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Needed: A More Expansive View Of Design Thinking

April 15, 2020 No Comments

It takes design thinking to do digital transformation right. That’s the word from Teonna Akinsete and Kenton Hankins, both with Pega. In an insightful post, they describe the essence of design thinking as “co-production” with end-users of software and related products, to “encourage empathy and collaboration.”

However, they add, this is easier said than done, even in enterprises that seem to have robust design thinking initiatives. “In most digital transformation projects, the goal is to design a product or service that users or customers will love,” they observe. “Traditionally the design team will employ user-centered methods, such as conducting user research and usability testing. These methods are still essential to the design process, but when it comes to impactful collaboration, they only really scratch the surface.” The best way to approach productive design thinking “is to make users and stakeholders part of the entire design process; not just at certain touch points.”

Surveys out of McKinsey put a sharp point to this challenge, noting that many enterprises are still struggling with the right approach to design thinking. Companies that excel at design grow revenues and shareholder returns at nearly twice the rate of their industry peers, the survey finds. However, design thinking is not something that pops up overnight. “What we found was striking,” the McKinsey survey team, led by Melissa Dalrymple, points out. “Some 90 percent of companies weren’t reaching the full potential of design, even as, in the past five years, double the number of companies have added senior design roles to their organization.”

Overall, McKinsey finds, organizations with the most robust design initiatives increased their revenues and total returns to shareholders substantially faster than their industry counterparts did over a five-year period—32 percentage points higher revenue growth and 56 percentage points higher growth for the period as a whole.

Dalrymple and her co-authors make the following recommendations to deepen design thinking into every enterprise activity:

Create bold, user-centric strategies. “Embrace user-centric strategies, improving not only products and services but also the full user experience and, in some cases, the organization itself.”

Embed the design leader into the C-suite. As part of its study, McKinsey interviewed 200 design leaders, and they focus on three key players: customers, employees, and designers themselves. The key is to “embed your senior designer into the C-suite while cultivating a collaborative top-team environment in which your design leader will thrive,” Dalrymple and her co-authors state.

Get the metrics right. Only 14 percent of the companies in the McKinsey survey se are currently setting quantified targets for their design leaders. “Make the most of user data through a balance of quantitative and qualitative design metrics and incentives that enhance user satisfaction and business performance.”

The bottom line is everyone should engage in design thinking. “Gone are the days when the design department receives instructions via email and creates a fully fleshed-out design before aligning with the product owner,” say Pega’s Akinsete and Hankins. “In a design thinking scenario, everyone works together using all available tools, and the team selects winning ideas to go into the final product brief.”

Feature Image Credit: Getty

By Joe McKendrick

I am an author, independent researcher and speaker exploring innovation, information technology trends and markets. I am also a co-author of the SOA Manifesto, which outlines the values and guiding principles of service orientation in business and IT. I served on the organizing committee for the recent IEEE International Conference on Edge Computing, and was active on the program committee of the International SOA and Cloud Symposium series. Much of my research work is in conjunction with Forbes Insights and Unisphere Research/ Information Today, Inc., covering topics such as cloud computing, digital transformation, enterprise mobility, and big data analytics. I am also a contributor to CBS interactive, authoring the ZDNet “Service Oriented” site. In a previous life, I served as communications and research manager of the Administrative Management Society (AMS), an international professional association dedicated to advancing knowledge within the IT and business management fields. I am a graduate of Temple University.

Sourced from Forbes

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6 skills designers need to get ahead in 2020

February 25, 2020 No Comments

By Joseph Foley

The expertise designers should develop to boost their careers in the new decade.

We know the design industry is always evolving. Changing technologies and trends mean that the skill set sought by potential employers is always in flux. Staying ahead of the game requires keeping up with trends, but also keeping up with the skills that are going to be most in demand.

The beginning of the year is the perfect time to think about how your skills fit the direction that the industry is heading. As we enter a new decade, here we look at 6 skills that could help you stay ahead of the game in 2020, from technical expertise to add to your CV and design portfolio to the soft skills that will make clients want to work with you.

01. Illustration

Image 1 of 2

Icon illustrations for Butterlust by Chelsea Carlson (Image credit: Chelsea Carlson)

Blinguage landing page by Cuberto (Image credit: Cuberto)

Assuming you haven’t had your eyes closed over the past year, you’ll probably have noticed that illustration has become rather popular. Brands big and small are favouring illustration to add personality to web and UI design. This includes line drawings and other hand-drawn elements that feature natural imperfections, almost as a rebellious turn against perfection in digital design.

Brands are seeking illustration for everything from attention-grabbing main images on landing pages to personalised icons that reflect the brand’s character and custom hand-lettering to create unique type that can blend with imagery.

