In News

InVision’s New Tool Lets Big Teams Manage Sprawling Design Systems

November 8, 2017 No Comments

Based on insights from Facebook, ZenDesk, and others, InVision’s latest tool aims to solve a new kind of problem.

In the last couple of years, design systems have taken big companies ranging from Airbnb to IBM by storm, and for obvious reasons. The dream is to create a set of shared design elements—ranging from the design of a hamburger menu to the grid options of a webpage—and standardize them in such a way that designing becomes less a matter of pushing pixels and more like picking out the right Legos. That way, designers can spend less time futzing with visual design and more time focused on solving actual problems.

But it’s one thing to create those systems and another to manage them. That’s why Airbnb and Facebook have spent countless hours creating their own tooling systems. Today, InVision is announcing the InVision Design System Manager, aimed squarely at the myriad companies with beefy design and development teams which nonetheless have hit a wall in trying to build out their own design systems. It will be open for trials starting in December.

The new product builds upon one created by a company called Brand.ai, which InVision quietly acquired two months ago. It works as a plug-in to Sketch or the recently announced InVision Studio. With it, designers can access a list of shared elements stored in the cloud, and then drag and drop those into a design they’re working on. If they do alter those elements, those changes can be managed and synced with the original files. These were already features of Craft, InVision’s Sketch plug-in, but DSM has a number of features such as version control and permissions which make it a tool better suited to large teams. On top of that, the library of shared elements is used to automatically generate a website that contains all the elements, which developers can readily access.

Thus, according to InVision, using and updating the pieces of a design system becomes a simple part of the design and development workflow. The company spoke to Co.Design exclusively about the new launch.

Strange Beginnings

Brand.ai has that funny name because the company didn’t start out working on design systems. It originally set out to make a tool that could automatically generate a logo if you gave it high-level brand values, such as “fun” or “sporty.” The team quickly realized that semantic information wouldn’t be enough and that it would need to pull in the company’s style guide to serve as data for a new logo. That’s when they hit a snag.

“We saw companies building those style guides using different tools. Even big companies were using Dropbox to share sketch files,” says Ehud Halberstam, Brand.ai’s founder. But even if a company intended to create one single element that everyone might use, such as a canonical “Buy” button, it was almost impossible to notify the entire team of developers and designers when that Buy button had been updated. “Even for teams like eBay who had already bought into the value of design systems, actually adopting them and using them day-to-day was viewed as a distraction,” Halberstam explains. “That’s the problem we set out to solve.”

One major facet of the problem was integrating both development and design—because design and development don’t quite work the same way. “Companies have touted before that they’re making a GitHub for designers,” points out Clark Valberg, InVision’s CEO. “The metaphor works loosely. But almost all the details do not. Ehud took the approach of looking at what the actual challenges are.” For example, designers, unlike developers, don’t want strangers copying their designs. “Open source” in the design world is known as “stealing.” Version control is another issue. Designers don’t want some random person from marketing to be able to change the color scheme of their UI elements, and then push those changes to the whole organization. Permissions have to be managed in a way that’s slightly different than mere pull requests.

Thus, one key feature of InVision DSM is that permissions are team-based rather than generic—instead of assigning someone Admin or Edit privileges over everything, they can be assigned based on individual collections of assets, so that, for example, an iOS designer can own the iOS designs without anyone futzing with them.

Learning From The Giants

Many of the nuances of InVision’s new Design System Manager spring from the hundred-or-so companies that Brand.ai talked with when developing their system. For example, Facebook’s design team shot down Halberstam’s assumption that a design team would want to separate their nice, perfect documentation of their design system from the actual production files used to create them. Better to keep all the comments about how the files were meant to be used and why they looked the way they did in the actual product files. Thus, with InVision DSM, the comment threads can be accessed when you’re clicking on an asset that you’re using in Sketch. The idea of being able to set permissions on a team-by-team basis came from insights lent by NewsCorp and ZenDesk.

DSM also comes with features meant to plug into the development workflow. Ordinarily, designers hand developers a Sketch file, which the developer tries to translate into code using their own judgment and inspection tools such as X-Scope. InVision DSM hopes to handle that by translating every element inside a design library into automatically-generated CSS class names with corresponding property values. These can be accessed via a SASS file and an API call. What the developer does with it is up to them, Halberstam points out. The idea is to finally alleviate the pain of a designer having to tell a developer every time a color’s been updated.

That’s a capability that will surely give developers and designers hives over the potential for hiccups in translating Sketch files to CSS. But it’s one that Halberstam says presents the most opportunity, given how divorced the design and coding processes still are. “The reason for joining InVision was the realization that there’s so much opportunity given how many steps there are between design and development,” he says.

By Cliff Kuang

Sourced from CO.DESIGN

In News

The Advice 12 Designers Wish They Could Give To Their Younger Selves

October 25, 2017 No Comments

Sourced from Co.Design

It’s a marathon, not a sprint. Go with your gut. Relax, it’s only work. What advice would you give your younger self? It’s a perennial question, for anyone interested in gleaning the life advice of the older and wiser.

When its 30th anniversary, the foil and film materials company Foilco decided to celebrate its age by asking 30 designers what advice they’d give their younger selves. The results, designed by StudioDBD‘s Dave Sedgwick, are presented in beautiful graphic form, with each designer’s answer given its own typographical due in a book and in a collection of animations online.

Some pieces of advice are design related. “Design is about other people,” writes Christopher Doyle, of Christopher Doyle & Co. “Graphic design is not everything. Graphic design will not save you,” says Michael C. Place of Build. “Don’t look at design to inform your design,” writes Paul Hutchison of Hype Type Studio. Others apply to anyone, creative or otherwise. “Enjoy yourself and find interesting people to work with,” writes the graphic artist Anthony Burrill. “Hustle hustle hustle,” encourages Yah-Leng Yu, a designer at Foreign Policy. “Listen to the voice in your head. It’s who you are,” says Tony Brook of Spin. “The difficult things are usually the things worth doing,” writes Kathleen Sleboda of Gluekit.Flip through the rest of the 30 designers’ inspiring words in the slide show above, and on the project’s website.KS

Feature Image Credit: Dave Sedgwick

Sourced from Co.Design

In News

Using Shapes in Graphic Design

September 28, 2017 No Comments

By Eric Miller.

Shapes are at the root of graphic design. They are figures and forms that make up logos, illustrations and countless other elements in all types of designs.

Shapes help the designer to add interest or organize elements of a design. They are not strictly ornamental, either, as shapes can have symbolic meanings, invoke feelings, or be used to direct the eye to the most important information.

The Different Types of Shapes

Shapes are one of the basic elements of graphic design and you have a great variety of shapes to choose from.

There are three basic types of shapes: geometric, organic, and abstract.

Geometric Shapes. These are your basic squares, rectangles, circles, triangles, and the like. These typically include sharp corners but may have rounded elements.

Organic Shapes. This type of shape has flowing lines and are also called ‘natural shapes.’ They resemble objects found in nature such as a pond (a squiggly blob), an apple, or a leaf.

Abstract Shapes. There are also those shapes which we cannot relate to reality. These are the freeform shapes like spirals, cloud-like formations, and multi-dimensional shapes that have become popular in modern logo design.

Using Shapes in Your Designs

Using shapes properly is one of the keys to successful graphic design. The form, color, size and other characteristics for the shapes in a layout can determine its mood and message.

Soft, curved and rounded shapes are perceived differently than sharp, angled shapes.

For instance, a company whose primary customer base is women may use circles and curves in their logo. Likewise, a business in the sports industry will want shapes with sharp lines that portray movement and action like the Nike logo.

Also, consider the invisible shapes of your designs such as the general outline for a website or brochure.

