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Comfort. It's comfortable. And deadly.

Music and links from this episode

Mystery Mammal from their great new album, Risk Society

I featured the tracks: Ruin, Greenhorn, and All Your Organs Get a Laugh

Line-by-line notes

Today's episode was going to be an extended one

But at the last minute

I changed my mind

Something has been nagging at me the last few days

About comfort zones

And how nobody likes to step out of them

But really, the only way we get better as humans

Is to step outside our comfort zones

This is AADA, and I'm Craig Burgess

MUSIC

Design and the creative industries require very specific things from you that lots of other careers dont

You have to adaptable, changing to variables that can appear at the drop of the hat

You have to be consistently improving, because things move so fast 

And that is something that gets harder as time goes on

When you first start in any career, everything is new

Anything at all that you learn is an improvement 

Every small increment is an improvement

But when you've been doing the design game for a while

You feel like you've seen it all

Or done everything 

Worst of all, lots of people feel like they know it all

That there's nothing left to learn

That's comfort

And it's deadly in a fast moving industry 

You can't ever get comfortable 

Comfort breeds arrogsnce

And cockiness

And not only are those traits not nice to see in somebody

They're self limiting

When you think you know everything, you stop learning everything 

Ive spoken lots about lifting weights on this podcast 

And i don't just do it keep fit and get stronger

I do it for the mental strength that it gives me

Lifting heavy weights pushes you far out of your comfort zone

When you've got a massive weight crushing your whole body and the only way to escape is to push it away

You find mental strength you didn't know you possessed

And finding that mental strength breeds more mental strength

This is exactly the same reason why pushing yourself out of a realm of comfort is so important

Progression isn't made by doing the same thing over and over

The only way to progress with anything is to increase the chsllenge

And as a designer, as you get better and better, that challenge needs to get bigger and bigger

When you get past all the initial book learning 

And reading the magazines 

And doing all the design work over the years 

Then you have to start working really hard to get outside of your comfort zone

I'm lucky in some ways

I've always thought like this

And I know that the only way to get better is through insane amounts of hard work

I don't always do the hard work

Sometimes I'm lazy

And sometimes for a long time I'm lazy

But I know, and I've proved it to myself over the years 

That when you put in the work to push yourself far outside of comfort

You make huge improvements 

The clue is in the title

Comfort is... Comfortable 

Comfort is nice feeling

But comfort over a long period has diminishing returns

We should all strive to be comfortable 

But the only way to be permanently comfortable 

Is to keep getting better and better 

And the only way to do thst

Is to stop being comfortable 

MUSIC

This was AADA and I'm Craig Burgess 

Music featured in this episode was by

Mystery Mammal from their great new album, Risk Society

I featured the tracks: Ruin, Greenhorn, and All Your Organs Get a Laugh

For a line by line rundown... /ep130

If you want more updates about my podcast, follow me on Twitter at craigburgess

I'm back tomorrow 

Support Ask a Designer Anything

Ask a Designer Anything Website

Twitter (@craigburgess)

Ask a Designer Anything on Facebook

Leave me a review on iTunes

How do you handle conflict in a design project?

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Music and links from this episode

Zapomnieç by Nonima

Viscous by FRAIL

Perfect Match by Kilyo

Line-by-line notes

Every designer has worked on frustrating projects

Most design projects have little bumps in the road

But sometimes, they turn into full on car crashes

At some point in every designer’s career

They’re going to have to handle conflict

This is AADA, and I’m Craig Burgess

MUSIC

Design projects can go wrong in a thousand ways

If you’re really unlucky, they’ll go wrong in a thousand ways all at once

The client can be wrong, the designer can be wrong, the research can be wrong

Deadlines might get missed, emails might get missed, meetings might get missed

People easily misunderstand things

Seriously, there’s so much that can go wrong

It’s no wonder then that experienced designers have to become conflict resolution experts

Let’s talk about one of the most common ways conflict arises in a project

A client making lots of changes to a design

You’ve been working with a client

You’ve been designing them a new logo

But you just can’t seem to get it completed

Every time you think you’re nearly there

The client makes another change

And most of the changes the client is making seem pointless

What do you do?