Cuberto’s concept landing page for a Japanese language school uses illustration where in the past photographic imagery may have been the obvious choice. Colorado-based designer Chelsea Carlson’s unique, stylised hand-drawn icons for cookery site Butterlust follow the rough brush edge style of the brand’s logo to create an emotional and human feel. Drawing doesn’t come naturally to everyone but the skill can be developed by practising on drawing from life, and focusing on the process rather than on aiming for realism in the results.

02. Motion design

Design skills for 2020 — Brands are looking for movement for everything from social media to email campaigns (Image credit: LOFT)

The year 2020 is all about movement. Brands have realised that adding motion can captivate and engage customers. And in a digital world with faster internet connections and device performance, it can be applied almost everywhere. This means that animation and motion design are no longer niche skills practised by a small group of specialists, but something all designers should at least have an awareness of, and upskilling in this area is an immediate way to stand out in the talent pool.

From GIFs to CSS animation and full-blown video, it can be an intimidating world to enter if you’re getting started, but there is plenty of good software for the job. Final Cut Pro, Adobe After Effects, and Cinema 4D are the major tools. A knowledge of colour grading for video will also get you ahead.

There are no end of applications that brands are looking for, including email marketing campaigns such as the campaign for women’s clothing company LOFT above, animated logos, video tutorials, product walk-throughs and social media content. It’s predicted that 80% of internet traffic will be video by 2021, but even offline there’s demand for motion design in advertising for digital billboards and in-store digital ordering screens. It’s no wonder it’s the skill that most designers want to learn in the coming years.

03. Image editing

The growing demand for illustration and motion does not mean that designers can forget about photography and image editing. Photographic images remain the main medium of visual communication in social media and the majority of websites. A growing trend to combine text and illustration with realistic photography to create collages means that image editing skills are still in high demand and that editing needs to be as precise as ever.

Graphic designers at all levels will want to make sure they are at least sufficiently skilled up in the basics of Adobe Photoshop and Lightroom to be able to make the little tweaks that can make an image usable. This can include tasks as small as cleaning up dust or flare on an image, or adjusting colour to fit a composition, but the more you know about image enhancement and manipulation the better, the more you can do yourself without having to go to someone else.

Courses will get you so far, but image editing is often best mastered by rolling up your sleeves and getting in there. Many designers who don’t find they need to edit images in their usual work develop side projects in order to work on the skills.

04. Coding and UI design

Drag and drop tools for web and UI design mean that most designers don’t need to know the finer details of code, but a working knowledge can set you way ahead of the competition. With web design and UI evolving from flat pages to become more immersive, designers who can code and design user experiences are in high demand and are often rewarded with higher pay. Even basic coding skills will allow you to avoid being limited to what your software is capable of and allow you to offer something that little bit more personalised than what competitors can deliver.

Most designers will want to start with HTML/XHTML, and PHP if you’re going to be working with WordPress, then CSS to be able to add code to a theme to change the look of a site. JavaScript, which allows the creation of interactive elements like images that change in size or colour when a user interacts with it, is more complex and a steep learning curve, but an understanding can help designers work with functionality in mind, and allow better communication with coders on a project.

05. Communication

That brings us to communication itself. This is a soft skill that is becoming just as essential as many technical skills in the designer’s toolbox and a vital part of getting ahead in design. Potential employers now look for designers who are able to communicate their ideas and processes well. For freelancers, a great portfolio can make an impression, but it’s your ability to explain your work and your approach that will earn the trust of potential clients.

Every day communication skills during a project include reminding people of the project goals, what the plan is, when they can expect delivery, what the fallback plan is, and following up after delivery. Explaining where you are and what you are working on helps others to trust you. Larger corporate work will often demand formal presentations to decision makers. Designers need to know not only how to make a visual presentation, but also how to talk an audience through it in an engaging way.

06. Collaboration

Another essential soft skill for designers in the new decade is collaboration. Designers no longer work in a vacuum generating fantastic ideas. They increasingly have to work with complex teams. Not only with other designers, but also with programmers, copywriters, engineers, sales and marketing teams, manufacturing, and management. This means a lot of discussion, and a lot of compromise.

In his last Design in Tech report, John Maeda argued that designers sometimes alienate other disciplines and can be guilty of trying to force their own tastes on clients. There can also be conflicts when designers work with their own portfolio in mind. Clients with complex projects are wary of this and now look for designers who show they can collaborate with other disciplines.

A good way to improve skills in collaboration is to think more broadly and to develop a greater awareness of other disciplines, from business models to marketing and sales techniques, and manufacturing processes. It can also help to share unfinished work more often and to ask more questions. There’s a general trend in many different industries towards a ‘blurring of swim lanes’ with people in different roles expected to have a greater awareness of the overall goal and every stage of a project.

By Joseph Foley

Sourced from Creative Bloq

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In News

The top design trends for 2020

January 20, 2020 No Comments

By Joseph Foley.

