Yesterday I read the 6 things I hate about your design CV article. I found myself on the hiring side numerous times already and although a bit disrespectful, the article genuinely offers good advice for designers that are just starting out. Finding and hiring good designers is hard and yes, companies get all sorts of applications. There’s simply a lot of it to get through—many people out there trying to start their design career.
Category: Blog
What it’s all about
I created the course because I felt there was no concise way to learn the skills required to make typography an integral part of a web design process. The gap between designers and developers is still there and I haven’t seen many projects that are trying to address that. Better Web Type at its core is exactly that—it starts off explaining typography, how it works, why web developers need to learn about it and then shows them how.
Measuring and quantifying the UX
“Data-driven” is all the rage at the moment, everyone wants a slice of the “big data” cake. Data scientists are the new rock stars, replacing the JavaScript and Front-end gurus and ninjas from a few years back. My problem with trends like these is that they cause the so called “tunnel-vision”. Thing x is a trend right now and we should do that too because,… you know… everyone’s doing it.
The day I proved myself wrong
Designers don’t know why a small change to an interface results in a massive drop in a core business metric, product managers don’t know what should go into the backlog and what not, developers don’t know how to estimate the delivery time of the fancy new feature. The whole team behind the product is so clueless that they don’t even know if the new feature brings any value to the users.
Specialised generalist
Compared to them, I felt mediocre and I was frustrated because of it. You see, I never specialised in anything. Since I was a child, I had a habit of putting things together and create something out of that. I saw things differently from others. Where everyone else saw a cardboard box, I saw a cool military jeep that I could create out of it.
The equilateral triangle of a perfect paragraph
And the lack of knowledge about typography doesn’t come from ignorance. I learned that web designers are commonly either self-taught and haven’t grasped the importance of typography yet, or they actually studied design but typography was just one of the classes they had to attend.
Getting things done with Trello
Most people will enjoy the nice weather or take a trip. I use this precious time to do some work on my projects. Sounds dull, but deep down it makes me happy.
Putting up a wall
And that’s alright because that was a huge part of their empire. They swore to themselves never to let their guard down after Rome was sacked by the Gauls in its early history. Because of that, they developed a highly organised, professional war machine. They conquered whatever they set their sights on. And they remained hungry — after each conquest they already had plans for the next one. At their peak, the Romans controlled the region between the frozen Scottish highlands in the north and the sandy deserts of north Africa in the south. But then — they stopped.
A two-step, no bullshit guide to sketching
In the last dispatch I wrote about my story of how I learned that sketches aren’t meant to be perfect. How they aren’t meant to give final answers. They’re meant to ask further questions. To doubt your own solutions. And with that comes a lot more sketching. Sketching is not something you do at the start of the process, produce a wonderful looking sketch and move on. Sketching needs to be done throughout the design process. And in order to produce more sketches quicker, the quality of sketching needs to move aside. Here’s quick overview of my sketching kit followed by a few tips to make sketching serve its true meaning in your design process.
My sketches aren’t perfect
This means that I started to sketch a lot more. I always loved to sketch, scribble and draw. I always felt this need to put something on the paper. Something visual I can refer to later on. Something I put out of my head—an idea that gets transformed into something physical.