A brand that changes the world

Branding/rebranding a large company requires a universal user experience. Visual consistency promotes a strongly focused perception of what a company is and is not. The more widely used a company products and services are used determines the difference between mere suggestion and conformity.

Its not a secret that success is achieved when name reference alone is enough to immediately ‘know’ it—to be able to understand through experiential-interaction rather than explanation. However whether this is gained through time, or persuasion makes a difference in how a company is perceived on a moral-level. Saying that you’re ‘not disreputable’ does not a honest company  make. Taking time to ask and test users molds honest attempt. Speeding through the process using quickly measured numbers and individual theories isn’t.

A company whose brand has world-wide influence, has the ability to change the way people use the web. They have the ability to undermine and redefine usability by eliminating choice. While changes may be efficient from a company’s point of view, it is entirely disruptive to everyone else. In this age where speed equals efficiency and affects revenue, having to learn a new ‘language’ changes the ecosystems and paradigms.

Whether a company’s solution is better is irrelevant when you take time and choice away from its users. A system has been created at the switch of a button, and right-handed users have learned to write with their left hand overnight. What may be ‘natural’ has become unnatural, and simply put, works. Macintosh users have been through this ‘Catholic School’ regimen before when Apple took away their floppy disks, and made them use one-button hockey-puck-shaped mice. Currently all new MacBook touch-pads are inverted and deemed ‘natural’. While this may work for a subset of consumers who are willing to make a change, you can’t expect the same with the Tower of Babel.

While there are other similar solutions and companies to choose from, they are hidden from most users. For those living in the Silicon Valley bubble, the existence of Firefox, Internet Explorer, Opera, Safari, Hotmail, Yahoo!, etc. is elementary. The fact is that most people don’t know or care what they use to get information on the web. How else did Internet Explorer become so widely used? Natural or not, learned behavior is faster than having to re-learn and adjust. The incorrect and irresponsible perception is that change is good medicine that needs to be forced down users’ throats.

‘Not being disreputable’ means having your brand adapt and be informed by the needs of your users. Thinking ‘visual uniformity’ is all you need to create a brand is short-sighted and works for products that most people aren’t dependent upon. It  is,  plain and simple arrogant.

When you’re a company whose brand changes human behavior there is an ethical responsibility to keep users productive while giving them choice.

Emotional Design

To understand what emotional design means, we must explore what emotion means, not in dictionary terms, but how we ‘feel’ it everyday.

Emotional design elicits a conversation between us and the world. It speaks to one of more of our basic senses—sight, hearing, touch, smell, and taste.

When it comes to our experiences with the web it is (currently) limited to sight and sound. Designing experiences for the web attempts to start a conversation with that in mind.

One common mistake that some designers and marketers make is that they focus on the initial introduction of sight and sound, but rarely engage in a conversation with the user. It’s akin to meeting a beautiful, charismatic person, only to have them walk away. People talk and admire movie stars and models but they can never say that they know what’s beyond the surface.

When we design for the web, we must keep in mind that we want to not only tell the user who we are but to let them know that we truly care about them as well. We can’t be pretentions or give an air of superiority, but truly listen and gain their respect and friendship.

As we design enterprise solutions we must not become door-to-door salesmen. We provide ideas and solutions that show that we care enough about their problems in order to help them solve the problems in their lives.

In conclusion, we need to truly listen and care about the user as if they were people.

Selfish Design

Its difficult when clients get so into a project that they can’t get past the design of it in order to understand that it won’t translate to a completely different site with different requirements.

Its especially hard for me, because I fight the urge to ‘take’ from other designs, and struggle to come up with something completely original. If I can’t do this, I don’t feel that I’ve truly done my job.

The real product shot of the Galaxy Nexus

It is easy to ‘port’ over a design, and in a lot of cases, people will be happy with it. Some even win awards even though they are unoriginal. However, what are designers really doing when they ‘copy’ trends? They’re doing it for themselves.

Original concept sketch

A lot of emphasis has been put on the ‘experience’. Words like ‘magical’ are synonymous with award-winning design. But its disingenuous to think that they are real solutions. The reality is that they can be self-serving to the point that they’re completely unusable. Design transforms into art. Art becomes the experience.