As we enter a new decade, we look at where design is heading.

A new decade brings new trends, and the evolution of existing ones. Last year saw exciting developments across the spectrum of visual design that will develop and evolve in the new year.

Here, we look at what’s hot in design right now and how we see it developing in 2020, covering everything from web design to fun fonts to graphic design and UI. Here are seven of our biggest predictions for what we’ll see happening in design this year. You heard it here first.

01. Branded animation

With GIFs now part of how we communicate, anyone designing for digital knows that people love movement. Illustration has become big for social media and web design over the last few years, but there’s now growing demand for the illustrations to move as shorter attention spans need to be satisfied.

GIFs can be a powerful way to bring brands to life. In 2020, we expect to see more fully branded motion graphics, from micro-interactions to moving logos to animated GIFs celebrating milestone events on social media.

Animations will also get more continuous. The safety video from Delta Airlines (above) shows the direction branded animation is going in, with one scene rolling into the next through fluid dynamic transitions that evolve and tell a story. The trend to build each scene out of the previous one takes viewers on journeys through a transforming world. And animation doesn’t only live online or on a screen.

Branded animations designed by London-based Animade were an integral part of Mailchimp’s rebranding in 2019, including the monkey logo that winks when you move the cursor over it, but the animators also created this interactive wall art. Interactive illustrations will offer a chance to reinvent communication and tools and engage with illustration in real-world environments.

02. Ultra minimalism

design trends 2020 — Calendly’s ultra minimalist landing page focuses attention on the call to action (Image credit: Calendly)

Minimalism seems like it will never become passee. It looks clean, sleek and for websites, it reduces loading time and scores better in search results. Services like Slack, Monday and Calendly are aware of this and have been leading the trend for minimalist landing pages that put the focus on the call to action and conversions.

With no distracting background elements, their sites are easy to navigate and make it easy to sign up. The trend is to complement the white space and simple message with an illustration – Calendly uses a modern looking line drawing to add to the clean feel, Monday opts for an animated demo with pots of colour to draw the eye, while Dropbox dispenses even with the illustration, dedicating half the screen to the sign up form. Other sectors are following the trend, opting for simple and direct approach, which will stay with us in 2020.

03. Combining realism and flat design

Recent years have seen a huge trend for flat design, and over the last year, isometric design has been the big thing, led especially by design for cryptocurrency sites, while 3D has been getting better and better. Now we’re starting to see more of a tendency to get the best of both worlds by layering elements of flat design and realistic 3D images. This can be through combining 3D design and flat design or through collages that combine flat design and photography like the beautiful dreamy posters created by Magdiel Lopez.

His work bridges the gap between the simplicity of flat design and the complexity and authenticity of realism, and communicates interaction between the real and digital worlds. The combination of 3D and flat design can also be a way to bring goods to life, such as on the urban trekking shoe company Déplacé Maison website or highlight blended learning experiences like on the Ocean School website.

04. Playing with the elements

In web design, there’s a growing tendency to play with water, air and light to create engaging effects, which follows a trend in design in general towards rejecting rigid geometric lines and shapes in favour for soft, flowing lines. It’s fun and playful, approachable, easier on the eye and still feels new.

The design and text on the Beyond Beauty project’s website seem to float around the space, conveying the sense of freedom that the project embodies. Expect to see a lot more free-floating elements in 2020 as we say goodbye to gravity. The theme for flowing shapes and lines is taken up also in the use of water and lights, for example, with cursor-controlled shimmer and ripple effects like in this site from property developers Azure The Oceanic. The Barovier & Toso website also uses cursor controlled liquid ripple and shimmer effects to give a sense of mystery and luxury to its products.

05. Heavy but simple fonts

The trend for big and heavy fonts is not going to move easily. With people spending more of their time online on small screens, big fonts are practical, but it’s a trend that extends to the world of graphic design and even packaging, since they also look great and give personality to text. When it comes to thickness, the rule for 2020 will continue to be the bigger and bolder the better, with text taking centre stage and overtaking image and video as the main element.

Designers are using bold or extra bold fonts paired with simple backgrounds or much lighter text to create interesting contrast in a design. Text may even go beyond a composition’s edges, and be split into multiple lines. CPGD, a list of direct to consumer brands, is on trend with a site that uses bigger Helvetica Now Display much bolder than most ecommerce sites, which can often suffer from lots of small text.

Large text is not only for headlines and titles, but sites like that of Germany agency Polar Gold show a trend to beef up the size of the text in paragraphs too, and expect to see more incorporation of movement too like in the bold and playful Piano Trio Fest site.

