Lorenzo Franchini
UI/UX Designer from Verona, Italy
I’m 27 years old and I work as a freelance in my city, Verona. Since 2012 I’ve been focusing on UI design and I’ve been working with clients from all over the world. My life is inspired by all kinds of design, every day.
When your friends or parents ask to you what job do you do, how do you answer?
It’s never easy to explain my job. I start saying that I design user interfaces, and since the first reaction is always a straight face, I just take my iPhone and show an app I designed. I never say “User Experience” because I’m sure no one would understand what it is — sometimes I don’t, too.
What is your background, how did you train?
Despite I attended a non-design high school, I’ve always been unconsciously passionated about UI. When I was 16, I bought a phone just for the design of the icons in the menu. I then attended a 3-years long Multimedia Design school, but only afterwards I realized I wanted to focus exclusively on UI.
What the web can do to make this world a better place? How did the web improve your life( if it did)?
Everyone knows that the web is an incredible tool, but every tool can be used and pushed in many ways, good and bad, especially with the social networks boom. Personally, the web enhances my life simply because 100% of my work comes from there. Also, on the web I can explore, learn, confront myself with other designers, but mostly I can constantly keep myself updated about the world of design, and this is a must, because it’s a world that evolves really fast, especially talking about UI and UX.
Can you show us three examples of interface that in your opinion improved human life?
I can just think of one, the most important for me: the sign/gesture on a surface, which has evolved from petroglyphs to the written word to pixels on a screen.
On quora.com, time ago there was a long discussion in answer to the question “what is the most intuitive interface ever created?”; according to Felipe Rocha it is the nipple, in your opinion instead? (http://www.quora.com/What-are-the-most-intuitive-interfaces-ever-created)
Hard question, I could think about it endlessly. I don’t agree with the “nipple”, because it’s not something that we first observe and then understand. We instinctively seek for it, it’s like a pre-installed interface in our brain, while I think that an intuitive interface is something that we don’t know at all, something that we first observe and then immediately understand. Two simple examples could be the ball we play with when we are children, or the trycicle.
How is your work day type?
I work as a freelance from home and this lets me manage my work in a pretty flexible way. On the other hand, I work with clients who live in timezones that are pretty different from mine — United States and Australia for example —, so I need to organize my day according to this.
My working hours are from 9.30 to 6.30, but I often take breaks to clear my mind, mostly playing different instruments. Unless I have some urgent work, I want to respect this hours. I’m lucky enough to do a job that I love, but I don’t want to overload my free time with too much work if I don’t need to.
What is the most stimulating and challenging project you have accomplished?
Let me pick two: Watchup, a video news application that is pretty popular in the United States and that is constantly featured in the App Store. It started exclusively for iPad but now we’re progressively launching it on new platforms — some predictable, like Android, some not. The key feature of this app is multitasking, so it’s been and still is very intriguing to experiment with this aspect.
The other one is LetterGlow, an App Store featured iPhone app to apply text, shapes and graphics to your photos. It’s been an exciting work that needed a lot of dedicated icons, a well organized structure and a simple interface to let the users focus on their contents.
What is, among the existing digital services, the one you wanted to do?
Twitter, Instagram and Medium. I love minimal, simple and well-shaped services that focus on a few number of things, instead of big and chaotic ones.
Many designers commit the mistake of starting a project directly from Photoshop, is there a perfect design method? What is your approach to the creative process?
I don’t think there is a perfect method. When you start from scratch, doing some sketches on a paper helps you to better define your ideas, but lots of designer have a great imagination and do virtual sketches in their mind, starting immediately on the computer.
Personally I don’t consider it as an error, but you have to know the game very well. Each person has his/her own logic and should follow the method that is most spontaneous, but at the same time a method that fits with the type of project.
It also depends on the status of the project. Sometimes I receive structured wireframes, sometimes I have to define the entire UX and the navigation, so there’s not a classic pattern.