There’s a lot of emotion, some would call magic, found in art. However, art, good art, is subjective. Movies provide great experiences to some, but are just as likely to be a horrible waste of time to others. There’s no denying that art can be very ‘magical’. It doesn’t make it universally acceptable or understood. A great design experience should strive to be universally acceptable and useable to its target audience.

Its increasingly becoming a trend to designing sites to impress rather than to be useable. One example would be ‘parallax’ scrolling. It works great for some sites which integrate it into their message, but as a design mechanic on its own, it is an extreme example of bad, chaotic design with no thought behind it. Simply put, in most cases, they’re terribly ‘one visit’ sites which provide an awful and embarrassing user experience.

A website is not a movie and its not a work of art (unless it is). In most cases, its a way to communicate with the user, and to provide them with relevant information in a timely manner. Designing a website otherwise is a selfish act of masturbation.

Design Exhaustion

I previously criticized mentors who I felt had ‘given up’ on doing great work, but now I realize that they just got tired. The older you get, the harder it is to keep up, and the easier it becomes to direct. That coupled with the monetary incentives has enough to let go. Why be masochistic about it, when you can be rich and comfortable?

Creation and innovation is hard work. Its emotionally-charged, and because of that, it’s unstable and exhausting to keep going. Unlike other things in life, the act of creation gets harder the older you become. Its easier for the young to find inspiration in life because they lack experience. They ‘see’ things that the older have become blind to. They have the energy to see things through. Their insecurity gives them this. It feeds the need to prove themselves to the world, and the end product is not only glorious, but exhilarating.

Going back to the older creators, I don’t want to give the impression of ‘jadedness’. For, even though some of us take that perspective, a lot of us want to continue to create. Whether its takes the form of enabling those who are inexperienced or taking the self-immolating path of pushing forward, is dependent upon the individual.

There’s a part of me which is feeling the exhaustion. Scales are forming cataracts over my ‘mental eyes’ and my path is harder to see. Its like being extremely tired and seeing a bed. It’d be so easy to fall upon it.

But I’m not going to. I define myself as a designer, amidst all the struggle and self-doubt which accumulate over the years. Some would question the ‘self-doubting’ part. Wouldn’t we become more confident with age? In some ways we do. We come to understand our clients needs better. We understand how relationships matter, and how to work with others. The core is there. Its the media which is changing at such a fast pace. Print design took a lot slower to evolve, and yet, even print design is being propelled into change by the digital age.

So when it comes to the ‘self-doubt’ I speak of, its in regards to pushing something that is evolving everyday. I wasn’t born into this digital age, I adopted it, and, while I can fluently speak the language, I am not a native.

Other ‘adopters’ like I, must push ourselves more and throw off the shackles of ‘what can’t be done’. We are prisoners to our youth, to the past where communication tools were physical rather than virtual. When we explore design, we need to fight our instincts that ‘it can’t be done’ and adopt this generations’it can, and it will’.

I’ve been able to do this successfully so far, however I’d be lying if I said I worked a 9-5 job. I’d be lying if I said I didn’t do my ‘homework’ every waking hour, and lose sleep problem-solving.

I’d also be lying if I told you I’m ready to quit it all right now—that their isn’t a challenge I find uninteresting. Contrary to belief, old dogs can still learn new tricks.

Quote which resonates with me

“The most common misunderstanding I encounter has to do with the perception of clients. I’d say 90% of the clients I’ve dealt with underestimate the amount of work that making a website will be on their end. Paying a designer to make them a website isn’t enough; the entire design depends on what content and message they wish to convey, and most of them don’t realize how much thought they need to put into that. It’s amazing to think that you can wait three weeks for a single paragraph of text from a client for their home page, but it happens regularly.”

Jay Hilgert, from The Smashing Book

After the Launch

November 2010

As I write this, I still can’t get past the awe of designing a site that close to 2 million people have visited since it launched this morning.

Awe. I’ve don’t recall ever using the word, nor thinking that I would ever understand it, but here I am, dumbstruck in the relevance that one tiny group in Mountain View can make in the lives of others. Literally within seconds of pushing the site live, tweets started to pour in. Paragraphs appeared faster than I could imagine the human hands were able to type. It was as if people were hitting the refresh key on our URL in anticipation.