Your wireframe may include shapes for the header and placement of design elements, but the boundaries may not necessarily be drawn out or outlined in the final design.

Shapes can be grouped or used in patterns to add emphasis.
The “white space” or negative space left between shapes will also significantly impact a design.
Experimentation and altering of shapes within a design can ultimately lead to the desired result.

Shape Creation in Modern Graphic Design

Graphics software has transformed the way graphic designers can deal with shapes and Adobe Illustrator is the most useful tool the creation and manipulation of shapes.

Simple shapes such as circles, squares, and triangles can be created with a click and drag.
Adjusting lines and curves using the tools in Illustrator and similar programs can create more complex shapes, of limitless dimensions.
Colors, patterns, opacity and other characteristics of shapes can easily be altered.

It is important for designers to master the shape tools within their favorite software, as almost any shape that can be imagined can now be created.

Feature Image Credit: Yuri_Arcurs/Getty Images

By Eric Miller

Sourced from ThoughtCo.

In News

What Happens To Your Creativity When You Age, According To New Study

September 11, 2017 No Comments

By Mikelle Leow

What happens to your ability to think up novel ideas when you get older, and when does creativity truly peak?

To answer these questions, Alison Gopnik and Tom Griffiths—professors of psychology at the University of California, Berkeley—have conducted a handful of experiments with their colleagues to determine the effects of age on creativity.

The team began with a group of participants of different ages: namely four- and five-year-old preschoolers, six- to 11-year-old children, 12- to 14-year-old teenagers, and adults.

The researchers discovered that, when it came to making descriptions, preschoolers were the most likely to think up creative, unusual explanations, and school children were slightly less creative. “And there was a dramatic drop at adolescence. Both the teenagers and the adults were the most likely to stick with the obvious explanation even when it didn’t fit the data.”

However, when it came to social problems, teenagers were deemed the most creative group. “They were more likely to choose the unusual explanation than were either the 6-year-olds or the adults.”

“Why does creativity generally tend to decline as we age? One reason may be that as we grow older, we know more. That’s mostly an advantage, of course. But it also may lead us to ignore evidence that contradicts what we already think. We become too set in our ways to change.”

It turns out that while much of childhood and adolescence is spent exploring multiple facets of life, creativity dwindles in adulthood as a result of the stern constraints of reality. Moral of the story: it’s important to see things in a childlike wonder at times, even when your consciousness fights back and tells you how ridiculous things might be.

You can read more about this study over at The New York Times.

By Mikelle Leow

Sourced from DesignTaxi

In News

The Dark Side Of “Friendly” Design

July 28, 2017 No Comments

By Jessica Lehmann.

Since when did businesses, from Mailchimp to Monsanto, start friend-washing? And when are they going to stop?

Everywhere you look a “friendly” brand stares back at you. Help Remedies sells doll-sized packets of over-the-counter medicine with tongue-in-cheek labels (“Help. I have a headache”) with a different colour for each malady. An eco-water company calls itself Boxed Water Is Better. Casper, which has disrupted the mattress and bedding industry, used a whimsical zoo of anthropomorphized creatures to launch its suite of bedroom pieces and became a $100 million company while doing it.

Friendly branding, it seems, sells.

But now that it’s the favoured visual approach of everyone from Chase to Pepsi, we have to question whether the obsession with friendliness has gone too far. It has become the catchall way of trying to engage consumers in a more “personal” and “authentic” way. But in its ubiquity, it’s being exposed as a shallow, limiting approach to branding that can ignore some fundamental facts about the world we live in.

How We Got Here

No one could have predicted that when Google launched its first web page in 1996, those clunky sites would evolve into the sprawling network that we rely on for everything from political activism to finding love and buying groceries. Digital is our new normal.

As fast as our lives have become digital-first, companies have changed the way they engage us. Companies spend more on digital advertising than on television advertising, and customers can interact with brands on Twitter and Facebook Messenger. Brands look, feel, and behave very differently too, understanding that in a world where Instagram is the antidote to boredom, things need to be visually appealing and compelling for anyone to spend time with them. The early web was text-heavy, monotonous, and had web-safe typography; now we see rounded edges, vibrant colour palettes, and smiling faces everywhere from Mailchimp to Monsanto.

The shift didn’t happen overnight, but in the wake of a financial crisis that plunged the world into a deep recession and shook people’s trust in traditional institutions, a new wave of companies were snapping at the heels of big corporations that looked complex, out-of-touch, and unapproachable. Smartphones were everywhere, allowing on-demand and direct-to-consumer services to penetrate the market. Everything from Dropbox’s easier solution for file management, with an illustration style to create a more human brand, to a more cost-effective and a fun alternative to hotels with Airbnb were appearing online. Their warm and friendly branding quickly became a shorthand for “we’re different.”

It wasn’t long before pared-back logos, flat illustrations, and sans serif typefaces prevailed. Oscar launched in 2013 with cute cartoon characters plastered all over the New York City Subway and the tagline, “Hi, we’re Oscar, a new kind of insurance company.” It grabbed people’s attention by turning our expectations about insurance upside down. It seemed affable and approachable–a clever strategy when you’re trying to disrupt a category known for being painful and bureaucratic.

The Problem With Friendly Branding

But there’s a dark side to friendly branding. We discovered this while building a new brand for Laurel Road, an online lender focused on student loan refinancing, last year. During our research, we discovered that other companies in the fintech space were trying to humanize student loan refinancing, injecting warmth and optimism into their brands in an effort to convince their audience that student debt wasn’t such a bad thing.

Their approach has attracted investor dollars, but the friendliness and positivity that saturates the fintech space are not only undifferentiated, they lull customers into a false sense of security. Student loan debt is the top financial concern for millennials, and while student loan refinancing provides an alternative payback route, it is still debt. An over-friendly brand minimizes the concern and burden associated with paying it back.

A financial advisor who we interviewed also pointed out that overly positive branding that focused on lifestyle-related messaging and imagery made life look a like a never-ending series of networking events–something associated with young coastal elites. It didn’t feel representative of a more down-to-earth consumer from a broader demographic that we, and many other fintech and refi brands, want to reach.

We unearthed insights with our clients about their customers’ focus, commitment, and ability to overcome challenges. This led us to position the brand in a way that embraced the reality of their situation– incorporating full-bleed imagery showing diverse terrain to signal the journey customers are on toward achieving their goals and paying back their debt, and a colour palette that nods to academic achievement.

Other companies, like Palantir, a data mining company that helps clients protect themselves against cyber threats, have taken a similar approach. By juxtaposing a grey colour palette and a squared-off, cyber-esque typeface with real-world visuals and an unfussy, reassuring tone, Palantir has created a brand that feels serious but not cold or isolated. This is also evident in many of the newspapers people interact with on a daily basis– the New York Times, for example, is an institution that needs to engender trust and take on a serious tone, but it also has to channel humanity. The use of the original logo and stymie typeface, harking back to their roots as print newspaper of record, along with expressive, vibrant art direction helps them achieve this.

In the post-truth world that we’ve come to know in 2017, friend-washing isn’t just disingenuous, it could be bad for business. Brands that fail to respond to people’s scepticism about the messages that companies try to send them risk being discarded as people’s tolerance for “fauxthentic”‘ brand expressions reaches an all-time low. Brands looking to future-proof their business will “stop lying to people” and offer honest ways to address people’s fears through a simplified narrative and more realistic promises that they make to people.

So What Should Brands Do?

When building a new brand, it’s essential to step back and survey the scene. What’s going on in the world and how is that affecting people’s behaviour and the way they interact with brands? What are the current trends in the space you’re moving into? And how is that space likely to look tomorrow, a couple of years from now, and further into the future? Are competitors clustering around a particular approach? Who is the most innovative of them all, and why? Does it get them noticed? Is there opportunity to move beyond the mainstream and occupy a unique space? How bold and daring are you willing to be in doing this?