The “design” is an important part of our analogic life. What is the role of the designer in our digital life?
LIke it or not, our life is becoming more and more digital. Therefore I believe that the role of a designer is to simplify the logic and the usability of what people see on a display, especially considering that with smartphones and tablets we’re just at the beginning of a series of new devices that will primarily express themselves through a visual interface.
Do you believe it is important for a designer to have a deep knowledge of matters as User Experience, Interaction Design, Product Design, and Front-end development?
It depends of which level of control you want to achieve. It’s clear that a designer who works on UI, UX, logic, interactions, animations and final implementations — e.g.: front-end development, talking about web — can achieve a really high level of quality, because of the complete control of all the ingredients that only in deep harmony can work perfectly.
Usually everything is fragmented between more people, and creating a well-fitted team is not that easy, especially when each person lives in a different part of the world.
Anyway, I think it’s helpful to know the basics of the implementation part. Often some designers don’t know anything about front-end development and they end up delivering a design that can’t be completely realized because they don’t know the rules and the limits of what’s outside of their canvas.
In which way do you make a difference between User Interface and user experience?
UI is tangible, the immediate contact with the user, the surface. UX, on the other side, is the almost invisible part, but otherwise perceived when it’s well defined. Needless to say that the best apps and websites are the ones that merge UI & UX in the best way possible.
What is your relationship with the developers? There are people that have a relationship of continuous confrontation and other of deep friendship, where do you collocate with respect to this question?
I usually have a good relationship with the developers I collaborate with, because I always try to be realist, avoiding creating useless obstacles. It also obviously depends on the people you work with. If they are transparent, efficient, practical and I do the same, I don’t see any chance for problems.
How do you think that your career and job will evolve in the next 5 years?
This specific area of design — UI & UX — evolves very fast, conceptually but also technically. Sometimes it’s still hard to believe that the world of mobile apps was born just 5 years ago. We can even say that the UI/UX designer job has indeed just started.
My job will depend on which hardware and devices will be introduced in the coming years, since each new product, if opened to third-party developers, can have its own ecosystem of applications. 5 years in this design area are a lot, and this is why I know that my future is constantly changing, but at the same time I believe that user interfaces will never disappear. Devices, platform and interactions will change, but I do strongly believe that the visual feedback of a display will always be a constant.
This is very exciting and makes me hope that my job won’t be stale for decades, but always evolving.
What do you think about Dribbble? Is it a good way to get a job? What’s the best way to find a job as designer?
I love design books, but in the last few years websites about design are really taking over. They’re like always updated digital books. This is why it’s hard for me to suggest books about UI, but I can suggest two design books that really inspires me: “One Day” by Emil Kozak and “Philographics” by Genis Carreras.
Always as far as advices: what tools for the design? What tools for the projects management ?
I think that the perfect UI design tool doesn’t exist yet. Personally I’ve always worked with Adobe Fireworks, simply because it was born to design user interfaces, unlike Photoshop or Illustrator. Anyway I’m very excited because it seems we’ll se new UI-focused tools in the near future. Adobe itself launched a survey last year about a new UI tool, so let’s hope they have understood we need a proper tool focused on UI — I hope to see some news in the next version of their suite. Also, the great guys of Bohemian Coding have just launched Sketch 3 and it could really becomes my next work tool. Skala from Bjango is on its way too, so there’s a lot going on and this is good for designers.
About projects management, every client I work with prefers a different tool, so I have to use more than one: Podio, PivotalTracker, Basecamp, Evernote. I also created a small tool for my personal use —http://whally.me —, to organize my projects and todos depending on the urgency.
Dribbble : https://dribbble.com/ilmagodiloz
Website : http://antartico.in/
FRONTIERSX November 12–13th, 2015, Milan, Italy
As the meeting point of design, technology and everything interactive, this year we’ll dive deep through innovation and disruption in Banking, Health and Retail industries.
