Everyone understands why this happens. Translation and less-than-pristine reinterpretation damage the fidelity of the message. There is no copy-and-paste equivalent for verbal storytelling. A photocopy of a photocopy of a photocopy of an image will always render that image indistinguishable from the original.

Unfortunately, the waterfall web design process and “Telephone” are similar, and too much valuable, primary research (in this case stakeholder interviews) ends up being reinterpreted to the point that the original sentiment and answers are lost. The process of conducting and then documenting stakeholder interviews can keep a team at an arm’s length from a project. Instead, place designers and developers closer to the project discovery and research phase. Maintaining the fidelity of the research helps our team craft the best user experience possible. While not everyone has a background in research, anyone can conduct a stakeholder interview.

The barrier to entry might be lower than you think. In the last 12 months, I’ve had to go from interviewer novice to Charlie Rose as the Happy Cog research process was revamped. Being thrown into the deep end of the pool has forced me to recognize quickly some of the more important aspects that make an interview successful. The following tips guide how I plan for and conduct any stakeholder interviews.

(Note: At Happy Cog, we work with our clients to determine what defines a “stakeholder” of the project. Stakeholders may just include the core members of a client team or can extend to content owners, key opinion leaders, potential audience types, users, etc. These interviews tend to take 30 to 60 minutes and are typically conducted by phone. To ensure our interviewee can focus on conducting the interview, a project manager captures notes from the call, and from time to time, we also record interviews.)

The script matters.

“Do you know how to have a conversation? Then you can conduct an interview.”
— Michael Johnson, Design Director at Happy Cog

Having the “gift of gab” doesn’t mean you can skimp on drafting a well-structured script for the interview. A strong interview script works from the general (big-picture project goals) to the specific (role-based concerns regarding features and functionality.) Start with the basics to get the interviewee comfortable. Ask about their role on the project and how they see themselves providing value. Allow interviewees to talk about themselves in their own words. Build confidence in the interviewee that their vision matters, because it does.

Once you outline the easy questions, work backwards. Consider the goals of the project and the goals set forth by the client. What questions will help you learn more about how this interviewee can help articulate the path to success? Always consider the uniqueness of the interviewee’s position and role on the project when deciding appropriate questions.

But, sometimes the script doesn’t matter.

Yes, the script is important, but it shouldn’t be carved out of stone. Just because questions are in a specific order shouldn’t dictate how the interview is conducted. Let the natural flow of the conversation govern the order in which you ask questions. Be cognizant of the topical threads in the answers the interviewee provides; look for the right moments to shift to a question in the script that might keep that narrative thread intact. Mentally check off the questions as you go, ensuring you still cover everything the session demands.

Prepare appropriately. Know who you are interviewing.

Knowing the right way to version the script means the interviewer must do some homework. Set yourself up for success by spending a brief amount of time familiarizing yourself with who you are interviewing and their role. This shouldn’t be a research project unto itself; a quick Google search should suffice. Don’t make the mistake of asking a question that exposes a lack of preparation. The same questions won’t apply to the Dean of the College and a prospective student. Respect the time that the interviewee is providing by making sure you aren’t asking questions that aren’t relevant.

Consider the difference between these two questions:

“What are the most important types of information on yourwebsite.com?”

Versus:

“As the VP of Marketing, how do you use yourwebsite.com to accomplish your team’s goals?”

While the purpose is the same, the second question is much more personable for our fictional VP of Marketing to highlight what types of content are valuable specifically to her and her team. Awkward bulleted-list responses can halt momentum in a productive interview. Avoid the inevitable “umms” found in responses from question #1, and, instead, focus on prompts that will promote free-flowing feedback. Let the interviewee be the storyteller.

Don’t be a robot.

Interviews should be a conversation, not an interrogation. Levity is not a bad thing. The conveyed expression in the interviewer’s voice, the manner in how questions are delivered, how introductions occur and the ice is broken—these all create an “air” enveloping the interview situation. Address this head-on. It starts with the tone in your voice. Keep it happy, upbeat, and generally interested. Let the interviewee know you are a blank slate, ready to learn. Not only does this help establish a more relaxing environment, but it also empowers the interviewee, letting them feel that their input is valuable and that their answers aren’t just checking off a compulsory check box in the project process.

Actually listen.