If the space looks unilaterally “friendly,” then dig deep and seek out the untold stories of the people you’re looking to connect with. Ask yourself how they can be brought to life with humanity and honesty. Use the resources you have at your disposal–shape, colour, type, tone, messaging–as an alchemist would; weave potent truths and ideas together in a way that adds new value to people’s worlds, rather than offering them more of the same.

By Jessica Lehmann

Jessica Lehmann is associate director of Strategy at Brand Union New York, where she leads strategy for a number of clients in the tech and innovation space, including Harman. A graduate of the WPP Fellowship, she spent time in Shanghai at Ogilvy as a digital strategist, and at The Futures Company in New York where she worked on everything from fragrance to breakfast cereal.

Sourced from CO.DESIGN

In News

7 Things to Think About For Your Startup’s Typography

June 12, 2017 No Comments

By Simon Endres.

Typography is the most effective and meaningful vehicle for your brand personality.

Typography surrounds us at all times, on all mediums. We see type used on websites, physical products, digital, print and television ads, magazines and on every book cover. The use of type is so pervasive that it ends up becoming invisible to most people. After all, very few people go around saying, “Wow, that’s a nice typeface!”

That being said, typography can communicate a lot of ambient information in an immediate and emotional way. Readers will respond to the size, the different shapes, weight and color of the type as well as bringing their own cultural references to bear before they actually read the words. By using the right typeface, a startup can create a strong emotional impression that, combined with effective messaging, can lead to more successful brand communication.

For example, when Red Antler was considering a typographic approach for Allbirds, a brand that uses premium natural materials to make comfortable and stylish shoes, we needed to find a typeface that would be a counterbalance to the looser script style of the logo. While the logo communicates a curious sense of ease and movement, we wanted the rest of the type to feel very modern and dynamic. In contrast with the logo, which summarily skips along, the headlines feel very bold and direct, connoting a sense of confidence and a no-nonsense attitude.

When thinking about typography as you build a product or site for your startup, you want to think through several key things, including what kind of impression you want to make, and make sure that the typography matches the message and purpose of your communications. Typography is the most effective and meaningful vehicle for your brand personality; not only does typography convey your message, it also communicates your personality, brand attributes (is your brand trustworthy, playful, serious) and your tone of voice.

Below are seven specific things to think about as you explore the world of typography for your startup or business:

1. Understand the value.

Typography is an essential element of your overall brand identity toolkit. Along with your logo and colors, type is one of the core elements that make up your brand identity. While photography and illustration are important to help visualize your offering, no other tool is as immediate, flexible or readily available to you as your typefaces.

2. Create a distinct and recognizable typographic image with your logo.

While a logo can’t communicate everything about your business, it can help give your audience cues as to who you are and how you might behave. The right type choice can help position your company in a meaningful way. Are you empathetic and accessible, are you trustworthy and credible, are you unique and one of a kind?

3. Find unique opportunities to embed meaning.

Typography can be truly empowering, as it can enable you to create a distinct set of shapes that are memorable. Typography can also position you differently from your competition.

Red Antler’s recent work with GoodUncle, a new food delivery service that gives people access to crave-worthy food no matter where they live, illustrates exactly that. We created a logo that is pretty weird looking, with a stretched G that also doubles as a U. The dripping goopy G evokes the delicious dripping ingredients that makes your mouth water. In this case, we embraced a more unexpected treatment that really brought to life the personality of the Gooduncle name and their unique offering. The primary intention of creating this was that if we pique curiosity in the typeface, then the overall brand experience will be infinitely more memorable.

4. Be versatile.

As a startup, there’s a lot to communicate, from headlines on your homepage to the detailed FAQ page. You need a selection of typefaces that can speak in different tones and at different volumes depending on the context. It’s important that your type choices complement each other. Strong, logical type hierarchy allows you to communicate the various layers of messaging. For example, bold display for headlines, clear and credible value props, hardworking with great legibility that works at small sizes in print and digital.

5. Sweat the details.

The amount of space you specify between letters, words and lines can impact the overall perception of the message or content. When we are working with a fashion or beauty brand, for instance, we’ll pay particular attention to the spacing of letters in the logo and headlines often adding a lot more space between letters to evoke a sense of elegance and luxury.

6. Invest in quality.

There are thousands of typefaces, and some are better drawn than others. Be wary of badly constructed typefaces for use as a workhorse typeface that needs to service your many needs. The nuances of weight, height, width, thick and thin strokes as well as how the letters relate to each other are all carefully calibrated by an expert typographer. Chose a “cut” that has good pedigree and a large family that gives you adequate flexibility to communicate through the many layers of your business whether it’s a PowerPoint deck, a subway campaign or your “How It Works” web page.

7. Consider going custom.

A custom typeface is unique to your brand, has the ability to accurately express your tone of voice and brad personality, and if executed well can be as recognizable as your logo. Some challenges do exist, including the need to commit time and budget to enlist an expert typographer to draw the typeface, ensure a tight brief and pick the right partner.

Typography is a powerful tool that, if given the right amount of attention by a founder, can be incredibly valuable as you build your startup brand, and can convey your message and personality in an authentic, understated and effective way.

Image credit: Courtesy of Red Antler

By Simon Endres

Simon Endres is a co-founder and partner at Red Antler. A New Zealand native, Simon lives in Cobble Hill in Brooklyn, N.Y.Read more

Sourced from Entrepreneur

In News

These Design Inspirations Can Change How We Read The News

May 26, 2017 No Comments

By Kent Mundle

The news industry has experienced tremendous turmoil in the past few years, and with tremendous turmoil comes new strategies, which put publications’ online experiences front and center. Websites are being redesigned, and mobile apps are being created left and right, which means the news industry is ripe with opportunities for designers with a vision.

Before you can have a vision though, you need a lot of inspiration, which is why we wrote this post. In it, we highlight and comment on the best news apps and websites from around the web. Some of the designs are captured from live products, and some are still in development.

Ready, set, find your vision.

Ukranian News Portal

Credit: Toma Reznichenko

Why it’s amazing:

Tubik’s Chief Product Officer created this news portal. She illustrates a great way to display sectors and transitions between scales. Often news portals hide their navigation tools when entering and leaving content. This can leave a user disoriented and confused about where they are in the interface relative to the rest of the content. This interface always keeps its menu around, but nicely transitions into a full screen view as well.

Time and Health Magazine

Credit: Elena Saharova

Why it’s amazing:

The idea of ranking content is not necessarily new, as many different platforms have utilized some sort of upvoting before. However, a rating system for articles – similar to Rotten Tomatoes – is interesting. In the age of content overload, readers appreciate knowing whether an article is worth a read or not. Upvoting systems reduce content overload, but this ranking system suggests an organizational structure for articles that will be worth reading well after they have been published.

Philharmonic Timeline

Credit: Grzegorz Oksiuta

Why it’s amazing:

The transition between calendar and main headlines offers an alternative way to consume content. Although this is a news platform specific to a concert hall, it suggests how similar institutions might align news content with upcoming events. The headline feed offers the featured content quickly, while the zoomed out calendar provides a broader scope of other programming.

Newsstand

Credit: Aurélien Salomon

Why it’s amazing:

Both Google Newsstand and Trello cards inspired this design. Can you tell? Salomon’s intent was to reconsider the pull gesture. Typically, the pull gesture is used to refresh the page. Salomon instead directs navigation in multiple directions and scales all with the single gesture type. The result is a smooth transition between menu and content.

The Weekday App

Credit: Nguyen Le

Why it’s amazing:

This editorial prototype focuses more on aesthetic design choices rather than architectural ones. The design harkens to the style of conventional print media, and as a result, it gives the content a serious tone, which many news portals lack. The serif font, which has suited mobile, is easier to read over an extended period of time than the serif fonts, which are more common in most digital interfaces.