Why am I writing this? I would like to say that none of it is about pride, but I’d be doing a disservice to myself and my teammates who have worked relentlessly during the last couple of months to prove that great design can be done within Google. To show that, when relentlessly pursued and backed with the extra effort it takes to prove that design is powerful even when not exactly quantifiable, the investment in an engaging user experience can make a huge difference in both the cost and effectiveness of a successful website.

Post Mortem: Nexus S Microsite

I’d decided to wait awhile to write about my experience working on the Google Nexus S site.

Designing is personal. Its a craft that can take an emotional toll. The long hours, the struggle to do something ‘better’ —it’s a byproduct of ego. One of the worst things that a designer can be labeled is being ‘unoriginal’. Criticism can be a bitch when it comes to design.

The best way to take negative criticism is to let it settle. Gather it up but don’t respond to it right away. Let all the fear, anger, and insecurity pale in time, and return to it afterwards. You grow as a designer when you’re able to scale back the blinding emotions and see things as objectively as you can.

I tend to place more weight on the negative comments than the positive. What can you really learn from the ‘pat on the backs’? The design looks great. People are happy. It’s getting a lot of page views. When it comes to either ‘here or there’ its really the ‘here’ that matters —I appreciate the support but I’m past the ‘there’.

After the Nexus S site went live there were a lot of positives, however what I found myself searching for were the negative criticisms. And I found them.

What I took most personally were the comparisons to Apple’s site. The comments were hard to swallow as they essentially stripped me of my role as a ‘designer’. It was saying I was unoriginal, and that I took ‘the easy way’. What good is a designer if he’s relegated to the role of forger?

Forget about the ‘good’, ‘bad’, ‘aesthetically pleasing’ — a designer’s respect comes from their originality. Anyone can be a good designer by following the rules. The great ones are those who do something different whether its by chance or a genuinely unique way of thinking.

Saying that the Nexus S site looks like Apple put me in the ‘good’ category, and as any self-respecting designer knows, being ‘good’ sucks.

So now, after a couple of months (okay a month and a half), I will attempt to find my self-respect back by what I hope to be distilled objectivity.

Before I begin, I feel I need to be forthcoming and say that I spent my time at 1 Infinite Loop, and that I wouldn’t be the designer I am today if I hadn’t. It taught me how to be a better designer and I’ll leave it at that.

Self Assessment:

I think the site looks very similar to Apple’s. Does that mean its unoriginal or does it mean that its a straight-forward product a marketing site? I’ve wrestled with this comparison a lot, and my conclusion (after the weeping and gnashing of teeth) is that its both. Its an unoriginal, straight-forward, product marketing site. Its a good site, it’s a professional site, but it could be pushed further.

Being Honest:
Did I intend to copy Apple? I can honestly tell myself that, ‘No, I didn’t’. Speaking to other designers who have worked at Apple, I can tell you that after leaving the company, every project that follows is an attempt to ‘break-free’ from it. That being said, if anything, it was (and will always be) a struggle to not copy Apple.

It was a struggle because going against Apple means going up against ‘good design’. Doing something different than Apple means spending more time and effort into doing something that breaks the rules of conventional design. When it comes to following design principles, Apple is a by-the-book savant.

This is actually a good thing, and if given an ideal amount of time and resources, it would push a designer to break free from good and come up with a great solution. However, unlike Apple, a lot of companies are just starting to appreciate the value of investing in visual design. So in the meantime, I often find myself prioritizing and making the best with what I have. It means squeezing every ounce of creativity I can come up with to fit in a limited amount of time, and making myself a resource for things that power the success of the design.

Asset Control:

When I started the two month project, we didn’t have any product photography and looking at the budget costs, we wouldn’t get the amount nor the quality that we’d need to showcase the Nexus S and its features. It became clear right away that the only way to get the product photography right in the amount of time we had, I needed to have as much control as possible over the creative assets

I had never done product photography before so most of the time I would normally spend on visual design, became devoted to studying, experimenting with different rigs, and post-production Photoshop. The phone needed to appear desirable and sexy —it needed to sell itself at a glance. It was the most important design element of the site, and I needed to have as much control as possible.