The best interviews often go completely off-script. Why does this happen? A topic or comment by the interviewee often leads to follow-up questions that can never be predicted. That can only happen if the interviewer is actually listening to the answers and not mentally multitasking. Listen for cues for follow-up questions. Never be afraid to ask “why?” Get comfortable asking for the interviewee to clarify an answer. You should be trying to get the best answers, not just the answers you expect.

Don’t have the last word.

End the interview with some humility. An hour-long conversation can never capture everything that the interviewee can contribute or exhaust their thoughts regarding a project. Quite often, they have more to say. To open a window for this last bit of insight, let the final question be phrased like this:

“What haven’t we asked you today that you think would be valuable for us to know?”

This allows them to shift the conversation to anything they find valuable that hasn’t been addressed yet.

Opt in to being better informed.

“Being able to tailor questions to different stakeholders based on their unique roles and goals gave me firsthand insights that I couldn’t (and didn’t) get from just reading requirements documents.”
–Yesenia Perez-Cruz, Designer at Happy Cog

Being closer to a project’s research phase can be beneficial to the design process. Working in a small(er) agency, UX often falls on the shoulders of more than one person or team. Use this as an advantage. I’ve never heard a designer or developer state “I want to know less about this project.”

Having firsthand exposure to what stakeholders are saying creates less chances for those findings to be watered down. Put an end to whisper-down-the-lane requirements and tactics. Keep what is learned in the interview intact by removing extraneous voices and filters from the process. Consequently, designers and developers can have more of a say in the overall project strategy and design process. Intimacy in the research phase instills project ownership. Ownership is an investment that will manifest itself in the project quality.

Everyone wins.

The reality: We have zero budget for hired guns—nor do we inherently know much about editorial illustration. Instead, we’ve always tackled Cognition in a true DIY manner. Our illustrators are Happy Cog employees volunteering to help out. In fact, the only trained illustrator on staff is…wait for it…our Business Development Director, Joe Rinaldi.

Each week, one of our seven illustrators takes a turn in the rotation. To keep the overall effort from being too bureaucratic, each illustrator works directly with the author to discuss the direction for the art. So, how do you craft an editorial illustration process that is decentralized yet still conforms to a consistent art direction? As all designers know, a smart process and specific constraints are your allies.

Constraints for Freedom

Constraint 1: Don’t overwhelm. Large canvases tend to create nervousness. Our image is petite on purpose. That means an increased focus on the idea and less ephemera.

Constraint 2: Offload some of the decisions. We work with a limited color palette. The reduced color options ensure that each illustration will fit in with the entire Cognition family and take that burden off of the illustrators.

Constraint 3: Time is never in abundance. Timeboxing the effort helps to clarify when decisions need to be made or diagnose when a specific step is dragging. A draft of the article is due on Monday, and the illustration needs to be prepped and ready by Wednesday for a Thursday launch. Combine that with normal agency duties, and you can see how crucial it is to be time-efficient. Not all of our illustrators timebox. To better monitor my own efforts, I’ve honed my process to ensure I create (idea to completion) the entire illustration in a three-hour window. Disclaimer: Not every illustration actually hits that mark, but most come close.

The Magic Revealed

Another meaningless milestone: I’ve now contributed 25 illustrations for Cognition (and have had my hand in another 10–12, assisting in the idea or production). Look between the lines again. As a result of all these attempts, I now have a clear process that makes the best use of limited time. Let me divulge the important steps that save me time while I craft the style and form of my illustrations:

Step 1: It’s all about the idea (Tools: pencil, paper, and your mind).

Strong editorial illustration is infused with a core truth about the article it supports. How to actually uncover this didn’t occur to me until I had a conversation with Yesenia Perez-Cruz regarding a lecture she attended by renown illustrators and designers, The Heads of State.

Their concepts are born from trying to combine two separate ideas into a forced connection. The practice of forced connection provides the opportunity to discuss the absurd, impractical, or potentially intriguing results of the mash-up. In order to successfully integrate this approach into my process, I needed a tool— mind mapping.

Listing all of the derivative words and ideas directly (or loosely) tied to the article’s main idea is therapeutic. This list becomes the first visual artifact in finding potential connections and surfacing a concept.

To be honest, this doesn’t always lead to a slam dunk. Often, I need to abandon mind mapping for a day and wait until my mind settles down and begins its own processing work. At least half of my illustration concept epiphanies have occurred in the shower or during the morning commute when my mind was a bit more adrift and relaxed to make that successful connection.

Step 2: Sketch and Layer (Tools: pencil, paper, and scanner)

With a forced connection concept firmly rooted in my brain, I then determine the form the illustration will take. For me, form is directly linked to style. Drawing by hand has become the fastest and most successful method for me to create form.