By Kent Mundle

Technical Editor @ Toptal

Sourced from Toptal

In News

Designing Marketing Campaigns: The Importance of Market Segmentation

March 3, 2017 No Comments

How to Design Marketing Campaigns: The Importance of Market Segmentation

By Myk Pono.

This article shares the process involved in designing successful marketing campaigns.

The goal is to outline practical strategies and tactics that are vital in launching high ROI marketing campaigns. Its primary focus is SaaS (or enterprise) companies at any growth stage. Even experienced marketing teams should be able to find one or two ideas that are worth testing.

Why should you care? Don’t we know all about running marketing campaigns by now? While there are tons of resources written on marketing and marketing campaigns, many/most are not comprehensive and others are missing essential strategic steps in the process. And more importantly — there are still plenty of poorly designed marketing campaigns.

Tech companies often fail at marketing because they take a fundamentally flawed approach to designing marketing strategy and campaigns. Subpar marketing leads to “me-too” uninspiring content on corporate blogs with insignificant social shares and superficiality from the target audience’s viewpoint. Tech companies struggle to create strategic messaging to describe their products and use undifferentiated messages, jargon and superlatives. The end result is that marketing drains significant resources on paid acquisition campaigns that have no market segmentation or designated landing pages.

These are just a few examples; but what’s behind such failure? Part of the problem is not understanding what marketing is and what its goals are. Also, many techies (especially engineers) believe that a good product sells itself (wrong!). And many founders and executives have a negative bias against marketing and marketers (sad!).

How do you define marketing and what is its goal? I have argued in previous articles that the goal of marketing is to manage perception and change the behavior of your target audience. Period. All marketing activities and every aspect of marketing falls under the goals of managing perception, changing behavior, or both.

What is a marketing campaign? A marketing campaign is a process that includes a series of activities or steps designed to alter the perception and behavior of customers or prospects.

Part 1: What is the biggest mistake made when designing marketing campaigns?

In the last few years, I’ve spoken with over a hundred founders and marketing executives. When asked about marketing strategy, most of the time companies present some sort of excel file (or other doc) with a list of activities such as SEO, SEM, social media, content marketing, paid acquisition campaigns, PR, email marketing or the likes. Each channel might include a few generic marketing campaigns or just a laundry list of activities.

There are tons of resources and content materials that share tactics on how to optimize your landing page, your conversion rate, how to pick and test the right title, what wording to use on your call-to-action, as well as how to use color and images to improve click-through-rates and so on. Yet, many fail to mention the most important part of this process. Before building any marketing campaign, companies need to have a solid marketing foundation. This foundation should include strategic messaging, ideal customer profiles, and competitive positioning. It is only on this solid foundation that effective marketing campaigns can be built.

Lack of marketing playbook or outline

Many organizations have no marketing strategy, methodology or playbook outlining how to structure marketing activities. Unquestionably, if you are a young startup there are more pressing survival issues than thinking about marketing strategy. But even mature organizations with detailed sales playbooks often lack any outlined strategy when it comes to marketing. (If you have marketing playbook in your organization I want to hear from you — seriously!).

I’m not advocating writing a 20-page marketing strategy playbook when you have just a dozen customers. Nevertheless, an outline of just a few pages that includes your target customer profile, strategic messaging with outlined value proposition, market segments, content topics, and marketing channels can increase the clarity and effectiveness of your marketing significantly.

A simple marketing playbook will enable a company to stay focused. It will help recruit and train the right marketing hires. In the same way that a sales playbook is the first document that new sales hires should digest during the on-boarding process, a marketing playbook will help new marketing hires getting up to speed by learning from how the organization has approached marketing so far.

Focusing on channels rather than customers

The absence of a marketing playbook leads to the biggest mistakes that companies make in designing marketing campaigns — they focus on marketing channels rather than the target customer.

In some companies, even teams are structured around channels — paid acquisition, SEO, social media. Having specialized teams definitely has its advantages. However, organizing teams around channels creates a culture where no one looks at customer experiences and customer lifecycle as a whole, instead focusing on their own initiatives, which leads to fighting over budgets, messaging and inconsistent marketing strategy.

Most companies start their marketing campaigns backwards — where should we spend our money?:

Their narrative starts with “where should we spend our money, what messages should we use and only then, who should we target”.

This is how successful marketing campaigns are structured:

This better way starts with the target customer, market segmentation, and only then moves to messaging and channels.

Before designing your next marketing campaign, make sure you answer the following questions:

Who is your target customer?
What is the goal of your current marketing campaign?
Can you split your market into meaningful segments?
What messages do you want to use or test to influence your target customer?
What are the best channels for your marketing campaign to reach your target audience?
How do you align marketing and sales?
How do you track and test the success of your marketing campaigns?

Going wide instead of deep

Companies rarely look into segmentation to achieve greater ROI on their marketing spend. Even when a company understands its target customer they still get it wrong. Take a VP of Sales in an organization with over 20 sales reps; it overlooks the fact that the needs and challenges their target customers are facing might be very different depending on the vertical. For example, a sales manager in the pharmaceutical industry might have very different needs, organizational structure, or even goals, compared to a sales manager in the hardware or media industry. We will come back to the idea of market segmentation later.

Certainly, there are other reasons why marketing campaigns fail. For example, weak or nonexistent calls-to-action, lack of valuable content or failing to manage customer acquisition cost and campaign budget can all impact on the success of your marketing campaigns. However, if you aren’t clear on your target customer and you aren’t segmenting your addressable market, nothing else will bring real performance improvements.

NOTE: Before you continue reading, I highly recommend you read the guide on strategic messaging first. It will help you follow this article better and see how the concept of target customer profiling and strategic messaging intertwine with designing effective marketing campaigns.

Strategic Communication: How to Develop Strategic Messaging and Positioning
This article covers the essentials of strategic communication.medium.com

Part 2: How to Design Marketing Campaigns.

2.1. Start with your target customer

Many teams are aware of the importance of going through the exercise of creating target customer profiles (aka Ideal Customer Profile — ICP). However, it is worth repeating that ICP is the cornerstone of every effective marketing strategy.

A target customer profile allows your company to set the right goals, design effective strategic messaging, segment your marketplace, develop value-based content marketing strategy, and pick the right channels for your marketing campaigns. In my previous article, we went over the detailed process for designing target customer profiles. Let’s now outline a few things that weren’t given enough attention earlier.

An ideal customer profile should be developed for every persona in the buying process.
Let’s not forget that not only decision makers and senior executives have a stake in a buying decision. Stakeholders with other goals and concerns can stir decisions during important buying processes. The larger the organization and the more impactful product you are selling, the more likely the buying process will include multiple stakeholders with multiple objectives and concerns.

Therefore, it’s essential to ensure that your organization understands the needs and values of everyone involved in buying your product.

Look inside and outside your organization.
The process of designing ideal customer profiles should involve interviewing your customers, prospects, and even your internal team. These interviews should be structured in such a way to help you understand the pains and needs that your target market is trying to solve.

Another good way to learn about your ideal customer profile is to dig into your CRM data and analyze what type of customers have the highest Customer Lifetime Value (CLV) and shortest sales cycle.

LEARN MORE: This article by Dave Kellogg talks about the benefits of segmenting your current customers based on renewal rate and retention rate dimensions — The Evolution of Marketing Thanks to SaaS.

For example, Metadata (full disclosure: I’m an advisor), collects all the data about your existing customers and patterns of engagement from the CRM, marketing automation, marketing analytics and even from social media accounts. Analyzing this data allows them to create a view of your current customers with the highest Customer Lifetime Value and shortest sales cycle. This data is then used to run marketing campaigns that target look-alike personas.