The design of the site is that it focuses on the device. If the device isn’t attractive or desirable to consumers, the site loses its value. Clever words, graphic details, flashy animations and interaction models help to make a site great, but are meaningless without content and purpose.

Be Mature About It:
Criticism should not be taken as an attack but an opportunity to be honest and aware of your design. Evaluating design criticism of whether or not the site looks like Apple’s I am able to understand that I every design choice I made was an appropriate one. It had nothing to do with challenging Apple design, but all to do with design itself.

As designers we should always evaluate our designs and ask ourselves the hard questions. Sometimes we may find that we don’t like the answers, but at least we can be confident in our response to others because it comes from reason and integrity.

Conclusion:
I am proud of the work that the team and I have done on the Nexus S site. Are there similarities to Apple’s site? Yes. Is the plan to make the new Google-y Apple-y? Of course not. Will we continue to design sites around content and the best user experience? Yes.

If anything, the core success of the Nexus S Site lays within what it represents. It shows that Google isn’t afraid of taking chances when it comes to design. We have proven internally that the numbers associated with the success of a product isn’t through compliance to standards, but by focusing on clean and appropriate design.

The Nexus S site is not a standard. It will never be a template for future Google design. It does however, prove that there is value in taking chances —there is value in focusing on quality design.

Shogunai

Ranting. Here’s the thing. Most feel the same way.

Life shouldn’t be so complicated. We get caught up in our own insecurities so much that the big picture gets lost.

We stop working with each other. We stop listening. We stop thinking.

Doesn’t that make us less than the people we should be?

When did we start seeing life as less than a large playground of potential and growth —one so linear?

How have we let politics keep us from progress? We’re a society which is unable to grow because we can’t see what’s truly important. Our ego makes the world so small that we feel confined and restricted.

I don’t understand politics, and why work stress, why political tip toeing exists to the point that we fear others as much as we fear losing our lives.

We are so much larger than our work. Work should enable us to progress the human race, not be subjected to it.

Take risks. You’ll fail, you’ll look like an ass, you may even lose your job, but you won’t lose your soul.

I see so much potential in every individual to contribute. I know people are asking the same questions that I am. You only have one chance, one lifetime to make a difference. Don’t waste it blindly following someone else’s agenda if you can’t invest yourself in it.

Don’t accept ‘It is what it is’, or as the Japanese would say ‘shogunai’. Look past the ‘barriers’ there’s always a way out.

What are you afraid of?

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Typography is not your brand, so don’t steal it

When tasked with creating an identity you have to ask yourself, “What will this logo mean to others? What brand equity will it gain?” You can’t do this by merely selecting fonts and playing a badge in or near it.

Typography by itself is a craft that should be respected as so and not used as a tool, but as inspiration when it comes to brand definition. Used in any other way, whether its kerning or resizing certain elements, is chipping away at the creator’s intended purpose. That purpose is to be used as a consistent style for content—not a logo. It is a disservice and unethical to use it in any other way other than inspiration.

Like typography, logo creation is also a craft built on inspiration and logical thought. In the case of a type-based logo, the design should reflect inspiration directly related to the context of a company’s brand. It takes this inspiration and develops its own unique form. In this way, it is ‘crafted’. Subtleties like ligatures, rounding of certain corners, are created from reason and adherence to uniform structure and balance. It may employ certain characteristics of a typeset, and should definitely not be the typeset. It needs to be re-drawn, crafted and refined with intention and an understanding of a brand’s essence. It must be able to stand on its own and be unique in a way that is both subtle and meaningful.

Simply put, a mark should never be able to be reproduced through simple keyboard strokes. Implemented in this way, the brand is reliant on the objectives of the typographer who created the type being used—objectives which are not in-line with a company’s reason for being. It represents a solution. It conveys honesty through refinement. And it reflects directly on the product that’s being sold.

Characteristics of different fonts are often forced to fit in with one another in creating brand identity. So, it surprises me when a client and vendor refer to their identity as a typeface. It should never be represented as such. You will never find a typeface that will feel entirely like your brand because a brand needs to have its own characteristic.

Great brands are built on unique characteristics and their mark needs to be defined by them. The solution will not be found within typefaces which were crafted to solve totally different problems.