Rough thumbnails for layout quickly evolve into layered sketches; each object (the background, the foreground, the shadowing) is an individual sketch and scan, so that final compositing is easier and quicker. If I need source material to help me define something, I use stock imagery and rely on tracing paper and a steady hand. The key, though, is to keep the drawing dissected into as many layers as possible.

Step 3: Vectorize (Tools: Photoshop, Illustrator)

I want my illustration assets to be as malleable as possible, so to set myself up for successful compositing, each layer needs to be a vector.

After scanning each sketch, I adjust the levels in Photoshop to ensure a strong contrast, then copy the image into Illustrator. There, the Image Trace tool is my best friend.

It might take some fiddling in the settings to get the result I want, but well-drawn source material should translate clearly. Once I’m happy with the vectorization, I hit Expand to finally render the drawing and make each individual piece selectable. (A few Ungroups are usually necessary.)

For years, this next maneuver eluded me. My knowledge of Illustrator didn’t include the understanding that I could select all objects based on common color or stroke. This crucial part enables manipulation of just the foreground part of the scanned drawing that is now vectorized and gets rid of any negative space fills that are a left over from the Image Tracing.

In Illustrator, I use the Direct Selection tool to select any white elements that have been added automatically during the Image Tracing. The resulting vector object shouldn’t have any shapes or fills that aren’t necessary for compositing. Then, I navigate to the Select menu option and choose Same > Fill & Stroke. This automatically selects all the “white” objects in my vectorized drawing.

Hitting delete never felt better.

The resulting drawing in Illustrator should match what was on my paper. Now, the fun begins.

Step 4: Compositing (Tools: Photoshop)

The final illustration compositing happens in Photoshop. I’m quicker in Photoshop, so it has always been my tool of choice. The transition from AI-to-PSD begins with copying and pasting each scanned object (one by one—not together) into Happy Cog’s preset Photoshop template.

To ensure scalability and easy manipulation of color, I use Shape Layers instead of any of the other objects.

Once in Photoshop, each copied vectorized drawing is its own scalable, colorable element on its own layer. This lets me re-layer or individually manipulate each element. Using ye olde imagination is often rewarded at this juncture. Do not allow yourself to be handcuffed by your original sketches. Manipulating each object and letting happy accidents occur can help shape the final form and bring the illustration to life in ways that often can’t be sketched or planned.

(Note: Want to see the final result? Read Patrick Marsceill’s great article on prototyping)

The Last Draw

Editorial illustrations work an entirely different part of our designer brains. I’m proud of the body of work our team has created in support of Cognition. Yes, it would have been easier to write articles without illustrations or just give all illustrations to one person, but the opportunity to stretch our own skill sets has made us learn and grow.

As a result, we have become better problem solvers. Having the confidence to say, “Hey, I don’t know what I’m doing, but I’m going to learn,” is how we can differentiate ourselves and improve our skills as professionals. Remember, no one is ever an expert when trying something for the first time.

Job seekers, beware. How and what you provide in your initial response to a job posting is very telling and can make you attractive (or delete-worthy) in just a few seconds. Help the hiring manager out. They don’t have an excess amount of time to figure out who you are, what you do, and why you might be the right fit. Trust me, I know. For a small agency, hiring just one person can feel like a part-time job layered on top of an already overloaded workday. Yet, it takes just a few specific fixes to ensure that your message actually gets earmarked for follow-up.

Tip 1: Don’t Overdo It

The message or cover letter you write will elicit a reaction. (I’m not proud to say it, but I remember the bad ones more.) To ensure you don’t make the “naughty” list, keep it short and business-toned. Leave the snark and humor elsewhere. Yes, I know you want to instill a bit of you, but don’t make that a barrier to what I’m really looking for first; your credentials and experience.

Keep those credentials simple. A URL to your portfolio is more than sufficent. I don’t have time nor do I really care about your Pinterest, Facebook, and Twitter accounts (yet). Provide those ancillary links at a later time when appropriate.

Avoid the temptation to over-design the resumé. Yes, you are a designer and want someone to know just by looking at your resumé that, hey, you can design! (Raise your hand if you haven’t been guilty of that at some point in your career.) Instead, focus on clarity and scannability. That means one page. “Quantity” in a resumé is the same as overloading a portfolio with too many pieces. Exhibit a knack for purposeful editing; include just enough to provide a snapshot of your history.