06. Dynamic live data visualisation

Data visualisation has been a growing trend for years. And there’s much more to come. In 2020, complex live data – like dashboard stats – will become even more immediately available, and designers will need to showcase information in a way that adapts to changes and dynamically animates. In the past year, The Economist’s Reimagine the Game offers visualisation of fans’ reactions in the stadium during football matches providing a kind of timeline of the match complete with goals and yellow cards. In 2020, expect data visualisations to go dynamic live, interactive and to cover everything.

07. AR and VR finally go mainstream

It’s been a long time coming but VR is finally coming into the mainstream and is expected to become one of the most consumed technologies of the next few years. What’s exciting for design is that more than being a trend, virtual reality offers a whole new medium to design for. UI and UX within VR is huge area in which to explore not only how we touch a screen but how we move around inside it.

Expect big opportunities in holographic 3D design and virtual reality e-commerce solutions, while AR will increasingly offer more demand for digital animation, with magazines like The New Yorker bringing pages to life through our phones’ cameras and Apple and Google introducing their own AR development platforms, ARKit and ARCore. And whatever happens in the areas of VR and AR is also bound to have an effect on wider design.

By Joseph Foley

Sourced from CREATIVE BLOQ

In News

Connecting the Dots Between Product and Branding

November 15, 2019 No Comments

By Douglas Montague

How rethinking brand expression influenced Microsoft products and vice versa

Imagine a sheet of paper with a couple dozen tiny dots spread out on it. Their placement doesn’t seem random. You can sort of make out a shape, but there’s no obvious way they go together.

Now imagine a sheet with identical tiny dots, only each one is numbered. The dots may still look like a jumble, but the numbers indicate how they link together. You draw a line from one to two, two to three, and so on. Oh look, you’ve drawn a seal balancing a beach ball on its nose! Gold star.

Working for a big company sometimes feels like staring at thousands of dots and having little idea how to connect them. I’ve been with Microsoft since 1995, but I don’t think I understood how these dots could work together until 2015.

That’s when we changed our marketing strategy. Before, the product design team would build and design the experiences, and the marketing team layered a brand identity on top to sell it. With the 2015 change, branding was no longer a “layer” of marketing disconnected from the product experience. Instead, branding became directly tied to and influenced by the product. And maybe, just maybe, the brand could influence the product in return.

In the heavily siloed world of giant corporations, that was practically crazy talk.

One dot at a time

Simplicity became our mission. We first needed to build brand principles and the brand story (in other words, why we exist in the world). Then, we’d figure out how the principles and story inform the product experience. We theorized that connecting experience and expression among product, brand identity, and marketing, and extrapolating those principles into meaningful guidance across the company, would create a better experience for customers.

Numbers started to appear next to those scattered dots staring me in the face. The trick was getting other people to see them, too.

To show people the value of brand creative teams in marketing, we needed to have a lot more conversations with product design. First, we needed to understand what they were building and where they were headed. Second, we needed to create a visual identity closely tied to the product’s visual language, which a worldwide marketing organization could later implement.

Easy enough, right?

Thankfully, our senior leadership encourages us to work together for the greater good of the company, pushing away our own egos as much as possible to bring success to all. We call this One Microsoft. Particularly in our area, acting as One Microsoft is a necessity: we have a tiny creative team and can’t succeed without the assistance of other great creatives, so we need to understand each other’s business and create together. When it works, it’s magical.

Case study: transforming Microsoft Office

Rebranding Office was one such magical example. For the first time, we looked to product teams for cues to lift the brand identity and create simple, scalable guidance. We worked directly with product design, an approach that we’d take later with Azure and HoloLens 2.

Our approach had five steps:

Create the brand story working across brand strategy, engineering, and marketing, including a deep dive into product design principles and future principles.
Conduct an end-to-end visual audit of the entire customer journey.
Identify visual patterns and cues from the product, and from the parent Microsoft brand, to create a visual identity for the brand expression.
Build creative principles and theories around color, illustration, typography, and photography, then stress test across all communication touchpoints in the marketing funnel.
Create a simple design system that designers could scale worldwide without much creative oversight.

Three large black boards with print outs of the current Office branding. — Boards from one of the many visual audits done in 2016 for Microsoft Office.

Our audit concluded that Office needed a more sophisticated yet simplified visual identity connecting our product experience and marketing communications. The marketing teams were doing their best; they followed the Microsoft brand guide for reference, but the broadness of the guide and visual system made it difficult to implement. We pared down the brand system in the name of simplicity.

Office brand guideline examples including personality, colors, and font.

Pages from the Microsoft Office Brand Guidelines.

Our collaboration effectively linked the pre-purchase marketing communications to the post-purchase ones. For example, we used our marketing expertise at engaging users to improve the first-usage experience (for example, the “how to” videos that introduced users to Office online). In that space, the product team focused more on UX, not the kind of branded moments within the product where you can tell a story.

