Designing Around Deficiency
How I Solve for the Stuff I Suck At
As a young designer, I was as optimistic about my burgeoning career as I was naïve.
My first industry job was with a dot-com era startup. We were building a product and team we were all proud to be a part of, working long hours, and I was soaking up as much knowledge as I was able via associates who had many years worth of experience on me.
One of my counterpart designers was, like me, versed in what he referred to as the “bread and butter apps,” those which now make up the core of Adobe’s Creative Cloud offering. We both also handled all of our small firm’s front-end development needs.
This particular associate was, however, also capable at writing content management and e-commerce software on the server side. Further, he designed titles and motion graphics, edited video, modeled and animated in 3D and seemed to have a working knowledge of every piece of software available for the Macintosh.
I had quite a lot to learn, I quickly assessed. And I set out, determined to become expert in every imaginable discipline of design and development.
Experience would eventually temper my hyperactive ambitions and, in time, I rather instinctively settled into the disciplines that would become my craft; those now referred to as User Experience Design, Visual & User Interface Design, Front-End Development and Creative Coding + Data Visualization.
Shedding excess aspirations would free up all the time needed, I imagined, for me to gain a comprehensive expertise in these, the arenas I had become so enamored of. And, while I am, today, more than happy with the knowledge and capability afforded me via years of experience, a few skills haven’t fallen into place along the way, as I once imagined they so naturally would.
With this in mind, I would like to outline a few of the things I totally suck at, and the techniques I employ to circumvent these deficiencies.
1. Color Theory
Color matching, knowing the visual effect a of particular color combination and the ability to assemble beautiful palettes of primary, secondary and tertiary colors; these are capacities I could not fake on my best day. I immediately know which color combinations I love, but only when faced with them. I cannot create a working palette from scratch.
As a designer, it wasn’t long into my career before I realized this to be an obvious issue for which resolution was required.
My initial solutions came by studying the mathematics of color matching. I would first choose whatever the primary color outlined in the style guide from which I worked, and set it as my base. I then wrote algorithms within which to feed this base color that returned RGB values to pair with the base using various color rules.
In late-2006, Adobe made this practice decidedly easier for me via an oddly-named product called ‘Kuler’ (now more appropriately named ‘Color’), a site — and now accompanying iOS app — that allows you to quickly visualize palettes based upon the same color rules I was using in my programmatic solutions.
Whether an app-based approach or one governed by research-driven solutions crafted with code, I have used math to assist me in creating color palettes for nearly everything I have ever designed.
2. Typography
The arc of my career has progressed in lockstep synchrony with the growth of the web, a medium upon which type has long occupied a second-class station. Contemporary technologies like CSS3, modern JavaScript libraries and HiDPI displays have only recently granted us the opportunity to enjoy some of the typographic luxuries communication designers have taken for granted for more than a century.
However, even as these new capabilities began to arrive on the web, I was many years conditioned in my go-to screen design practices. I had long been accustomed to working with a paltry few web-safe typefaces, with no control over even basic properties like kerning.
Thankfully — as per my color palette deficiency — I know type pairings and treatments I adore on sight. And, with the explosion of web font activity that has occurred since the introduction of the HTML5 and CSS3 web specifications, there is, all of a sudden, no shortage of resources and inspiration from which to draw.
Chad Mazzola’s Beautiful Web Type, Phoebe E’s Hand-picked tales from Æsop’s Fables with hand-picked type from Google Fonts, and resources like Type Genius from Muno are just a few that have endlessly inspired me to pay better mind to a discipline long ignored on the web. Further, I regularly pull from Andrew Wong’s repository of Google’s open source web font database, such that I might enjoy experimenting with these faces and pairings both online and off.
When I happen upon any lovely pairing or showcase of inspiring typographic work, I immediately save it to Evernote for later reference. These collections of logged inspirations inform my every visual design.
3. Writing
Writing helps me to be more reflective. I find it endlessly relaxing and, in some cases — like this one — even cathartic.
That said, I am a champion of the adverbial modifier. Further, I can be needlessly verbose, especially when I’m writing on a topic for which I’ve no shortage of passion.
To force myself to improve both my writing and editing, I created a project I call, ‘Restored Stories.’
Restored Stories is a writing exercise wherein I browse photographs from the public domain on Flickr’s Creative Commons page. Rather than reading a photograph’s caption, I try to imagine what instead might be taking place in the captured scene. When an idea comes to mind about a particular image, I write a story to accompany the photo.
The catch is that the my every story auto-publishes to each of the major social media properties, including Twitter. With the story’s accompanying photo included in the tweet — along with a few characters lost to automation — each story is limited to a meager 116 characters.
After 100 stories and the many lessons offered via every painful-yet-necessary edit, my most meaningful learning was an obvious one: just as in every other discipline of design, all of the material you take away is of equal importance to that which is required to remain.
Inspired by a quote from LCD Soundsystem’s James Murphy, I recently wrote about learning by scratching your own itch, that ‘The Best Way to Complain is To Make Things.’ Only now, in writing this piece, have I come to realize I have abided by this mantra throughout my career.
I’ve long been meaning to write on the topic of my professional shortcomings, if for no other reason than as a reminder to myself: deficiencies are nothing more than design challenges around which a solution has yet to be crafted.