That also means just saying no to design fads. Turning your skillsets into an infographic might seem like a very “now” technique. Unless it provides some crucial insight into your experience, drop ‘em and opt for clarity. A concise statement will communicate faster.

Tip 2: Don’t Underdo It

Nothing says candidate apathy more than an uninformed piece of communication from a job applicant. Do your research; know why you want to work for the company. What makes the company special? Who are their thought leaders and why would you want to work for them? (Get your hands dirty with LinkedIn, if you have to.) Find the blogs they write or make a point to see them speak at a conference. The more you can uncover, the more likely you’ll have an opinion about the work the company creates.

Embrace the truth. If your work experience doesn’t match that of the agency, own up to it. I’ve seen too many print/identity portfolios of candidates applying for a digital design job that never address that gap in reality. It’s better to honestly state that, yes, this job is outside of your current experience but you are trying to learn and grow as a professional.

Finally, really read the job posting to which you are responding. Many hiring managers (myself included) include small details in the posting that act as a canary in the coal mine. These help employers see which candidate is putting a concerted effort into their communication versus one who is in mass-reply mode. Miss those details and your application gets deleted without hesitation. I know because I’ve done it.

Tip 3: The Medium Is (Part of) the Message

Hiring managers use smart phones. The PDF attachment of your resumé might not be the best way to provide a concise view of your experience. If you don’t believe me, please read this A List Apart article that expounds upon the benefits of a responsive HTML resumé

This technique not only benefits the recipient but you, the candidate. It’s quick to load, easy to update, and shows that you have a passion for communicating appropriately for the medium. Best of all, it shows you respect the time of the potential employer you are courting. Nobody wants to download then pinch-and-zoom a PDF on a 3-inch screen.

A dedication to differentiation is valuable. Like a responsive resumé, consider crafting a password protected webpage curated solely for the potential employer. Everyone wants to feel “special,” employers included. If you’re willing to dedicate your valuable time to constructing a personalized web experience, the employer will notice. The very few times I’ve come across these candidates, they’ve shot right to the top of my list.

Foot, Arm, Leg In the Door

There is no denying the obvious. Talent will always open doors. Yet, an attention to detail and a desire to differentiate yourself all point to two very important facts that are overlooked in the hiring process: an obvious demonstration of caring about the job for which you are applying and taking the pursuit of that role seriously.

Now, get out there and woo some Creative Directors.

(Time to break the ice.)

Hello, it’s really nice to meet you! We’re the web design agency the client hired to bring the branding direction to the web. So, we’re over here and you’re over there, and our client is in the middle. Yes, we know you weren’t awarded the website portion of the RFP. Of course, that doesn’t mean we can’t be partners with our client’s best intentions in mind. No need to be nervous, we are considerate teammates. We hope you know why we are here, and that you are curious about what we do really well. Not sure? Read on, new friend.

How do we set our client up for success beyond just the initial launch of a new website?

Online experiences are more than just vessels for logos and photography; they are living, breathing manifestations of an organization. Real people maintain the site. Real people ensure that this part of the brand experience is alive and functioning properly. Multiple authors share duties of bringing new content to life. In-house graphic designers partner with marketing teams to bring new offers, deals, and promotions to the site in a timely manner. There are many moving parts, and each part brings an internal approval process. We know this, so we plan for this. We listen to our clients, understand their internal processes, and get to know our clients in order to build a site for them that they can sustain. Our recommendations for maintaining a new website must match up with the resources that our client has available to maintain it. If our client can’t maintain a site beyond launch, then it was a flawed concept from the start.

Does the client have a limited photography budget or lack a professional photographer resource?

Not every organization has deep coffers of cash to ensure top-notch-photography is always available. If the need arises, we brainstorm compelling ways to get by on microstock or completely avoid a design that relies heavily on custom images. How about the client team’s Photoshop skills? A year from now, when the primary marketing messaging has changed and a new crop of events has launched, will the site design still hold up without the perfect images that our designer selected for launch? An appropriately planned “system” that drives the graphic design of the site has to alleviate some of that stress from internal teams. Looking for opportunities to educate our clients about the design intentions is as important as the actual execution. If necessary, we provide them with template Photoshop documents or photography usage guidelines to help them make smarter selections once our involvement in the project has long since ended.

What about selecting typefaces for online usage?