The fifth step in that process was perhaps the toughest, simply because of scale. Several hundred marketers worked on Office, each with their own budget, each choosing their own creative. Because of that, and their concern that we’d just scold them for doing things wrong, none of their work went through a creative review process. We not only had to change how people worked, but we also had to assure them we had their best interests in mind.

In time, people from other teams understood that we weren’t focused solely on creative, that we wanted to help them meet their business objectives and performance metrics. Again, it comes back to that One Microsoft principle of trusting each other and helping each other succeed. Product teams started seeking out our involvement, and marketing trusted us to make more things on their behalf.

Keeping a good thing going

We emulated this turning point elsewhere. We worked directly with principal designers Paul Cooper and Lance Garcia to build creative principles (for everyone keeping track, that’s step 4) that ended up changing the patterns and UX of azure.com. Functionality informed brand choices, which reflected back on the site itself.

The front page of the Azure.com website. — Azure.com

The same goes for HoloLens 2, which was perhaps our most daunting task. The product team had worked on it for two years by the time we stepped in to begin branding, so we had catching up to do. (Yes, not ideal.)

HoloLens 2 works in mixed reality, a new medium for most users. Because of that, people need more than product photography or UI to understand how it works. So, I partnered closely John Nguyen and David Wolf from the product design team to come up with a solution. We were inspired by prismatic light in holograms and by the way the product sensors understand the world and generate a 3D map. We believed that this prism and map would tie the marketing and the product experience together in a beautiful way. The product experience largely informed the elegant brand we created for HoloLens 2 and subsequent marketing materials.

Four expressions of the HoloLens branding. — HoloLens 2 Prismatic Color Blend used in illustration, full-bleed backgrounds, and HoleLens 2 wordmark logo.

These marketing materials turned out well — so well that they influenced the product. Romiro Torres, the creative director for HoloLens 2 UX, was working out the visual expression and experience of how the device maps a room. He integrated the same visualization into the product experience, so users see the same visualization we created for marketing when HoloLens 2 maps the room they’re standing in.

HoloLens 2 Room Mapping from the launch announcement in Barcelona

Chances are that doesn’t sound like a big deal to you, but it felt huge — that “maybe, just maybe” moment I mentioned earlier. If you listen closely, you can hear silo walls cracking.

Those are the kinds of moments we strive to create every day. They become a lot more likely when teams spend the time to truly understand each other. Branding makes that easier. It provides that layer of customer clarity, connecting the dots so that marketing and product can take a step back, look at the lines, and say, “Wow, a seal balancing a beach ball!”

By Douglas Montague

Microsoft Brand Creative Director. I don’t believe creative that has commercial success tags it with an odious suggestion that is stinks. Views are my own.

Sourced from Medium

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Why Criticism Is Good for Creativity

September 25, 2019 No Comments

By Don Norman

Roberto Verganti and I published an article in the July 2019, Harvard Business Review on the virtues of criticism (Verganti, R., & Norman, D. (2019, July 16, 2019). Why criticism is good for creativity. Harvard Business Review. https://hbr.org/2019/07/why-criticism-is-good-for-creativity. May require registration or payment.)

Here is the basic argument

One of the most popular mantras for innovation is “avoid criticism.” The underlying assumption is that criticism kills the flow of creativity and the enthusiasm of a team. Aversion to criticism has significantly spread in the last 20 years, especially through the advocates of design thinking. (In 1999, in the ABC Nightline video “The Deep Dive,” which ignited the design thinking movement, criticism was stigmatized as negative.) In IDEO’s online teaching platform, the first rule of brainstorming is “defer judgment.” To make this rule even more practical and straightforward, others have reworded it to say: “When a person proposes an idea, don’t say, ‘Yes, but…’ to point out flaws in the idea; instead, say, ‘Yes, and…’” — which is intended to get people to add to the original idea.

We challenge this approach. It encourages design by committee and infuses a superficial sense of collaboration that leads to compromises and weakens ideas. Our view, the product of years of studies of and participation in innovation projects, is that effective teams do not defer critical reflection; they create through criticism.

The secret of criticism in innovation lies in the joint behavior of the participants. Those offering criticism must frame their points as positive, helpful suggestions. Those who are being criticized must use critiques to learn and improve their ideas. When conducted with curiosity and respect, criticism becomes the most advanced form of creativity. It can be fascinating, passionate, fun, and always inspiring. Let us combine “Yes, and” with “Yes, but” to create the constructive and positive “Yes, but, and.”

By Don Norman

Sourced from LinkedIn

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5 Print Design Tips to Create Standout Marketing Materials

September 5, 2019 No Comments

Sourced from Inc.

Best practices for creating modern, printed brand ambassadors with staying power.

