How To Identify Good Design.
Firstly, let’s look at the different kinds of design, before heading on to being a Good design detective, this entails how to See efficiently, questions to ask yourself when designing and a bit of other stuffs.
So my definition of the various kinds of design will be relative to an individual. Let’s start with:
1) Graphic Designer:
A Graphic designer typically works with graphical images, could be illustrations, typography, or images, and on a variety of media including print and web. Graphic designs are usually rendered in 2D — printed on a physical surface or displayed on a screen. This also describes an array of independent kinds of designers.
Think of it like the term “entrepreneur”. It describes a wide variety of business people — from founders to VC’s to “Chief Ninjas” — but isn’t all-inclusive. A type of graphic designer that works exclusively with print media. Before the widespread adoption of computers, software, and the web, virtually all graphic designers worked on print media such as posters, magazines, billboards, and books. Print designers are typically masters of typography, illustration, and traditional printing processes like the Linotype machine or the letterpress machine, a 500-year-old printing method that has regained popularity in recent years for its handmade and traditional feel.
2) Interaction Designer:
Interaction designers are concerned about interactive software design and digital products. For instance, software applications like Facebook, GitHub, Trello, and operating systems, are typical examples of where an interaction designer can exhibit his/her expertise. Interaction design assist humans experience or manipulate interfaces with screen-based hardware in order to achieve specific goals like creating pull requests, viewing a profile, commenting on a post or “clapping” as in the case of Medium.
“Interaction design is heavily focused on satisfying the needs and desires of the people who will use the product.”
An interaction designer is often referred to as a User Interface Designer and/or a User Experience designer.
User Interface Design:
User Interface (UI) design is the design of software or websites with the focus on the user’s experience and interaction. The goal of user interface design is to make the user’s interaction as simple and efficient as possible. Good user interface design puts emphasis on goals and completing tasks, and good UI design never draws more attention to itself than enforcing user goals.
“The design process must balance technical functionality and visual elements to create a system that is not only operational but also usable and adaptable to changing user needs.”
User Experience Design:
User Experience (UX) design “incorporates aspects of psychology, anthropology, sociology, computer science, graphic design, industrial design and cognitive science. Depending on the purpose of the product, UX may also involve content design disciplines such as communication design, instructional design, or game design.”
The goal of UX design is to create a seamless, simple, and useful interaction between a user and a product, whether it be hardware or software. As with UI design, user experience design focuses on creating interactions designed to meet or assist a user’s goals and needs.
3) Industrial Designer:
Industrial designers create physical products designated for mass-consumption by millions of people. Motorcycles, iPods, toothbrushes, and nightstands are all designed by industrial designers. These people are masters of physical goods and innovation within the constraints of production lines and machines.
“The objective is to study both function and form, and the connection between product, the user, and the environment.”
Back to being a ‘Good design detective” , I’m assuming you are a design newbie (means you are new to the concept “design”) or maybe not new, but you were probably surfing the internet searching for articles related to design and you ended up reading this! Feels like you got a bonus,this article is an overview on what to look out for, prior to tagging a design ‘design’ before adding the prefix ‘good’. We will be putting into consideration the following:
- Principles for good design.
- Learning to see.
Principles for good design.
- Good design is innovative.
- Good design makes a product useful.
- Good design is aesthetic.
- Good design makes a product understandable.
- Good design is unobtrusive.
- Good design is honest.
- Good design is long-lasting.
- Good design is thorough down to the last detail.
- Good design is environmentally-friendly.
- Good design is as little design as possible(simplicity at its best).
Learning to see.
Depending on how you read the tittle of my article, you will read the words in the tittle as “Are you a “Good Design Detective” wanna be? but its actually “Are you are “Good Design Detective” wanna be?. If you actually noticed it as an error at the initial glance, pat yourself on the back, :). I owe you a cookie.
The physical stimulus ‘a’ is registered in your memory but is perceived differently because of the influence of the context in which the sentence appears. We EXPECT to see the letter “a” in the context of other letters of the alphabet.
Learning to design is, first of all, learning to see. Designers see more, and more precisely. This is a blessing and a curse — once we have learned to see design, both good and bad, we cannot un-see. The downside is that the more you learn to see, the more you lose your “common” eye, the eye you design for. This can be frustrating for us designers when we work for a customer with a bad eye and strong opinions. But this is no justification for designer arrogance or eye-rolling. Part of our job is to make the invisible visible, to clearly express what we see, feel and do. You can’t expect to sell what you can’t explain.
This is why excellent designers do not just develop a sharper eye. They try to keep their ability to see things as a customer would.
On this note, as a designer when designing You need a design eye to design but in order to feel your design you need a non-design eye to actually feel what you designed😊.
Thank you for reading, you deserve an applaud 👏.