Even though webfonts have recently exploded in use, there are still gaps in quality. Just because the font is available for the web, it doesn’t mean it’s been properly prepared and tested. Need some evidence? As the web-partner on a recent project, we raised a red flag to our client recommending that their branding agency revisit a typeface choice. When considered for print and identity work, there was nothing wrong with this specific typeface. Hell, there was even an @font-face licensing agreement that came with it. But, when it came to actually implementing the font, it was obvious that this face wasn’t ready for prime time. The x-height was much smaller when rendered in a browser, making it hard to discern the characters. And let us not forget Windows. In IE, it was downright ug-ly. Here’s a tip: if you haven’t been exposed to what “font hinting” is yet, I suggest you get friendly with your favorite type foundry and ask them how they prepare their faces for the web. At the very least, test, test, test that typeface before purchasing. We are happy to help you out when scrutinizing typeface choices.

When it works, it’s a thing of beauty.

“One must know the rules to break ‘em” is a well-trodden graphic design axiom. We think this also applies to brands. In 2010, we learned this firsthand due to our involvement in the redesign of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. Prior to starting the graphic design of the site, lead designer of the brand, Pentagram’s Paula Scher led a workshop for USHMM and Happy Cog designers. Wanting to get it right, we were hungry to learn how we should best “web-ize” the brand.

Her answer was surprising: respect the intentions but drop the dogma. Instead of never deviating from the Pentagram guidelines, she told us to adapt those decisions to fit the evolving needs of the brand. We (the designers, the people who have to live with the brand day-in-and-day-out) are the real experts. Ownership isn’t exclusive to the creator. Whether or not “it works” is decided by the designers who have the most experience with the brand in practice. Empower those folks to make the best decisions.

Best Friends Forever

I’ll be frank: we like to think there are oodles of other opportunities to which we can contribute. Yet, we aren’t out to obfuscate your work. Instead, we want to learn the “how” and “why” of this brand’s evolution. Share with us. Provide us the research and the insights you’ve learned. Treat us like an equal partner and we will provide the same respect back to you. Trust is hard to earn and easy to lose. So, let’s get to know each other.

At the end of the day, our value can be summed up with this statement: we bring brands to life appropriately for the web (even if our client’s audience is experiencing this brand at 3:00 a.m. in their underwear). Please, don’t be nervous. I think this is the start of a beautiful relationship.

Hugs and pixels,

Clear underdogs for the final game, the team awoke that day of the game to this bit of inspiration:

Play without fear and you will be successful!

I can’t help but think about this statement in relation to the current state of the web design industry. Are we working in a fear-free environment? I can’t say that we are; it feels like there’s a dark cloud hanging ‘round. This negativity is like the angry blob slowly oozing out of the Phoenixville Colonial Theater. It’s dastardly mission is seemingly to lodge doubt and fear into the mindset of hard working web designers everywhere. This hive-mind secretion provides no positive alternative: it bluntly decrees what we must do and know. But do I have the specific skills to actually live up to the title on my business card? According to the blob, I don’t, and perhaps you don’t either.

We should stop being frauds and just quit, right?

Of course not.

This continual land-grabbing for ownership of the term “web designer” seems silly and counterproductive. Isn’t the Internet big enough for all of us? I’d be lying if all this chatter hasn’t rattled my confidence a bit. When these moments of insecurity arise, I have to rely on my experience to remind me that I’m good enough, smart enough, and gosh… you know the rest. So how do we avoid the blob? Take a look in your own mirror and say these three mantras.

You are passionate about what you do.

Think quickly of a designer who has inspired you. Are you able to quantify exactly how you were inspired? Those fleeting and often intoxicating moments can be hard to define. But think about a designer who didn’t inspire you; someone whose presence fell flat. Pinpointing specific attributes of failure is easier. You likely saw evidence of uncertainty, apathy, or doubt.

Somewhere during their sad existence, these designers lost their passion. Luckily, I know the antidotes and am happy to share.

Do you create design? Express yourself excitably when talking about your work. Project Kickoff meetings are a great opportunity to demonstrate how much you care about the craft of design. Here at the ‘Cog, we ensure that graphic design is a hearty portion of our workshop-driven Kickoffs. It provides our design leads with opportunities to establish our passion for creating a quality product.

Do you sell design? Share your design values with your clients. Not a conversation after you’ve delivered the work, but a clear manifesto of your design ethics even before you’ve opened Photoshop. During the sales process or during the Kickoff meeting, demonstrate evidence of your specific design ethos. Then when you bring solutions to the table, clients can understand their origin and have better insight into what motivates your work.