Vladimir Gendelman, an Entrepreneurs’ Organization (EO) member in Pontiac, Michigan, is the founder and CEO of Company Folders, an award-winning online printing company specializing in presentation folders. The company made the Inc. 5000 list of the fastest-growing private companies in America for three consecutive years. As a thought-leader in print design and business, we asked Vladimir about the best ways to transform your marketing materials. Here’s what he shared:

While digital marketing is a significant focal point on the business landscape, print marketing–which started nearly 200 years ago–remains a robust marketing tool. Whether it’s trade shows, in-person networking or direct mail campaigns, print materials elegantly convey information about your company, brand and products.

Unlike their digital counterparts, print marketing materials aren’t instantly deleted with a click. They have staying power. When done well, print materials can work in conjunction with digital marketing efforts to differentiate your company and help customers remember you.

To do print marketing well, there’s pressure to capitalize on the next great design trend. Given how long print marketing has endured, it can be challenging to come up with fresh ideas.

Sometimes, the best way to step up your game is to leverage existing techniques with a unique twist. That’s what our team focuses on when creating new designs for clients, whether it’s finding a cool way to emboss a product or using a coating to highlight a specific design feature.

Here are five ways to create memorable, inspiring print marketing materials.

1. Cut it out

Marketing material designs aren’t limited to square or rectangular shapes. Consider reshaping the piece itself to match your logo or another brand element. Recipients will make the connection when the guitar shop’s business card is shaped like a guitar pick, and round business cards literally stand out from the pack at conferences.

For folders or brochures, you can add multiple curves, change the pocket shape, or create a custom-shaped window. Such windows not only provide a quirky design element–they also encourage recipients to look inside by offering a peek at the contents. Die cuts can outline or accentuate essential design elements such as a company logo or featured product.

2. Give it a lift

Embossing lifts your design from the stock, providing a raised, textural effect. It can be used to create geometric patterns or emphasize specific areas of your design. You can even give your die cut more pizzazz by embossing the border. Nothing is off-limits: You can add embossed elements to folder pockets, envelope flaps and business cards.

Photo courtesy of Company Folders, Inc.

Combining embossing with other imprint methods can transform and refresh a piece. That’s the case with this folder designed for a fine jewelry store. The foil stamp visually communicates elegance, while the embossed logo adds a level of sophistication and calls attention to the flap of the product.

3. Make it feel real

A poignant image stirs emotions, whether by drawing attention to your cause or identifying uses for your product or service. The key is avoiding basic, generic stock images.

Instead of images of your product sitting on a desk or in a field, choose an image showing the product in use or various scenarios in which the products would be ideal. Images must look and feel authentic as if they were plucked from a target customer’s camera roll or social media feed. Authentic imagery makes it easier for people to connect with your brand.

4. Add a coating

Incorporating a stock coating into your design can be the cherry on top of your sundae. In addition to providing extra protection to print marketing materials, it draws the eye to specific design elements by adding unique texture and shine. Coatings also add a level of sophistication and luxury, implying that you use only the highest-quality materials, which can make customers feel more comfortable working with you.

A spot-UV coating makes specific colors pop, or it can create its own element on the stock. A soft-touch coating provides a smooth, suede-like feel, giving recipients a tactile experience that will help them remember your product. For a more subtle look, matte coatings provide contrast and protect your design without the shiny, reflective appearance of a gloss coating.

5. Give it depth

Ever seen a design that makes you want to reach out and touch it? That’s the magic of 3D design, which adds a new level of depth to any element, from fonts to graphics. It adds complexity to an otherwise simple piece. It’s a best practice to use 3D design features sparingly and balance them with 2D counterparts to avoid weighing down your design.

Designer Katt Phatt transformed the Netbee logo to 3D so that it jumps off the screen. The key in this instance is Phatt’s keen attention to detail–showing each individual wire and cog makes the logo more realistic.

While new trends take shape every day, you can make a modern design statement with existing techniques utilized in distinct ways to give marketing materials a sleek twist. A great designer will be able to mix the old and the new to create a timeless printed piece that stands out.

Feature Image Credit: Getty Images

Sourced from Inc.

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Streamline your creativity with this design assets bundle

August 6, 2019 No Comments

By Deals Staff

Get your hands on premium design assets for life.

Is your creative project taking longer than you anticipated? If so, check out EpicPxls. This design package will streamline your productivity by providing you with premium curated fonts, graphics, templates, mobile app designs and much more.

Whether you’re a graphic designer, web developer or a blogger, there’s plenty to enjoy with this EpicPxls deal. You’ll be able to download 20 premium items per month for life, all for the reduced price of $99. That’s a massive 95 per cent saving on the regular price of $2,400.

The best cloud storage 2019

With no recurring payments, you can sign up today safe in the knowledge that you’re not going to get stung by charges further down the line. Supercharge your creativity and your productivity today by getting your EpicPxls deal for $99.

