Flavours of Design
“What type of designer are you?”
It comes up in every interview. I’ve missed out on jobs because they didn’t know where to put me in their company. They wanted me, but I didn’t fit into their boxes. (Their loss).
As Head of Design at Code Enigma, I never want to put anyone in a box.
Code Enigma is a very technically-savvy company. We’re conscious sometimes we speak in t3ch sp33k and others might not understand us. When I joined, design was fledgeling. We hadn’t done much design work of our own, even though we’d had designers for years. Normally, they would collaborate with external agencies like Stuff and Nonsense to create designs and we’d implement them.
As the company grew, things changed. We started designing for our clients. We became a profitable team. We’re busy, but we’re not complete. There’s a gap.
Between the two of us, Aaron and I cover a lot of design base, but we can’t cover everything under the umbrella of “design”. It’s a big umbrella. There are a lot of articles about ‘flavours’ of design on the internet, from architecture, packaging design, communication design and motion design.
There’s a good diagram which sparked debate a few years ago. Is the diagram complete? Does X cross over Y? I’m not reigniting that argument. I’m looking closer at the parts of design we do and want to do at Code Enigma.
We’re Unicorn designers
As much as I don’t want to put people in boxes, we have to assign roles and responsibilities in our team and company. We do this to understand what we’re doing. As there are only two of us we’re able to utilise and overcome our respective strengths and weaknesses.
We don’t do much motion design and I’m sure we won’t have any architectural jobs coming up. It’s safe to say we rotate within a set of flavours.
As a relatively small web agency specialising in Drupal, we focus on digital design and disciplines under that umbrella. We’re both good at brand design and both come from a traditional print background. We’re able to create marketing materials for our awesome marketing manger. We do information architecture and user testing, we write code, we make things look aesthetically-pleasing and, most importantly, we solve problems.
As a team, we believe our role is to gather research and stories to test, validate and refine solutions to our clients’ problems. Our job is to create ease-of-use. We help our clients delight their users in a way that is beautifully simple and effective. We do this under the constraints of being an agency, having a budget and a deadline.
Together we’re a pretty good team! Currently, I look after the business side of things; from our team goals and analytics to ensure we produce effective code, create robust solutions and that everyone is aware of how to do so.
Aaron is front and centre when it comes to design. He rebranded the entire company. Everything from the website to mugs and reusable water bottles. He creates thoughtful designs that solve our clients’ problems with usable solutions. He provides value for money and doesn’t over-complicate things.
We’re close to our developers. Together we turn our designs into Drupal themes. Most of them don’t really like CSS; it’s like showing a vampire a beautiful sunset and they run away, melting. We get it. They’re backend devs for a reason and they don’t have to like it. Just like we’re not so keen on playing with Drupal’s theming layer. That’s why teamwork is key at Code Enigma.
Though we can do all of these things, we feel there are areas where we lack strength. We’re strong believers in being T or Pi shaped designers (comb-shaped feels like too much, for us). We don’t hide this fact from clients; content design is a flavour we both appreciate, but cannot do it ourselves! (You should see the first draft of this blog post before the awesome marketing manager worked her magic on it).
It’s clear there’s a gap.
We’re missing someone who really gets frontend performance. The beauty of code. We can both do it, but there’s room to improve. We’re passionate about using only HTML and CSS when we can, accessibility is high in our principles and we’re working hard to improve.
If you feel like you’d be the chocolate in our Neapolitan, the Huey to our Duey and Louie, then we want to make wonderful things with you!