Proudly own the responsibility of shepherding smart and beautiful design. When discussing the merits of your work, don’t be afraid to battle for the strongest ideas. Ask many questions to better understand the nature of your client’s feedback. No one was ever fired from a gig for asking someone to explain their reasoning behind a criticism.

When you disagree, argue your points with logic and purpose. You won’t win every fight, but you’ll earn the reputation of being a stalwart of quality and intention. Recently I had to stick my Creative Director neck out for our concept to one of our large clients. A few long Basecamp posts and an hour long conference call got us back on track. If I had not taken the extra time to ensure our vision stayed true, I would have been kicking myself for as long as that site was live. No one wants to stare at missed opportunities. No one wants to live with regret.

You’ll always have ideas.

If you’ve been at this for awhile, you know that creativity isn’t a well. There will never be a morning that doesn’t contain the same creative potential as the previous. Yet, what designer hasn’t agonized about the idea factory in their noggin grinding to a halt prematurely? Thankfully, the more experienced have learned that creativity isn’t divine. It’s based in process and hard work.

Consequently many young designers fear process; they irrationally push away the sense that they are automating creativity. But by allowing a design process to relieve some of the burden of the “how,” designers can be free to focus on the “what.” This is nothing new; Ellen Lupton’s Graphic Design Thinking: Beyond Brainstorming. provides one hundred thirty-six techniques for generating results. A casual read-through will inspire and (re)acquaint you with the notion that not all great design is a result of light bulbs and lightning strikes. Great design often comes from just working smarter.

You must succeed.

What’s the expected retirement age these days? 80? (Best stay sharp, Cashdollar.) Watching my 401k dwindle reminds me there is always work to be done, and there is always opportunity for improvement. Fear keeps me sufficiently curious and striving to evolve into a smarter, faster, each-day-is-slightly-better-than-the-last-day designer. Fears help us recognize the consequences of our actions (or in-actions) and change behaviors for the better. Subsequently, repeated behaviors become habits. Shut the baby gate. Check the oil. Always place iPhone in front, left pants pocket.

Fear is powerful. What other options do we have? Mortgages, families, and recreational kickball leagues all demand our money and our time. Are they going anywhere? Are our lives getting less expensive? It’s not likely.

Failure is not an option. To paraphrase Ian Mackaye, this is a life-thing; there is no back-up career or family business to fall back on. I will fight to make this work regardless of what the blob is blathering about. Fear will not keep me from helping my clients, learning as much as I can from my talented peers, and creating something beautiful every day I step into the office.

But who won the Cup?

The Penguins won that fateful final game and brought the Stanley Cup back to Pittsburgh. Of course the team had the talent to win, but that short communication gave them license to relax in a very stressful situation. They were able to enjoy the moment and just do their job. Simply put, Mario’s message took the fear out of the fear of losing.

Sadly, not all of our bosses can send us morning motivational text messages before big days. And we can’t win every time, of course. Perhaps someday, we will be the New York Yankees of web design, but until then, all we can do is focus on what we do well. The more curious and more engaged of us will survive just fine. Seriously, how fast can a blob really move?

How do you “play without fear” in your job?

Since we deal with such variety, how we get to client-ready designs is as important as the outcome. Planning the right mix of tactics creates a roadmap that steers our team towards success. Situation-specific design exercises arm our designers with the ingredients for that success, and different clients require different recipes. Combining, tweaking, and blending techniques becomes part of the design-making process. Recognize a challenge? Bring the right tool for the job. Then the process becomes the art, and the design itself becomes the artifact.

You may recognize most of the ingredients that follow already, but the three specific situations for which we employ them might be a surprise.

1. Weak Brand

“Our brand just, well… isn’t exciting.”

The client’s brand needs an intervention, and they’ve decided the website is the place to start. Unfortunately, there isn’t a true rebranding effort anywhere in sight. A brand identity is made up of many different pieces; the logo, typeface choices, colors, voice, and tone. But the actual brand is the combined emotional experience of all these things. Contemplate the effect of this on your design process.

In this situation, we’ve found that jumping right into website layout exploration creates undue stress. Each website concept in our Rule of Three now has an additional, very heavy variable to solve. It must not only visualize a new experience, but it also has to introduce a smartly reinvigorated brand.

Our ingredient of choice here? Samantha Warren’s Style Tiles. By focusing a more precise effort into conversations with the client about the building blocks of their brand, we get brand consensus before moving onto the website.