For early-stage startups with no, or a limited number of customers, the primary focus is finding a dream customer for your product. What company and what persona has the highest pain that your product is solving? What company has the budget and size to become your customer for 1/3/5 years? Early stage startups should narrow their focus when it comes to ICP and then slowly expand as they grow. If you try to market too broadly too early, you end up with watered down everything because you aren’t big enough to do it right.

Getting your ideal customer profile right requires looking inside and outside your organization. When a company focuses only on the profile of current customers they miss out on larger opportunities to attract customers that might be a better fit. Sometimes teams fall into a mindset of thinking that just because they have a certain segment of profitable customers that this segment is the best one to focus on. Nonetheless, it is often because companies used non-effective messaging or run specific campaigns that they ended up attracting these customers in the first place.

Basically the question is this — are you sure that your most profitable customer segment currently isn’t purely the result of wrongly positioning your product or misusing messaging in the past? This is why looking outside of your organization is as important as diving into your customer data.

2.2. Segment your market

Market segmentation is a very underestimated strategy when it comes to improvement of your marketing ROI. Essentially, market segmentation is the process of dividing an entire addressable market into clearly defined segments with similar pains and values.

NOTE: I agree with Tom Wentworth who pointed out that market segmentation is an important topic beyond marketing. Segmentation impacts go-to-market strategy, messaging, product roadmaps, and the way you structure your sales team. This process needs C-level buy-in and commitment to think of segmentation in the very function of the company. Unfortunately, many companies go through segmentation exercises as a purely marketing thing.

Let’s take a deep dive into segmentation, a secret resource of great marketing teams, with a case study.

CASE STUDY

Let me explain how market segmentation can improve ROI for marketing campaigns and how I learned about market segmentation. In 2009, I was hired to join a newly created corporate marketing team at Sophos, a global security software company with over 1200 employees worldwide. Amongst other responsibilities, my task was to create and manage paid acquisition campaigns (primarily Adwords). The Adwords campaigns that had been running previously weren’t performing well due to a number of issues.

The problem

High cost per click was a challenge. First, the cost per lead was extremely high. Words and phrases such as “antivirus”, “data protection” and “encryption” are among of the most competitive keywords in Adwords, after insurance and mortgage. Another problem we were facing was a big consumer market that could drive high cost per lead with absolutely zero value to our organization. Unlike our competitors such as Symantec, AVG or McAfee, Sophos only sells to large organizations (finance, retail, government, healthcare, non-profit). Therefore, we had to take into account high cost-per-click and consumers while designing our paid acquisition strategy. How important was this cost to our marketing budget?

Let’s look at some approximations. For keywords like “antivirus”, “data protection”, “encryption software” you can pay anywhere between $5-$10 per click:

Cost-Per-Click (CPC) of ~$5 with conversion rate 3% -> leads to $33 Cost-Per-Lead (CPL)
(100 Clicks * $5 CPC) * 3% = 15 leads
$500 (total cost) / 15 leads = $33 Cost-Per-Lead (!)

A $33 CPL is quite high, particularly if you add a huge consumer market that’s very difficult to exclude. What this means is that you can end up paying as much at $33 for the email address of a college student. With these figures, your cost and campaign ROI can get out of hand quickly — even with a significant marketing budget.

Take for instance, a situation where 3 out of 10 leads are bogus data or coming from consumers, the effective cost per lead for the 7 “good” leads is ~$47. Our average deal size was large enough (some >$100K annually) to make it worthwhile for Sophos to pay up to $100-$120 /per lead for a high quality (VP-level or C-level from a Fortune 1000) lead. But proving marketing ROI was never easy because our sales cycle was between 6–12 months. So while we could spend $40K per month on Adwords, paying $33 per lead, we might have to wait for up to 12 months to really see revenue.

Today a case could be made that with such high CPL, the money would be better spent on outbound sales campaigns or an account-based marketing approach.

The Solution

We searched for a marketing agency to help us manage our Adwords campaigns as well as design landing pages. I talked with almost every marketing agency in the Boston area and we settled on the one that proposed deep market segmentation for our paid campaigns. Along with the agency, our marketing team segmented the market based on vertical industries and product offerings.

We started small and created targeted landing pages for companies that were looking for a specific product in a specific industry. For example, we first created landing pages for antivirus solutions in top industries, and had landing pages that focused on:

Antivirus for Finance companies
Antivirus for Government Organizations
Antivirus for Non-profit
Antivirus for Retail
Antivirus for Education

For each page we created a separate ad campaign with unique calls to action and ad messages, as well as focusing on narrow keywords related only to this product and industry. Also, each page had unique content targeted to the ideal customer profile for a specific vertical. This allowed us to decrease the cost-per-click because Google saw the ads as very relevant. Our conversion rate increased and our cost per lead decreased. When we saw that one industry performed well, we would segment that industry further and create another ad campaign and landing page; data protection solutions for banks for example.

In a couple of months, we had over 50 landing pages running across multiple industries and product lines. Beforehand we were directing visitors to generic landing pages and in some cases just product pages. Post campaign, we had a mini-website with ~50 pages covering very specific products and industries. It’s true that it can be very costly to develop 50 landing pages. However, remember we were often paying over $33 per lead, so if a new landing page costs $400 and you can decrease cost per lead by $10 you can break even after only 40 leads generated from such a page.

Vertical Segmentation for Paid Acquisition Campaigns

Unfortunately, I can’t share the exact numbers in terms of improvements in conversion rate, Cost-Per-Click, or Cost-Per-Lead. But I can tell you that we improved our Adwords campaigns somewhere in the range of 50–150% on a Cost-Per-Lead basis. This is a unique case study where the importance of market segmentation could be calculated and translated into dollar amount.

We learned a lot (at least I did) and based on our learning developed separate pages on the website dedicated to every top industry. It also helped us drive some organic traffic from search engines and let customers landing on our website segment themselves based on the industry they were coming from.

LEARN MORE: Brian Halligan, CEO of HubSpot discusses segmentation and targeting for scaling company in this article — HubSpot’s Playbook for Going From Startup to Scale-up.

There are multiple ways to segment your market besides simple vertical or industry segmentation that we saw in the Sophos example.

Narrow your market and go deep. Segmentation allows companies to narrow their market and go deep. What do we mean by going deep?

Hypothetically speaking, if you company is willing to pay for 1,000 touches that your prospects have with your product, ad, content or whatever, you’ll get a better ROI if you have 10 touches in 100 different companies than 1 touch in 1,000 different companies. Going narrow and deep is what constitutes the main idea of what we call account-based marketing which we will discuss later. From a segmentation perspective, going narrow and deep means looking at your ICP and your market from the prism of a smaller, well defined group of customers.

Segmentation doesn’t have to be complicated, and there are cases where it can be overkill. In general, best advice is to make sure segments strike a balance between being big enough to be economically viable and sufficiently different to justify modifying your message or changing the focus of the values presented to attract them.

For example, at Sophos creating a segment that targets data protection for non-profits, larger than 100 employees in south east Asia might be overkill. Unless, A) there are plenty such companies in this segment or 2) the order in which they perceive the value of your product is significantly different from other non-profits. So, you need to ask yourself:

Do you have enough companies in the segment (with the required budget) to make this segment attractive economically?
Are the companies in this segment differentiated enough in terms of pain and values to justify changes to your message?

Below are a few examples of how you can segment your marketing campaign.

Vertical segmentation

The Sophos case study is a perfect example of vertical or industry segmentation. If your product solves pains across multiple industries it is worth taking a look and testing industry segmentation.

Companies like Veeva and Vlocity built very successful companies just by focusing on specific verticals in otherwise very crowded industries. This is a great example of market segmentation as a core strategy.

