How do you plan to manufacture it? What’s it made from? How many parts?
I appreciate much of this stuff comes from experience and knowledge gained over time, but at it’s base level, none of this stuff is rocket science. All designers should have a core working knowledge of how stuff goes together. You might not know how it’s made specifically, but you should at least appreciate the broader fundamentals. Things like wall thickness (and combinations thereof), split lines, moving parts versus fixed parts, colour differences, attaching things to other things, preventing stuff from getting in or out. That sort of stuff. You needn’t have to know about IP rating or flame retardancy or draft angles or tortuous path seals, but a sensible awareness of the physical world and it’s inherent relationship to things and people is necessary. The detail can – and will – follow.
But it’s this stuff that is constantly swimming around in my brain, even at the scribble stage. I’m drawing a profile or a product form and already thinking about tooling complexity or how the seal can be waterproof or the number of necessary parts. Just in my head. It sounds a bit complex but it isn’t. It’s a bit like driving a car for me now. I don’t think about clutch control or rear view mirrors…it’s just habit. Habits that formed from countless hours of driving.
The same is true of this stuff. I’m pretty darned sure, when I commit an idea to even the scribbliest of scribbles, that I am confident that it can be made and roughly how I might do it.
I can’t tell you how much time it saves down the line.
I’ve always been minded to consider this stuff, but it was certainly forged in blood when you are running your own small design business and you need to make sure things go to plan as much as possible, in order that you can maximise your profitability and secure repeat work. There’s nothing more sobering than presenting an idea to a client and then having to go back – cap in hand – admitting that the production costs have gone up or the product has had to get bigger or the form isn’t quite as seductive as you’d purported, because you didn’t think this stuff through early enough.
6. Obsessive controllable sketchwork.
One thing that I’ve certainly developed from making errors in the past, is my obsession with controllable sketchwork. I’m not talking about the pencil on paper type of sketchwork, but the digital, controllable style that I use in Illustrator or SolidWorks (in my case).
I am stupidly obsessive about reducing the number of bezier points in a vector curve. To the point where it might actually not make any difference to the visible results in any way, shape or form, but I will be satisfied that the linework is as ‘pure’ and ‘clean’ as it can be.
I will spend much longer on the first set of SolidWorks master sketches than I should. I’ll always attempt to use as few line breaks as possible (to ensure that I have as much control of surface topology as possible) with often insane levels of dimensional control. But it’s all done with a view to hopefully allowing my model to have as much editability and control as possible, even when significantly detailed and developed.
I think I’ve learned from days spent remodelling parts when new constraints are introduced and the whole history tree has collapsed, that the more time I spend on the foundations of the model, the better and more confident I will feel about changes later on. In fact, you then become more open to adjusting the design to suit feedback and insight – which is what design should be about.
But we all know that stuff gets to point where to change something causes more problems than you have budget or justification to implement. So excuses are made, or furrows are continually ploughed and the product isn’t as good as it possibly could be.
Now I’m not suggesting that all products built in 3D can be pulled about like bread flour, but the more work you put in at the start and the more robustly (and flexibly) you build your foundations, the more likely you will be happy to accept change and the more likely the product will be fit for genuine purpose.
That’s how I see it anyway.
7. 90% thinking 10% presentation.
I’ve always had an issue with the way that a certain proportion of designers approach concept work. The brief is taken from a client and the phase is started. Let’s assume for a moment that all insight or research has taken place and we are in the guts of the ‘ideas’ bit.
There tends to be a habit of spending (by my reckoning) about 30% of the allotted time coming up with ideas. Scribbles, sketches, doodles…call them what you will. These are then shortlisted by whatever means the business deems necessary or relevant (by dictatorship or democracy), leaving you with an agreed set of ‘concepts’ that will be eventually presented to the client. The remaining time – typically 40%-50% – is then spent translating these shortlisted ideas into presentable visuals. Renders normally. But typically a combination of 2D and 3D CAD work, digital rendering, Photoshop and Illustrator and then – finally – into a presentation deck to share with the client.
Remember these are still just concepts.
The ideas. The very foundations upon which the remainder of the project will be built.
I think that’s a bit absurd. Being more focussed on the presentation of the concept than the concept itself. There may be plenty of people who will argue with the percentages I’m suggesting, but few can contest the fact that we often put too much effort in the polishing than the building.
Whilst I like a bit of visual magic as much as the next designer, I’m most definitely of the opinion that presentation quality should play second fiddle to time given to thinking…and I’m pretty sure every client I’ve ever worked with would prefer their budget to be spent on more solving than more ‘slick’.
I’ve certainly changed over the years. I was conditioned to think you needed to spend an inordinate amount time on the ‘visual’ but as my confidence to present things that are a little less polished has grown, so has my confidence in spending more time than feels natural, thinking through the challenge, and then adapting the presentation quality to the time remaining, rather than vice versa. I do have to check myself every now and then though. I am as guilty as the next person to a bit of concept indulgence!
8. Walk in the client’s shoes.
I’m a huge fan of seeing things from the client’s point of view, and something I try to remind myself of throughout a project.