Trying to hit the target by blending the brand work into the site layout creates a monster task, so when the brand is weak, we have presented the Style Tiles as the first step in visual design work. An agreed-upon, homogenized set of identity and brand design decisions saves countless hours downstream. Without this approach, feedback will inevitably be a blend of website critique and brand critique, and trying to sort out the mess can lead to endless rounds of revision and trouble finding a clear path forward.

2. Strong Brand but Inconsistent Identity

“Of course we have a brand identity! Here’s our 15 typefaces and 23 color swatches.”

Sometimes we have the honor of working with a world-renowned institution. And sometimes, they lack an internal brand identity shepherd. The pieces are there: logo, typefaces, colors…but their application is inconsistent. Turning this confusion into a logical visual design strategy can be tricky. A situation like this lead to our first successful use of Mood Boards.

Mood Boards always felt a bit too “arts and crafty” to me. They also seemed to be a very poor client-facing deliverable. Internally though, they work wonders. Wading through a schizophrenic brand and selecting different art directions is tough. Combined with a project that requires three different executions, it can be difficult to visualize where the concepts will go. Mood Boards have gotten us unstuck in this situation.

In our application of this ingredient, each of our three visual designers combines the identity building blocks with design ephemera to create a unique visual fingerprint. They push and pull their Mood Boards in different directions to represent divergent visual approaches quickly. When done well, a Mood Board becomes a lighthouse for staying true to an art direction. Honor thy Mood Board and thy Mood Board will lead the way.

3. Reliance on Cliched Approaches and Patterns

“Where’s our messaging carousel?”

Within our Rule of Three process, three different visual designers tackle visual design using the same set of wireframes. While we are prepared for the differences in the brand or identity in our designs, we also want to make the experiences of our concepts unique.

I hereby dub this process ingredient, which is relatively new to us, “Game the ‘Frame.” Despite the silly name, the tactic requires that we don’t simply execute upon the user interface patterns defined in the wireframes. We single out approaches to those interfaces that are considered cliché. Then, we partake in a sketching exercise that focuses just on the patterns in question. By sketching the translation of a single pattern or user interface element, designers are free from the stress of completing an entire page (for now). This achieves additional creativity by adding constraint.

For instance, take the pervasive web pattern known as the carousel.

Lately, the carousel has been under the microscope here at Happy Cog. Employed again and again, it has become synonymous with messaging-heavy modern web design. “Game the ‘Frame” looks at the purpose and function the carousel pattern brings to the site experience, but also acknowledges its shortcomings. We refuse to blindly accept a landscape photo box and two adjoining arrows. We break it apart. Rebuild it. We try to remember what it was like to play with LEGOS.

Steps to More Successful Design

Hopefully you’ve found these tactics promising, but the real moral of the story is this: never be satisfied with your process. New scenarios that require calling an audible help you innovate and hone your tactics.

Stop looking just at the end deliverable and take greater care to recognize the important opportunities for a better understanding of the design problem, or for the best of all tactics: good old-fashioned teamwork. The byproduct of this might mean less total hours spent in Photoshop, and no one will complain about that. Except maybe Adobe.

At Happy Cog, successful design means smarter process. There’s a stirring satisfaction from discovering and implementing new tactical tools that help us work better. The journey, as they say, is as important as the destination.

Critiques were cold sweat-inducing stress marathons. Didn’t have a strong reason why that purple was paired with that specific shade of orange? A furrowed brow and squinty stare was your reward. Wouldn’t divulge the driving impulse behind your Pollock-esque composition? Expect an audible “tsk, tsk, tsk” combined with a deliberate, slow shaking of his head. Couldn’t articulate the process of how you arrived at this particular solution? Expect the worst. Class then transformed into a whirlwind of loud and angry chastising that often resulted in the ejection of some poor soul’s blood, sweat and tears out the window.

The fear of humiliation in front of peers can be a strong motivator. In retrospect, Mr. Newhouse’s teaching tactics were incredibly valuable. The importance of being able to talk about finished work and eloquently defend design decisions was forever ingrained in my mind. Mr. Newhouse understood the significance of being able to justify your choices and expose what went on behind the curtain, even if it wasn’t the correct path.

That’s why I cringe upon hearing about web design trends described in such catch-all, light-beer words as “Clean,” “Minimalist” or “Modern.” Words of this calibre never expose the quality of a solution, regardless of how perfect the final design might be.

