121 - The Process

What this episode covers

No matter what you're designing, designers have a special code we all follow. It's called The Process. Subscribe: ITUNES | ANDROID | STITCHER | RSS FEED Music and links from this episode Gorgon by Jesse Spillane No sudden movements by rui Interstate 70 Rain Chants by Fields Ohio Line-by-line notes Buildings Bridges Roads Websites Restaurant menus They’ll all made by following a set process This process, whilst usually similar for every designer Allows designers all over the world to make very special things This is AADA, and I’m Craig Burgess MUSIC A problem Every design process Whether you’re designing a city or designing a business card Begins with a problem Design only really has one purpose: to solve problems And if there’s no problem to solve, there’s no point designing anything These problems range from simple stuff like a problem of a business not looking professional enough To complicated problems like too many traffic jams on a particular road You can’t find a solution, until you’ve identified the problem And the design process is the only one that can solve such a problem After that, designers start to collect information to understand the problem This step is a mix of research and finding inspiration By seeing what others have done before, you can analyse what went wrong And of course, what went right and what you may want to emulate I’ve been pretty vocal in some past episodes about the inspiration gathering step And being very careful not to cross the line of inspiration to downright copying other’s work Now comes the fun part, ideas generation This is my favourite part of any design project Being alone with a sketchbook and working on ideas Younger designers too often skip this step, or go about it in the wrong way The point of the ideas step is to indiscriminately create ideas That is, to create ideas without thinking they’re good, bad, or anything else At this step, it doesn’t matter if your idea is bad Or if you think you’ve found a solution to the design problem That is not the point here, it’s just to let your brain be free And make ideas And then take those ideas, and turn them into solutions This is a really difficult step, because now you’ve got so many ideas You need to analyse them, and work out which ones are good Or appropriate solutions Lots of designers like to leave this step to their clients They’ll create quite a few ideas, and ask their clients to pick which is their favourite I prefer to be much more critical at this stage And I normally only present one solution to a client If we give the client the choice, we’ll either end up with a frankestein’s monster of a design with lots of solutions turned into one Or we’ll end up with the solution we like the least It isn’t the client’s place to do our job for use at this stage And we need to be ruthless and pick the best solution for the job This slots neatly into feedback This is the stage which can cause the most problems in the design process if not handled properly A client isn’t usually experienced in the design process And we ask them which one they like the most This is not the correct question to ask them We should be asking them which is most appropriate The one that is the best solution to the design problem is the best And we need to make sure we tell our clients that too The final step Is improve In lots of design projects, we may go back and forth between feedback and improve Before we get the best solution And that’s OK So long as we’re working towards the same goal To make the best solution for the design problem we’ve set It’s amazing when you think about it That no matter what you’re designing This process is largely similar across any medium It’s really special And also quite humbling MUSIC This was AADA, and I’m Craig Burgess The music featured in this episode was Gorgon by Jesse Spillane No sudden movements by rui Interstate 70 Rain Chants by