Feature Image Credit: EpicPxls

By Deals Staff

Sourced from CREATIVE BLOQ

In News

Mutilate your fonts with this amazing browser app

July 11, 2019 No Comments

By Jim McCauley

EnFont Terrible lets you remix your fonts in seconds.

You can never have too many fonts, we’ve found, and just to complicate matters we’ve also found a fantastic new site that makes it absurdly easy to mutilate your existing type, turn it into whole new pieces of typographical joy and even create stunning kinetic typography in a matter of seconds.

It’s called EnFont Terrible, which is by far the best pun you’re going to hear this week, and it’s the work of Spanish designer Javier Arce. He claims that he doesn’t really know about kerning or any of that complicated typography stuff, but decided to make his own type generation site anyway.

If you can’t be bothered with typography tutorials, you’ll be delighted to learn that EnFont Terrible is quite gloriously simple to use; either use the default fonts that come with it or upload your own, and by dragging a few sliders around you can warp and mutate it into something quite weird and wonderful in a matter of seconds, without having to know the first thing about typography.

20 typography terms you might not know

Once you’re happy with it, just hit the Create Font button in the bottom right-hand corner and you’ll instantly save your mutant creation in OpenType format.

As a serious typographic tool it probably leaves a little to be desired, but as a fun way of mucking about with fonts it’s very hard to beat, and with the right input fonts and a bit of experimentation you could quite easily grow a massively expanded font collection over the course of an afternoon.

Don’t take our word for it, though; you can get to grips with EnFont Terrible’s tools here.

By Jim McCauley

Sourced from CB CREATIVE BLOQ

In News

How to Be Creative on Demand

May 17, 2019 No Comments

By Joseph Grenny;

Creativity is learnable providence. It feels like an inexplicable miracle when it arrives, and we may never be able to isolate all the variables that generate it. But, in my experience, we can reliably create the conditions to invite it.

Twenty years ago, I was involved in a terrifyingly inspiring project, working with some of Kenya’s poorest citizens in one of Nairobi’s most blighted areas. Our goal was to generate self-help strategies that would enable this group to climb a few rungs up the economic ladder. The audacity of this effort hit me in the middle of a flight from Brussels to Nairobi. I had fallen asleep briefly just long enough to become immersed in a nightmare. I dreamed I had somehow become the president of Kenya, and this filled me with overwhelming despair. When an announcement about approaching turbulence jarred me into consciousness I’ve never been happier. But the dream had hammered home the weight of the task I was heading toward. I was to lead a two-day meeting with hundreds of people for whom the stakes could not be higher. We had a clear goal but no concrete plan. I knew the work was worth pursuing, but I had never done what we were trying to do and felt inadequate to the task. I hoped and prayed that worthwhile ideas would come. And they did. The trip was successful in ways that exceeded my competence. This was a welcome surprise, but one I had done my best make happen.

Here are some of the ways I’ve learned to be more predictably creative.

Frame the problem, then step back.

Like a grain of sand in an oyster, cognitive irritation stimulates creativity. When you give yourself a compelling, complex, unsolved problem — and make sure to clearly, concisely, and vividly articulate it — your brain becomes irritated. For months before my trip to Nairobi, I carried around a pad of paper on which I had handwritten the following statement: “How, with no outside resources, will we create 300 middle-class jobs for the people in our group?” The problem turned in my mind. One way to further amp up the cognitive irritation is by slogging through a first, unsatisfying round of generating solutions. This effort is more about priming the pump than solving the problem. Then, walk away for a bit, and allow the unconscious work — that which draws from a fuller complement of mental resources, experiences, and creative connections — to begin.

Obey your curiosity.

Steve Jobs claimed that “creativity is just connecting things.” I agree. If you want to be more creative, you need to have more things to connect. The best way to

The problem turned in my mind. One way to further amp up the cognitive irritation is by slogging through a first, unsatisfying round of generating solutions.

build a rich mental database that will help you solve problems later is to honor passing curiosities. If something tickles your brain, spend a moment with it. Follow paths that have no obvious purpose other than to satisfy a whim. It could be an article or a conference session that intrigues you; a book that you inexplicably notice; a person to whom you are introduced. It’s tempting to let these opportunities pass, but you do so at your creative peril. They become the Lego bricks, tinker toys, and pipe cleaners from which your creative masterpieces emerge. My Kenyan experience was the product of scores of conversations, books, lunches, and papers that seemed to have little immediate value. But I invested in them anyway — and it paid off.

Keep a shoebox.