If you don’t know yet, design is causality. Every decision that goes into a properly researched design should have an intended effect. Need to break out of using pre-canned adjectives to describe design? Become comfortable in sharing the process of birthing a design. How did you make decisions about the visual relationships and content hierarchy on the page? Are the font pairings evoking the right mix of historical relevance and on-screen readability? Share the details that go beyond the obvious. Break down the visual characteristics to their origin in your process. Provide insight into the history and purpose of the design elements being employed. And don’t forget the most important part; how do these collective decisions come together and solve a problem? Designers are problem solvers, not style propagators. Attributing the success of a design solely to its cleanliness is like attributing my wife’s greatness solely to her “brunette-ness.”

Consequently, our industry needs to promote the idea of constructive criticism regarding visual design. Done correctly, it would go beyond just lumping work together by general-purpose attributes. We can openly regard what is cliché, what is convention and who is doing the really great work out there. No more lists of the best clean, minimal and simple websites necessary.

Sure, Mr. Newhouse wanted us to create great (color theory) work. Yet, finding the value in communicating design process ended up being the true lesson.

Of course there is a lot more to our process than that. During our visual design phase, the Rule of Three means distinguishing three unique but strategically related solutions. The ingredients for this cocktail can change. One project might be three different art directions built on the same user experience. Another might explore three very different user experiences, each with a similar look based on a well-honed identity. The three different designs fit together in a manner that presents a purposeful range. One might be structured on storytelling. Another might employ a highly focused primary navigation system based on key user tasks. We mix and match in a manner we feel will solve the important design problems while still exploring different conceptual directions.

Three provides the opportunity to solve beyond the expected. I can’t think of a project where it wasn’t worth our time to think beyond the obvious. When presenting our ideas, clients feel good because we are bringing some adventurous thinking to the table. We are exploring every nook and cranny, leaving no stone unturned. And my favorite part of this approach is that we involve the client in the decision-making process. They don’t feel like they are being dictated to or coerced into choosing our favorite design solution.

Irrational

I’m a practical person, and I realize that this approach has some painfully costly drawbacks:

• Time in total hours: Creating three independent stand-alone concepts uses a hefty share of the hours allocated for the design phase. Might those hours be more valuable later? Also, those extra hours add to our overall estimate, making it less competitive.
• Time in designer hours: Our Rule of Three also came with the stipulation that each design must be created by a different designer. That means that every new project immediately needs three designers. This can be very hard to plan for a shop juggling multiple projects.
• 2/3 of the effort is discarded: 99% of Happy Cog projects are structured around the idea of getting our clients to a good place, then letting the client take command. In many cases there won’t be a follow-up project. Unless some key ideas are plucked and saved from the unchosen directions for incorporation into the selected design, the work ends up on the design cutting room floor: unrecoverable and lost forever.

Rational

So what is a creative director to do? I love the range and quality of work that the Rule produces, but more often than I’d like, we find ourselves struggling to find the hours necessary to complete the design phase. We’ve tried some early phase intermediary deliverables like mood boards, and while they are great to get to an aesthetic earlier, the client doesn’t always understand them. Much like the glassy-eyed stare we occasionally get from presenting information architecture deliverables, early phase exploratory work is not always right for every situation.

We’ve also toyed with doing only one concept with multiple iterations. When I casually polled my Twitter followers this was the most popular process. Perhaps it is because of faster timelines, tighter budgets, fewer people working on a project, or all three. I don’t know if they’ve ever tried the Rule of Three.

And this makes me a bit sad.

I think of all the amazing work that will never be conceived. Or amazing work that was conceived but not nourished. Or amazing work that was never shared with the client to discuss its possible merits. How many great ideas never made it past the perhaps “too-quick-to-please-the-client” design director?

Designers should attack projects with obvious gusto. The best ones will always want to push boundaries and expand their range. With only one solution provided, is there a possibility that they might rely on their strengths and not stretch themselves? My experience has shown me that supporting this type of design process is a surefire way to ensure my team and I don’t grow.

Rationale

Thankfully, process is something we love to scrutinize here at Happy Cog. Expect my future Cognition posts to expose some of our tweaks and experimentation with the Rule of Three. And I’ll happily surface the realities of our process, as pretty or ugly as they might be.

Meanwhile, I’m still going to fight for stickin’ with the Rule. Quality and quantity still reign in this agency. But I concede that tough times call for more focused efforts. When you deliver one direction, are you confident it is the best direction? Is your design process ensuring that the sole idea is as strong as it can be? Or are you a Rule of Three believer, like myself?