How to Navigate the Design Maze — II

What does design do? Does it make things look good? Does it solve problems? Does it help in understanding users? Does it push our imagination forward?

If you ever felt confused about what design skills to build or what design skills to hire for, fasten your seat belts because we are about to fly into the world of design at full speed.

As a warm-up, go through this post by Julie Zhuo. And of course, the Part 1 of this post will help.

And now we commence. We will look at a spectrum of design skills, tools and outcomes. We will highlight the core design skills, the cluster of related skills which help define the core skill, and the tools which you need to master the skill. If you are too busy to read, just look at the images, and you will get most of this.

We begin with the simplest, and maybe the hardest.

Graphic Design

Graphic design — beauty, simplicity and creativity. Most people skilled at graphic design are good with sketching (their desks are littered with fineliners) and probably have a Wacom tablet, and are ninjas at Adobe tools — mainly Photoshop and Illustrator.

They hang out on behance and dribbble, and find inspiration on Pinterest too.

These skills help in delivering a compelling brand identity. Everyone from Google Ventures to Instagram goes for re-branding once in a while, and they need these skills to generate samples of logos as well as complete identity systems.

They are also useful in creating beautiful and functional User Interfaces — and hence serious product managers do not ignore these skills.

Snippet time:

He even got involved with colors and, you know, with how the computer physically looked, what color it was. One person he worked with complained that there were 2,000 shades of beige that were available, but Steve Jobs wanted to create his own because the other 2,000 shades of beige weren’t good enough. I think this was for the Apple II.

If you are an early stage consumer internet startup, you probably don’t need these skills — the first job is to find a product-market fit, and the CEO, or even the CTO can cook up some basic logos and UI. In fact, some investors actually like poorly-designed pitch decks — it signals that you did not ‘waste’ time on less important things. Just look at this thing Dave McLure made.

But as soon as the product-market fit problem is solved and you see real growth, good aesthetics will matter, and you better have these skills on board.

Next up: Digital Interaction Design

Most of the times, basic wireframes can be made in keynote or even powerpoint, polished in Sketch, and tested and shared using Marvel or InVision. A bit advanced (but very desirable) skill is front-end web design — HTML/CSS and JavaScript.

Unlike graphic design, these skills are easy to learn and the product manager at your startup is already probably doing it. But you need to have a lot of experience to get really good at creating intuitive and enjoyable interfaces. Find inspiration — here.

These skills help you build web and mobile apps, as well as interactive devices like kiosks at airports.

But while graphic design and digital interaction design are more of execution skills, you need a critical strategic skill for building a great product:

User Experience Design

If you read design blog posts, you might have seen an angry person who was like — “Don’t put UI/UX together ! They are completely different !”

The poor soul is right.

UX is more analytical, less design-y and requires another set of skills. A UX person needs to be involved from the beginning — hell, he or she should begin the product design.

The skills involve deep empathy, a desire to understand people, and the ability to connect with them — to discover their needs through interviews. Theoretical grounding in Psychology, Anthropology, and other people-centric domains helps.

You need to quantify the research and analyse the results. For this, a basic grasp of statistics gets you going. Then you can move on to the first wireframes which the UI designer can make concrete.

Once the product is launched, the UX designer can learn more about user behavior using tools like Google Analytics and add or remove features.

While the product design team works on making the best beautiful product, you need design to sell it too.

Enter Branding

Brand Management is a very broad term, going from conceptualization to execution and measurement, here I focus on the creative part.

Brands begin with names, continue with logos and brand claims, and include business cards, presentations, videos and other communication.

Branding is a conceptual skill which needs deep understanding of product as well as the company values, philosophy and the existing product line.

It matters less in startups — because they are still creating their first product and defining their values. But as your company grows up, the brand image becomes increasingly important. Typically MBAs are employed to take care of engaging with creative agencies to define requirements and measure brand performance.

While broad in scope, branding can become very specific. For example, there is a firm called Lexicon — which specializes in creating brand names. Its clients include Intel, Apple, and Blackberry.

These areas cover most of design for consumer internet startups. We can frame them together like this:

Thinking or ideation about your product requires UX skills, the actual making requires designers to be great at graphics and interaction design and a solid brand identity helps sell the product. As a Startup CEO, look at your product stage and fish for designers who have the required skills. As a designer, single out the skills which make you compelling for the given stage for a product.

But this is not all. To grow as a designer, a leader, to truly stand out from the noise, you need a set of:

Meta-skills

These are ideation, communication and business skills which are easy to define but difficult to master.

A great designer has great ides. Yes, yes, execution matters for success. But if you only need execution, you probably already have the ideas and don’t need a star designer.

A truly innovative designer pushes boundaries, has diverging ideas, and thinks from the ground up to solve problems. Ideation skills are built over a lifetime with more practice, and with learning about diverse fields.

Another way a great design leader stands out is communication — both public and private. This helps them multiply impact by harnessing other peoples’ design talent.

While these give a brief overview of what design looks like, this is barely the beginning. This is a fascinating world with a lot

More…

I will update more as I learn, till then, I wish you the best in your exploration :-)