When a client is making lots of changes to any kind of design work

There’s something deeper going wrong

It could be the designer isn’t good enough

and the client feels like they need to improve it

It could be that the client is being polite

and that they don’t really like the design but they’re trying to improve it stealthily

Finally, it could be the client thinks they’re the designer

And they merely see you as a facilitator of their ideas

Whenever a design goes through more than a couple of changes

And you don’t feel like you’re getting anywhere with the project

You can’t keep going and not saying anything

At some point, for everybody’s sanity, a conversation needs to be had

The air needs to be cleared

In a situation like this

You need to ideally get to the problem before everybody gets pissed off

Which is sometimes easier said than done, because people can be excellent at hiding when they’re annoyed

Then that conversation needs to be had

These kind of conversations aren’t easy for anybody

Nobody likes talking about negative stuff

Unless you’re some kind of monster, or you’re used to that kind of thing

Lay out the problem or issue clearly to your client

“It seems like we’re struggling to get this piece of design work signed off”

“Why do you think that is?”

“What’s stopping us from getting this work signed off from your end?”

Then let them talk

When you’re trying to resolve a conflict, you need to encourage your client to talk

You need to get every last bit out of them

Every last annoyance and hangup about you needs to come out

And even though that could be uncomfortable to hear

Don’t be tempted to go on the offensive

Don’t be tempted to elevate the situation to start to argue or fight back

Let your client talk and explain the situation

Once they’ve explained their entire situation, then you have the time to talk

Explain your point of view, but don’t blame anybody

Be polite and friendly

Because at the end of the day

Everybody wants the same thing

The designer wants to do a good job and make the best possible thing for their client that they can

and the client wants the designer to make the best possible thing they can

Sometimes though, things get muddled a little bit

And tensions can build up

Make sure you iron them out as soon as you can

And keep your projects running smoothly and stress free

MUSIC

This was AADA and I’m Craig Burgess

I had to reuse music from episode 86 today, as Free Music Archive was down

I featured:

Zapomnieç by Nonima

Viscous by FRAIL

Perfect Match by Kilyo

For a line by line rundown of this episode go over to...

Ego is the enemy of any design project.

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Music and links from this episode

Why I Can't Sleep With The Door Ajar by We Is Shore Dedicated

Nothing (Bonus Track) by Kai Engel

Mutations by Small Colin

Line-by-line notes

If we consider the task of making a website

There’s several stages a project goes through

Most of those stages are black and white, especially actually building a website

But when design gets involved

The ego starts to get in the way

This is AADA, and I’m Craig Burgess

MUSIC

When you build something

Like a wall for example

There’s no black and white to that

A wall either works

It stays stood up for years and functions as a wall

Or it doesn’t

The wall falls down

It’s very clean when the wall isn’t working, or doing its job

There’s no emotional intricacies to deal with here

Design is the exact polar opposite of this

When you’re talking to somebody and telling them their logo will be green

This can elicit a whole range of responses you can’t begin to even comprehend

Ranging from things that make sense like

My customer base won’t like the colour green

To strange things like

Green reminds me of grass and the countryside, and I don’t like that

No matter how hard we try to stop it from being so

Design is an emotional thing

It isn’t as simple as a wall that either stands up or doesn’t

Or a website that either works or not

Design isn’t black and white, and it works on a thousand levels

Most of all, design is subjective

And that causes problems for everybody

With subjectivity comes a much more insidious thing: ego

The graveyard of failed design projects is full of gravestones that declare Ego was the problem

And ego comes from everywhere

It comes from the client thinking they know better than the professional designer they hired

It comes from the marketing company thinking they know better than everybody else