Pain-based or value-based segmentation

Segmentation based on values and pains that target customers care about can improve your marketing campaign performance too. In the article on strategic messaging we saw that the target customer profile of the economic buyer (CMO, Chief Digital Officer (CDO) etc.) had three value categories: 1) revenue / retention / engagement; 2) customer satisfaction and 3) product roadmap decisions. It’s a good idea to design and test campaigns for each value category. In this particular example even the first value category can be broken down into three segments (revenue, retention and engagement). Your target customers may have up to 3 values that impact their buying decisions and the order of importance of these values may change depending on the segment.

Competitor-based segmentation

If your product is well positioned against competitors, you can segment your marketing campaigns based on competition. The key here is to understand your strengths and weaknesses and to play to them. You don’t necessarily have to position competitors as inferior, your goal should be to position them differently and to show for what customer pains and why your product is a better solution. Both Volvo and BMW are great cars but the former focuses on safety and the latter is more focused on performance. If done well, positioning competitors as inferior can be effective and some companies in consumer markets use this strategy often and successfully.

At Sophos we created competitor-based marketing campaigns betting on the brand keywords of the competition. We would create custom landing pages highlighting our advantages by comparing Sophos vs. McAfee or Sophos vs. AVG.

If your brand isn’t as well-known as your competitor, it’s a great idea to get your company into the consideration list for those who maybe haven’t heard of, or considered your product before. That said, it is better to avoid marketing campaigns against smaller and less well-known companies. You will only validate them and diminish your perceived brand value. So, just ignore smaller players. Instead go after industry leaders or established companies that many people dislike.

LEARN MORE: Recently, I came across a solid article on product positioning by April Dunford— Obviously Awesome: a product positioning exercise. Also, check out the article on the law of duality by Al Ries — The law of duality is creating havoc with many marketing programs.

Technology-based segmentation

Let’s say your product is built on top of the Salesforce platform or your product integrates with multiple CRMs or marketing automation systems. This is a perfect opportunity to segment your market based on the technology that your target customers use.

For example, PandaDoc, a document automation solution, integrates with over a dozen CRMs. They build a dedicated page for every single integration. This is a great example of how you can create marketing campaigns focusing on technology that is supported or used by your product. Marketing campaigns targeting document automation for Salesforce, Hubspot or Pipedrive reaches companies that use these technologies and allows your message to be tailored specifically to the targeted technology.

NOTE: We highlighted above just a few examples of market segmentation but in no way is this a complete list. Some companies and some markets will have unique profitable market segments to explore.

2.3. Strategic messaging

Market Segmentation Examples

Once you have segmented your target market, you need to adjust your strategic messaging to fit customers in each segment.

If vertical segmentation includes companies in the financial sector, it’s important to make sure that your value proposition reflects the challenges that these companies face.

In technology-based segments, it’s important to describe how your product is integrated with the targeted technology. Outline how your product enhances experiences or saves time.

Strategic messaging at this stage impacts the content on your landing pages, in ads and so on.

2.4. Marketing channels

There are multiple marketing channels and ways to run your marketing campaign, and we can’t cover all of them here. The main point to note is that only once you understand your customers, have segmented them, and adjusted your messaging can you move into the specifics of launching marketing campaigns whether through Linkedin, Twitter, Facebook or any other channels. As mentioned, one of the biggest mistakes marketers make is creating Facebook/Linkedin/Twitter campaigns without a clear understanding of their customer and without segmenting and adjusting their messaging to new markets.

Obviously each channel has different targeting capabilities, limits on content, and politics around calls-to-action, so some adjustment will be needed.

Designing Marketing Campaigns: Market Segmentation

2.5. Call-to-Action (CTA) / marketing assets / landing pages

Your customer acquisition model will dictate the call-to-action, marketing assets, and landing pages that you use. With broader and simpler products that use freemium or free trial models, you can drive prospects from marketing campaigns to free trials or signups. Marketing assets using this strategy become optional. Many companies with this approach move away from gated content, signup forms and marketing qualified leads (MQLs). Drift, for example, only asks prospects to provide an email to access their free 14 day trial, and the rest of their content, such as marketing assets, ebooks, etc. are given without any lead forms.

When it comes to more expensive products for which you can’t easily build a free trial or where a freemium model isn’t a viable option, gated content can still be effective. However, I personally believe that gating content has very little benefit and it may harm, more than help a company grow. Opening up your content can increase interest and social media shares. So, instead of gating content, open it up and showcase a “request a demo” CTA. By design, a “request a demo” call to action is more appealing to prospects with higher buying intent. Students and small business outside your target customer profile might give you their email to access an educational white paper but they are unlikely to sign up for demo.

The bottom line is that you have to understand your customer acquisition process and create appropriate call-to-action and landing pages. Marketing assets can help you spark interest and generate leads if your marketing team still relies on MQLs.

2.6. Align marketing, sales and product

We will discuss marketing and sales alignment more closely when we talk about account-based marketing below. However, it’s important to remember that when marketing uses segmentation and adjusts messages accordingly, sales reps need to be signed up to this unified message. The last thing you want to do is to pitch your prospect a generic value proposition if the company came from the financial sector.

Engaging your product team in the market segmentation process can provide necessary input for changing and adjusting your roadmap. It is much more effective to have product managers in the room when you develop your ICP, messaging, segmentation, and marketing campaigns than discover crucial information afterwards.

To avoid confusion, marketing and sales should develop battle cards for each market segment to use in their marketing campaigns. Battle cards include message and qualification questions specifically for each vertical. Segment-specific case studies, references, and customer reviews can also be tremendously helpful. In the early stages you can just mark in your CRM or marketing automation that a prospect came from a specific industry so your sales team can adjust their initial qualification call accordingly.

For example, Sophos took the importance of understanding vertical segmentation to the extreme. Our sales team was set up in a way to allow reps to focus on just one or two vertical markets. This setup allowed sales reps to be deeply immersed in the problems that industry faces and highly aware of competition and other market forces that impact the industry (eg. the financial sector was heavily impacted during 2008–2010 financial crisis).

2.7. Tracking and Analytics

Obviously you need to have some tracking and analytics in place. We won’t spend much time on this topic here but let’s highlight a few things that you have to be aware of. Marketing campaigns need to be tracked on following levels:

Channel level (CPC, CPM, CTR, CPL)
Landing page level (conversion rate)
Marketing automation / CRM level (leads, demos, opportunities, CAC, CLV)

LEARN MORE: To learn more about tracking marketing campaigns and customer acquisitions, read this in-depth article on how to track customer acquisitions.

NOTE: don’t forget to track your customers over time and understand how churn and CLV are impacted by segmentation. You might find interesting insights that will help you adjust and improve your marketing going forward.

First-touch / last-touch vs. pattern analysis

If you are emphasizing first-touch / last-touch in your marketing I believe you are missing the point. Analyzing customer interaction patterns rather than focusing on first-touch / last-touch will give you a better understanding of your customer.

Let’s look at attribution using a sports analogy. What has more impact on an athlete becoming an Olympic champion; the first practice or the last? You may argue that how people get into sports is most inspiring or that you can’t win the Olympics by skipping your last warm up before the race. While these are both true, the practice patterns over a long period of time is what correlates most with successful performance.

In your marketing, do you focus on understanding the pattern of how your prospects interact with your content, your product or your marketing campaign before they become a customer? If not, you’re missing a big trick. Look for overall patterns and a correlation between free trial signups and how many times a customer visited your website, consumed your contented, or was exposed to your marketing campaign. It is not the first-touch or the last-touch that matters, it is about the number of times (the pattern) that prospects are exposed to before they sign up or buy from you that matters.

