How to Navigate the Design Maze

Design.

A powerful word which lends itself to many layered interpretations. And thus creates a lot of confusion for people starting out as designers, and people who want to hire them. Over last three years, I have dipped more than my feet into design in the real world, and this is what I have found.

You can separate design into these areas:

• Graphic Design (& Branding)
• Industrial Product Design
• Information Design
• Digital Product Design (or, UI/UX)
• Service Design
• Design Thinking

Graphic Design

The design of things you see.

Visual design, illustrations, and more importantly, logos and branding fall in this zone. While most graphic design (or prettiness) itself adds limited value, the overall visual identity does. Creating a new brand vision requires a blend of deep conceptual thinking and creativity. Companies like Fabrique do an outstanding job at it.

While logos, stationery, and business cards are standard parts of a branding project, some clients also ask for websites and videos. Delivering the whole package becomes challenging, and you add a ton of value.

You need to have amazing visual acumen to deliver on these projects — after all, clients are paying for that — as well as a deep understanding of business needs. Logo design has a less talked about secret — it needs you to be a story-teller and salesman. You cannot touch a logo (unlike an iPod), and you cannot measure it’s performance (unlike an app), and hence the only way to convince a client is to have a damn good story — presented flawlessly. This is also why pricing for logos varies wildly, and sometimes big companies with their big budgets end up with logo design fiascos.

Other graphic design deliverables include infographics, illustrations and posters — which may be smaller, but challenging projects. A medium sized infographic design project can take up to a month and cost more than 500 dollars. Sometimes presentation design is thrown into the mix. Companies like Duarte are known for creating persuasive presentations.

Yet another area of visual design is the enchanting world of Typography. You will not believe the depth of this field. There are many books, youtube videos and even movies made about fonts. Mostly, this skill comes into play for Logo design projects (when a brand name itself is used as a distinct logo, it’s called a ‘word mark’, think ‘Coca Cola’).

Industrial Product Design

The design of things you touch and feel. This can be a can of spray paint, a BMW car, and of course, your (desired?) iPhone. For more examples check out the work of the Dutch design firm Van Berlo.

This needs phenomenal sketching skills & loads of imagination. And I can safely say that it needs years of practice. While things begin with visuals, you have to take into account materials, ergonomics and context. I have little experience in this area (I wish I had), hence will leave you now to explore this on your own. I promise you will find this exciting.

Information Design

In a world drowning in data, there is enormous value in expressing its meaning as fast as possible. So, say hello to clever and beautiful graphs and charts from companies like Tableau. There are books and authors devoted specifically to this field. And websites like these showcase the full power of information design.

This is slightly different and more strategic than infographics design. Infographics are used as marketing material (hence clubbed with branding) — they explain an idea to customers. They tell a story. Whereas information design is meant for rushed data-driven managers. It makes it easier for them to find a story.

If you have good visual design skills as well as a passion for data, you can deliver great results on information design projects.

Digital Product Design

With the rise of consumer internet startups — from Facebook to Medium, need for digital product design has heated up. And hence you hear the term UI/UX design. There is more to it than just making apps and websites. A digital product designer studies how a user interacts with the product (not just looks at it) and this is why many people also call it ‘interaction design’. And when the products get more complex, like a Tesla car’s dashboard, the serious label ‘Human Computer Interaction’ seems more apt.

Another feature separating digital design from the others is that it is highly flexible and measurable. Facebook and Quora make minor changes every few weeks to the UI without a lot of people noticing (but their behavior doeschange). And the folks at the company can see exactly how the new change is affecting user behavior and their desired metrics. This rich real-time feedback can help a designer deliver outcomes with high impact, and ensure that the work is literally never finished.

While in practice I think UI (User Interface) and UX (User Experience) are intertwined because the user experiences the interface, we can make some conceptual differences.

UX design relates to understanding the needs of your potential user. As a user researcher, you interview users and observe them in context — that thing they are doing for which they need your design. Based on this, you create user stories and personas to get a clear idea of what the user wants, and how he or she behaves in the context you are designing for. Until now, no visual design skill is needed — apart from maybe drawing stick figures in user stories. The core skills for this work is conceptual thinking, as well as the energy and willingness to go out and talk to people, and make them comfortable in sharing their pains.

After getting some idea of user needs, a UX designer needs to build a prototype, which is a wireframe of the desired interaction and then get it tested by early users. Once the direction is clear, the UI designer can step in to transform those wireframes into mockups with buttons having the right shade of blue. UI design borrows ideas from graphic and print design, but a great UI is not critical to get your product going. Just go a quick google search for the early UIs of many sites you use today.

Since most startups are consumer internet companies, they are prime destinations for UI and UX designers. Also, consultancies like Mobgen deliver the designs to established bigger companies.

Service Design

This holds more relevance in bigger companies who want to provide a better customer experience. For example, a bank making its financial services easy to use. Companies like Koos deliver service design projects. They focus on emotions felt by customers at various stages of interaction with the service. The intangibility and subjectivity of emotions and feelings makes these projects challenging.

Qualitative analysis tools like customer journeys are employed to structure these problems. Sometimes designers develop new qualitative frameworks for a specific company. The process resembles the user research phase of digital product design — it requires deep conceptual thinking as well as empathy.

Given it’s fuzziness, measuring the impact of service design is difficult. Sometime you measure through the brand’s NPS (Net Promoter Score). In some cases, the service design consulting company is incentivized on basis of increases in net promoter score.

Sometimes, service design may include creating of products (like apps) making the project even more challenging and interesting.

Design Thinking

This is what you get when MBAs wanna design.

Not hating on MBAs, I have that degree too, but ‘Design Thinking’ gets tossed around too much as a cure-all. When you brainstorm more openly using a designer’s tools (like mind-mapping, sketches, prototypes), you can call it Design Thinking. And the marketing-centric MBA has much to contribute here. But it is mostly a more structured ideation process which sometimes leads to good products or good features. And it is fast. The famous Google Ventures Design Sprint takes just 5 days !

— -

This is just the tip of the colorful design iceberg, and there are so many other terms like Human-Centred Design, Design Strategy, Game Design and Product Management which I have not addressed here, but I hope this sheds a bit more light on what designers do. And I will update as I learn more.

Please share your ideas on how you think designers create an impact.