Next, find a way to collect and organize your experiences. For example, when I read, I fanatically highlight. I then go back and re-read the highlighted passages. And then I cut and paste the best of them into a document so I can easily find them later. This three-step process (highlight, review, organize) increases the likelihood that I retain the information and, eventually, am able to conjure fertile connections between all the tidbits. During that same transcontinental flight, I think somewhere over Egypt, a memory of a book on large group decision-making that I had read five years earlier tickled its way to my consciousness. I had not thought of the book since, but I had highlighted, re-read, and tagged it at the time, so I opened my laptop and reviewed key ideas that would inform the agenda our group used to leap forward in coming days.

Do things that don’t interest you.

Early in my career, Will Marre, the founding president of Stephen Covey’s training company, admonished me to subscribe to a handful of business journals he listed, then added, “And every time you read one, be sure to read at least one article that holds no interest for you.” I’ve been rewarded time and again for doing so. Many things that end of up in my shoebox have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things “boring” simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.

Invite uncomfortable conversations.

Another great creative stimulus is to regularly engage in conversations with people from whom you might normally recoil. Three of the more unexpectedly fruitful conversations of my life were with a racist cabby in London, a drug dealer seatmate on a plane, and an extremist political advocate in Puerto Rico. While I didn’t change teams as a result of these conversations, I gained valuable perspectives from lives I will never live. This discipline helped me find the psychological flexibility I needed in Kenya. At times, a member of our group engaged in the graft so common to their experience. I needed to find a balance between empathy and accountability. Long practice in grappling with others’ realities helped me approach the situation with determination rather than disgust.

Stop and work when it hits.

I can tell when something is coalescing inside of me. At an unexpected time, I will feel a rush of clarity. The final discipline of inviting creativity is to honor these moments by writing. If I interrupt whatever is happening at the time to transcribe and organize my thought flow, I accelerate the development of ideas.

This three-step process (highlight, review, organize) increases the likelihood that I retain the information and, eventually, am able to conjure fertile connections between all the tidbits.

If I ignore those moments — or try to kick them down the road — I find them impossible to re-conjure. I lose emerging clarity and slow the process. A couple of hours from Nairobi, I felt a rush of ideas. I was exhausted and drowsy, but I recognized the first symptom of inspiration for what it was. Before the plane landed, I had a powerful opening speech written as though it had been dictated. I simultaneously envisioned the two-day group process that helped the group coalesce around a detailed and hopeful strategy.

Over the next two years, I helped my 300 co-conspirators form a worker-owned cooperative. From their meager but collective efforts, they assembled enough capital to begin an enterprise that employed many of them. These experiences contributed to the founding of a non-profit that has, to date, helped tens of millions around the world to improve their economic circumstances.

Creativity may always be part mystery. But we can all practice disciplines that invite its beneficent arrival.

By Joseph Grenny;

Sourced from ascend

In News

How to get HIGH PAYING Design Clients

March 19, 2019 No Comments

By Jacob Cass,

Want to know how to get high paying design clients?

This video explains how I went from $300 design projects to 5 figure projects.

I concisely discuss 5 tried and true strategies to get high paying design clients including:

Your Portfolio & USP
Building Relationships
Marketing Strategies
Pricing Creativity (Proposals & Closing Deals)
Upsells

Inside, I recommended putting this book on your radar: Pricing Creativity by Blair Enns. It’s expensive ($200+) and only available on his website. Alternatively, you could read a short summary or a listen to a podcast to learn more about “value based pricing”.

design

By Joe McKendrick

Sourced from Forbes

The expertise designers should develop to boost their careers in the new decade.

01. Illustration

02. Motion design

03. Image editing

04. Coding and UI design

05. Communication

06. Collaboration

By Joseph Foley

Sourced from Creative Bloq

As we enter a new decade, we look at where design is heading.

01. Branded animation

02. Ultra minimalism

03. Combining realism and flat design

04. Playing with the elements

05. Heavy but simple fonts

06. Dynamic live data visualisation

07. AR and VR finally go mainstream

By Joseph Foley

Sourced from CREATIVE BLOQ

How rethinking brand expression influenced Microsoft products and vice versa

One dot at a time

Case study: transforming Microsoft Office

Keeping a good thing going

By Douglas Montague

Sourced from Medium

By Don Norman

Sourced from LinkedIn

Best practices for creating modern, printed brand ambassadors with staying power.

1. Cut it out

2. Give it a lift

3. Make it feel real

4. Add a coating

5. Give it depth

Sourced from Inc.

Get your hands on premium design assets for life.

By Deals Staff

Sourced from CREATIVE BLOQ

EnFont Terrible lets you remix your fonts in seconds.

By Jim McCauley

Sourced from CB CREATIVE BLOQ

Frame the problem, then step back.

Obey your curiosity.

Keep a shoebox.

Do things that don’t interest you.

Invite uncomfortable conversations.

Stop and work when it hits.

By Joseph Grenny;

Sourced from ascend

By Jacob Cass,

Sourced from Just Creative