2.8. Budget / ROI

Calculating marketing ROI is often tricky. What if you don’t have a free trial or signup and only collect demo requests by providing assets in exchange for contact information? This probably means that you have a longer sales cycle. As discussed in the case study, at Sophos, free trial or product sign up wasn’t an option and the sales cycle was long. This meant that estimating customer acquisition cost vs customer lifetime value was difficult. That’s why we had an intermediate step that required the sales team to assign a potential revenue number to every opportunity. It was this opportunity revenue number that we used to calculate ROI.

For example, let’s say we generated 1,000 leads (at a $50 cost per lead) in January and by March 1st all leads had gone through the sales process. If 25 opportunities were created with a combined potential revenue of $200K (remember Sophos is selling security solutions to large organizations, so some deals could easily be over $100K), the:

Total Cost = $50 per lead * 1,000 = $50,000 (landing page design cost are not included for simplicity)
Revenue per opportunity = $200K (total revenue opportunity) / 25 opps = $8,000
Opportunity per lead = $200K (total revenue opportunity) / 1,000 leads = $200 / revenue opp per lead

2.9. Optimization and testing

Optimizing and testing your marketing campaign is important. There are plenty of resources that discuss this topic in detail.

LEARN MORE: Lars Lofgren has a good article on testing and optimization when it comes to marketing — My 7 Rules for A/B Testing That Triples Conversion Rates.

2.10. Account-based Marketing (ABM)

While account-based marketing and account-based selling might come across as relatively new ideas, the basic concept has been around for a while. The main idea is to focus your selling and marketing efforts on a list of targeted customers with the highest potential Customer Lifetime Value (CLV). But the true benefit of this approach comes when account-based strategies in sales and marketing are aligned.

So how does account-based marketing play into the process of creating the marketing campaigns that we have discussed thus far? It is all about creating more targeted and segmented marketing campaigns instead of running a generic marketing campaign. Account-based marketing allows companies to take a narrow and deep approach even further by focusing on a specific list of companies in their selected segment. So instead of just targeting the financial sector, your marketing team will select a specific list of companies in that sector and go after them.

So for example, if you are selling to VPs of sales in organizations with over 20 sales reps, you might segment and test the pharmaceutical market and software resellers. Then you pick a list of 100–200 companies in each category. Teams have to be careful when picking target companies since sales reps will be inclined to select organizations they know, or have done business with. While this is not necessarily bad, nevertheless, you want to focus on targets that have higher CLVs and shorter sales cycles which indicate a great fit. That is why you want to use a data-driven approach to analyze your current customers (see Metadata example) and select specific targets you want to reach that match your ICP.

Needless to say, when you prepare your marketing campaign for each vertical you need to design unique messages. And don’t just focus on decision makers, because other stakeholders can have a huge impact on the final buying decision too. Ensure that you are talking to them as well.

Ultimately, companies need to align marketing, sales and product so that their target customer is exposed to messages a few times per day. In the morning your sales team might send him/her an outbound email, during work hours your customer can be exposed to your ads on Linkedin and Twitter, leading to a marketing asset that provides valuable insight. At the end of the day he/she might see your ad on Facebook or while reading the news through your retargeting campaign. This unified 360 attack from your sales and marketing team will allow you to spend your money efficiently and embed your company and message into the minds of your potential buyers.

Best results come from sales and marketing agreeing on a list of companies in a particular segment and designing marketing campaigns targeted to specific individuals and companies across multiple marketing channels for the duration of their outbound sales campaigns.

2.11. Putting it all together

Create a marketing campaign checklist:

Ideal Customer Profile
Segment your market
Strategic messaging
Pick marketing channels
Call-to-Action (CTA) / marketing assets / landing pages
Align marketing and sales
Tracking and Analytics
Budget / ROI
Optimization and testing

Summary

A Marketing playbook or outline will help you stay organized and keep track of marketing fundamentals by keeping a record of what has been working and what hasn’t.
Start with your target customer in mind and not with the channel.
Segmentation is key to running effective and efficient marketing campaigns. It’s worth exploring how your market can be segmented into an economically viable set of customers.
Understand your buyer journey. Journeys and the pattern of customer/prospect engagement is more insightful than first-touch /last-touch attribution analysis.
Account-based marketing strategy can help narrow your market even further and focus on reaching your target on many levels in organizations with different value-based messages for each stakeholder.

Additional Resources

How Silicon Valley’s bias against marketing obliterates value, time, and technical brilliance everywhere it goes by Dan Kaplan
The Evolution of Marketing Thanks to SaaS by Dave Kellogg
HubSpot’s Playbook for Going From Startup to Scale-up by Brian Halligan
Obviously Awesome: a product positioning exercise by April Dunford
The law of duality is creating havoc with many marketing programs by Al Ries
My 7 Rules for A/B Testing That Triple Conversion Rates by Lars Lofgren
The Importance Of Segmentation For Your SaaS Startup — by Tom Tunguz

By Myk Pono

Sourced from Medium

In Uncategorized

36 Days and 36 Design Prompts Lead to 36 Spectacular Typographical Creations

January 6, 2017 No Comments

By Andrew Nunes.

36 Days of Type is a yearly challenge created by Spanish designers Nina Sans and Rafa Goicoechea, which invites people across the world to design a new font every day for 36 consecutive days.

For this year’s edition, up-and-coming visual designer Jesseca Dollano stepped up to the plate and designed an expansive typeface for the challenge, one that manages to be futuristically cybernetic, mildly retro, and strangely cohesive at the same time.

The most interesting part of Dollano’s typeface is her numerical set, which functions like a time machine of typographical history in reverse. Beginning with a ‘0’ that is splintered into geometric 3D sections as if it were a NASA architectural blueprint, the numbers slowly become more corporeal and evocative of typographical styles from the 70s and 80s by the time ‘8’ and ‘9’ roll around.

Even their color palettes reflect this pattern of polished futurism, beginning with sleek, cold, and calculated blues and purples until bubbly reds and yellow burst into the font. Dollano later created another version of the typeface in an entirely synchronized palette revolving around shades of turquoise, yellow, and green.

Despite the fact that the Hong Kong-born, New York-based designer primarily works on app interfaces, infographics, and Samsung ads, this wasn’t Dollano’s first foray into typography. Her earlier project One Rock Alphabet saw the designer create an entire typeface from photographed movements of rocks, an idea she derived from a passage in physicist Alan Lightman’s book Einstein’s Dreams.

36 Days of Type marked a departure from a more formal and composed typographical style into something energetic and less constrained. It’s the first time she engaged in a time-based, durational design project, a feat that was challenging to say the least. “Designing anything at all (even if it’s something small) for 36 days straight will be a challenge for anyone. There is just not enough time in a day, especially after work,” Dollano tells The Creators Project.

“A friend actually challenged me to do this and it ended up becoming a competition between the two of us on who gets featured the most,” she adds. “I almost didn’t have a social life, as I was so dedicated to this project. I thought I couldn’t do it at first, but in the end, I managed!”

More of Jesseca Dollano’s works can be found on her website, and more information on the 36 Days of Type challenge is available here.

By Andrew Nunes

Sourced from The Creators Project

In News

A Quick Guide For Designing Better Buttons

December 14, 2016 No Comments

By Nick Babich.

Buttons are a common element of interaction design. While they may seem like a very simple UI element, they are still one of the most important ones to create.

In today’s article, we’ll be covering the essential items you need to know in order to create effective controls that improve user experience. If you’d like to take a go at prototyping and wireframing your own designs a bit more differently, you can download and test Adobe XD¹ for free.

Make Buttons Look Like Buttons Link

How do users understand an element is a button? The answer is simple. Visual cues help people determine clickability. It’s important to use proper visual signifiers on clickable elements to make them look like buttons.

Shape Link

A safe bet is to make buttons square or square with rounded corners, depending on the style of the site or app. Rectangular shaped buttons were introduced into the digital world a long time ago, and users are very familiar with them.