We so often get sidelined in our attempt to ‘delight’ the client, but rarely do we look at the project from their point of view. We focus on our ‘bit’. The idea or the prototype or the insight. But think about how they are placed. Are they taking a risk with you? Do they understand what they will be seeing at the end of this phase? Are they looking for this project to get them a promotion? Do they have the skills to present this work upstream to the wider business?
If you look at things through these eyes, you often end up approaching the way you present, the mode of operation or even the very ideas themselves very differently. It’s why I often end up starting with stories (see earlier point) as this can be a good way to introduce the ‘design illiterate’ client and their audience to creative opportunity and problem solving.
Think about the client experience. They write a brief and present it to you. You say you can do it, but there’s no quantifiable evidence to suggest it will be what they want (sure you show them lots of examples of other success stories but how much should they believe?). You provide a budget. They agree it. They leave you to it.
That’s a huge amount of faith and trust in what is an entirely subjective and unquantifiable process, from people who may not know one end of the design process from another.
And we complain when they want ‘an update’.
If I were them, I’d be the worst client in the world. I’d want to be a part of every decision. Rightly or wrongly.
But if you start to consider the anxieties, expectations and consequences for the client, you will most likely do a much more sympathetic and relevant job of delivery. You want them to feel empowered by what you provide them. They should be made to look good. They made the right decision in choosing you to work on this.
I tend to try and sense check everything I do through this lens. Sometimes I forget. Sometimes I get it wrong. But if I can, I try to ensure that the work is as much tailored to them as the challenge at hand.
9. OCD page layout.
My wife has OCD…or at least she did before we had kids. We always used to joke about it. She couldn’t leave a glass if it hadn’t been put down a certain way, or walk away from a tap if she hadn’t turned it off in a specific order. I won’t bore you with how long it took us to leave the house!
I’ve now come to realise that this wasn’t a patch on my OCD* when it comes to page layout.
I’m stupidly obsessive about ensuring that titles, page numbers and text blocks are consistent, that the presentation has a clear grid system that is doggedly adhered to and that font sizes and legibility is on point. I’m also a pedant when it comes to spelling and wordplay.
Most people don’t notice any of this, but much like my bezier curve fanaticism, I can’t let things go if I see that they should be done better. My colleagues over the years would roll their eyes when I asked to look at their presentations, and they wryly groaned when it came back fully edited at some ungodly hour because I couldn’t simply say “fine!” In fact there are certain past colleagues who would exploit this and deliberately bang out a rough cut, knowing full well I would do the necessary and make everything work (not mentioning names Rich!).
I think it stems from my thinking that if every touchpoint you have with a client is considered, then this garners trust and belief in consistency and quality. It’s a bit like going into a fancy hotel with a stunning reception, glorious lobby, spangly elevators and glitzy staircases, only to find the rooms are a bit average. Your overall impression is one of distrust rather than wholehearted belief and delight.
In most instances, the one thing that you typically send to the client after an ‘end of phase’ presentation is the digital presentation itself and this may very well be distributed to all relevant colleagues and stakeholders, many of whom will never hear you present the work, nor meet you at all. So all they have to form an opinion of you and the ‘value’ of your input is the deck. If that deck is shipshape and slick as fuck, then hopefully you get the opportunity to make the best – albeit remote – impression as possible.
10. Don’t try to imagine the solution.
When I first started out as a designer in a proper job, I used to frantically try to think of the solution as the brief was being shared by the client. I was of the impression that a ‘good’ designer should know the solution immediately as they are ‘creative’ and that is what we are being hired to do. In fact, I’d often research a client before a meeting (which is still something everyone should do anyway) to try and anticipate the solution beforehand.
As I’ve got older, I’ve become considerably more trusting of the process, to the point where I actively take great delight not having any ideas when I meet the client. I’ve found that with a pre-conceived idea (albeit only in your own mind), the line of client questioning becomes loaded and contrived. You almost try – albeit sub-consciously – to convince the client of your idea before you’ve even had a chance to think it through…almost in an attempt to impress.
I know…it sounds ridiculous doesn’t it?
But if you jettison that thinking, you tend to find you ask more open questions and have wider, more exploratory discussions with the client, which in turn tend to yield greater scope for opportunity and investigation.
I now deliberately admit to having no ‘top of mind’ solutions in these early discussions and I have learned to trust and enjoy the journey that I go on. I know that if I do the right sorts of things, ask the right sorts of questions, explore the right sorts of avenues, use the right sorts of tools and put the right amount of time into it, I’ll find something useful and interesting and relevant.
But it’s taken me a while to get to that point and I still have a bit of a wobble every now and again when I default to my 21 year old brain who tries to find an immediate solution. The middle aged me gives my younger me a metaphorical slap and a neck massage and we are good to go.
I’ve got a few other things I’ve not listed here, but true to form, I’ve written another behemoth, so I’ll stop now. Like many such topics, the lists are endless and inexhaustible.
It’s been interesting writing this, more as an exercise in self reflection and understanding how I tend to approach things. I realise how much has evolved and how much is hard wired. It also demonstrates how our approach is a by product of our circumstances, coping strategies and mindset. Much less to do with so-called training and education I think.
Anyway, time for a coffee.
Thanks for reading.
*I appreciate there is such a thing as diagnosed and clinical OCD. I’m not suggesting that is actually the case with me or my wife. No offence intended.