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Windows 95 at first run: notice that every button, including famous ‘Start’ button, has a rectangular shape. Image credit: Wikipedia³. (Large preview⁴)

You can, of course, be more creative and use other shapes, (circles, triangles, or even custom shapes), but keep in mind unique ideas can prove to be a bit riskier. You need to ensure that people can easily identify each varying shape as a button.

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Here, the Floating Action Button (FAB), which represents the primary action in an Android application, is shaped like a circled icon.

No matter what shape you choose, be sure to maintain consistency throughout your interface controls, so the user will be able to identify and recognize all UI elements as buttons.

Why is consistency so important? Well, because users remember the details, whether consciously or not. For example, users will associate a particular element’s shape as the “button.” Therefore, being consistent won’t only contribute to a great-looking design, but it’ll also provide a more familiar experience for users.

The picture below illustrates this point perfectly. Using three different shapes in one part of your app (e.g. system toolbar) is not only confusing to the user, it’s incorrect design practice.

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There’s nothing wrong with creativity and experimentation, but keep the design coherent. (Large preview⁷)

Shadows and Highlights Link

Shadows are valuable clues, telling users at which UI element they are looking. Drop-shadows make the element stand out against the background and make it easily identifiable as a tappable or clickable element, as objects that appear raised look like they could be pressed down, (tapped or clicked). Even with flat buttons (almost flat, to be exact), there are still places for these subtle cues.

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If a button casts a subtle shadow, users tend to understand that the element is interactive.

Clearly Label Buttons Link

Users avoid interface elements without a clear meaning. Thus, each button in your UI should have a proper label or icon⁹. It’s a good idea to base this selection on the principles of least astonishment: If a necessary button has a label or icon with a high astonishment factor, it may be necessary to change the label or icon.

Clear and Distinct Labels Link

The label on actionable interface elements, such as a button, should always tie back to what it will do for the user. Users will feel more comfortable when they understand what action a button does. Vague labels like ‘Submit,’ or abstract labels like in the example below, don’t provide enough information about the action.

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Avoid designing interface elements that make people wonder what they do. Image credit: uxmatters¹¹

The action button should affirm what that task is, so that users know exactly what happens when they click that button. It’s important to indicate what a button does using action verbs. For example, if a user is signing up for an account, a button that says, ‘Create Account,’ tells them what the outcome will be after pressing the button. It’s clear and specific to the task. Such explicit labels serve as just-in-time help, giving users confidence in selecting the correct action.

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A button’s label should say exactly what will happen when the user presses it. Image credit: Amazon¹³

Put Buttons Where Users Can Find Them Link

Don’t make users hunt for buttons; put buttons where users can easily find them or expect to see them.

Location and Order Link

If you’re designing a native app, you should follow platform GUI guidelines when choosing a proper location and order for buttons. Why? Because applying consistent design that follows user expectationssaves people time.

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Image credit: Apple¹⁵. (Large preview¹⁶)

In the case of web-based apps, you should think about which placement truly works best for your users. The right way to determine this is by testing.

If you design mobile navigation it’s worth paying attention to the best practices for buttons location. The article The Golden Rules Of Bottom Navigation Design⁴⁵¹⁷ covers this topic.

Make It Easy For Users To Interact With Buttons Link

The size and visual feedback of buttons, play key roles in helping users interact with them.

Size and Padding Link

You should consider how large a button is in relation to the other elements on the page. At the same time, you need to ensure the buttons you design are large enough for people to interact with.

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Smaller touch targets are harder for users to tap than larger ones. Image credit: Apple¹⁹. (Large preview²⁰)

When a tap is used as a primary input method for your app or site, you can rely on the MIT Touch Lab²¹study to choose a proper size for your buttons. This study found that the average size of finger pads are between 10–14mm and fingertips are 8–10mm, making 10mm x 10mm a good minimum touch target size. When a mouse and keyboard are the primary input methods, button measurements can be slightly reduced to accommodate dense UIs.

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10mm x 10mm is a good minimum touch target size. Image credit: uxmag²³

You should consider the size of button elements, as well as the padding between clickable elements, as padding helps separate the controls and gives your user interface enough breathing space.

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Here is an example of padding between buttons. Image credit: Material Design²⁵. (Large preview²⁶)

Provide Visual Feedback Link

This requirement isn’t about how the button initially looks to the user; it’s about interaction experience with the UI element. Usually, a button isn’t a one-state object. It has multi-states, and providing visual feedback to users to indicate the current state should be a top priority task. This helpful illustration from Material Design²⁷ makes it clear how to convey different button states:

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Make sure you consider the hover, tap, and active states of the button. Image credit: Material Design²⁹.³⁰
This animation shows the button’s behavior in action. Image credit: Behance³¹. (Large preview³²)

Visually Highlight The Most Important Buttons Link

Ensure the design puts emphasis on the primary or most prominent action. Use color and contrast to keep user focus on the action, and place the button in prominent locations where users are most likely to notice it.

Call-to-Action Button Link

Important buttons, (such as CTAs,) are meant to direct users into taking the action you want them to take. To create an effective call-to-action button, one that grabs the user’s attention and entices them to click, you should use colors with a high contrast in relation to the background and place the button in the path of a user.

If we look at Gmail’s UI³³, the interface is very simple and almost monochromatic, with the exception of the ‘Send’ button. As soon as users finish writing a message, they immediately notice this nice blue button.

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Adding one color to a grayscale UI draws the eye simply and effectively.

The same rule works for websites. If you take a look at the Behance³⁵ example below, the first thing that will catch your attention is a “Sign Up” call-to-action button. The color and the position, in this case, is more important than the text.

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The most important call-to-action button stands out against the background. (Large preview³⁷)

Visual Distinctions for Primary and Secondary Buttons Link

You can find another example of grabbing the user’s attention with buttons in forms and dialogues. When choosing between primary and secondary actions, visual distinctions are a useful method for helping people make solid choices:

The primary positive action associated with a button needs to carry a stronger visual weight. It should be the visually dominant button.
Secondary actions, (e.g. options like ‘Cancel’ or ‘Go Back’,) should have the weakest visual weight, because reducing the visual prominence of secondary actions minimizes the risk for potential errors, and further directs people toward a successful outcome.

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Notice how the primary action is stronger in color and contrast. Image credit: Apple³⁹. (Large preview⁴⁰)

Button Design Checklist Link

While every design is unique, every design also has a set of items in common. That’s where having a good design checklist comes in. To ensure your button design is right for your users, you need to ask a few questions:

Are users identifying your element as a button? Think about how the design communicates affordance. Make a button look like a button (use size, shape, drop-shadows and color for that purpose).
Does a button’s label provide a clear message as to what will happen after a click? It’s often better to name a button, explaining what it does, than to use a generic label, (like “OK”).
Can your user easily find the button? Where on the page you place the button is just as important as its shape, color and the label on it. Consider the user’s path through the page and put buttons where users can easily find them or expect them to be.
If you have two or more buttons in your view, (e.g. dialog box), does the button with the primary action have strongest visual weight? Make the distinction between two options clear, by using different visual weight for each button.

When looking at the visual distinction for ‘Submit’ button, it should be visually dominant over the other button. Image credit: Lukew

Conclusion Link

Buttons are a vital element in creating a smooth user experience, so it’s worth paying attention to the best essential practices for them. A quick recap:

Make buttons look like buttons.
Label buttons with what they do for users.
Put buttons where users can find them or expect them to be.
Make it easy for the user to interact with each button.
Make the most important button clearly identifiable.

When you design your own buttons, start with the ones that matter most, and keep in mind that button design is always about recognition and clarity.

By Nick Babich

Sourced from SMASHING MAGAZINE