And worst of all, it comes from the designer thinking that they know better than everybody else in the world

A designer with an ego is a useless designer

That’s a fact

A designer who sees their work as precious pieces of art that have been perfectly crafted isn’t a real designer

Design is not art

Design can be pretty, it can affect people’s emotions and decisions, but it’s not art

Art is designed to affect an emotion

Design is to communicate a message

Art serves the artist

Design serves the client or the purpose intended

Design doesn’t serve the designer 

And when a designer thinks it does, things go wrong really quickly

Don’t get me wrong

Designers should be passionate about doing a good job

OF COURSE they should

But that’s a fundamental difference

Passion is not ego

Passion is doing things with conviction

And an ego usually negatively impacts anything it gets involved with

I’m going to finish off with a depressing thing about design

It’s not depressing if you already know it

But it might be depressing if you’ve never considered it

Good design

Really good design

Gets out of its own way

Good design doesn’t get noticed

Because its done it’s job

The only people who notice good design is designers

And design isn’t for designers

MUSIC

This was AADA and I’m Craig Burgess

Music featured in this episode was

Why I Can't Sleep With The Door Ajar by We Is Shore Dedicated

Nothing (Bonus Track) by Kai Engel

Mutations by Small Colin

For a line by line rundown of this episode go over to askadesigneranythingdotcom/ep128

I’m back tomorrow

Support Ask a Designer Anything

Ask a Designer Anything Website

Twitter (@craigburgess)

Ask a Designer Anything on Facebook

Leave me a review on iTunes

Sorry. Every design you make isn't going to be amazing.

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Music and links from this episode

Creative Destruction by Nihilore

Slow Nights by Sro

Synthetic Feels by Sro

Line-by-line notes

No matter what your job is

When you do it every day of your life

When you create stuff every day

It's not always good

In fact, most of what you do isn't good

And every thing you do isn't solid gold

This is AADA, and I'm Craig Burgess

MUSIC

Let me clarify what I mean when I say most of what you do isn't good

Unless you're really lucky

I mean, really lucky

90% of what you create isn't good

It might be average

It might be better than average

And some of it that you never show anybody will be absolutely terrible

Some of it will be good

But most of it won't be solid gold

It's hard making stuff that's good, and especially solid gold design work

It's a sad and inevitable fact of design

Sometimes

Whether it's the client's fault, your fault, or you just run out of time

The design work you make won't be amazing

It'll be passable

And sometimes good enough is...good enough

Sometimes, and I don't want to sound snobby about this but I guess I'm going to

Sometimes a company or a client deserves just good enough

Not every company in the world should look amazing

You wouldn't make a scrap yard look like a perfume brand

A perfume brand should look elegant and usually high class

But the same isn't true for a scrap yard, and it shouldn't look...amazing

And yeah...I know that sounds snobbish

But it's true

Not every brand should look amazing, because it isn't appropriate

As a designer, it's OK to sometimes be bad

In my last episode, I spoke about creative block

And learning to appreciate that it's OK to sometimes run out of ideas

It's also OK to sometimes make bad design work

So long as you have an internal barometer to know that you should never show it to a client

Because I can guarantee that the client will pick your worst design if you show it

My sketchbooks and my rough logo documents are full of things that look like they've been designed by a 2 year old

But nobody ever sees them

You've got to get past all of the bad ideas before you can get to the good ones

Sometimes you get lucky, and the first thing out of your brain is amazing

But that's rare

And it takes persistence and consistency to find that solid gold idea amongst all the dross

Sometimes you can start to feel a little self conscious about this though

If you go through a couple of hours or even a couple of days

And everything you've designed or the ideas that you've come up with are all rubbish

You start to wonder if you're rubbish

Am I rubbish?

Is that it?

Am I past it? Have I got no more good ideas in me?

It's hard to stop thinking that

But you've got to

Because bad ideas never last for a long time

Unless you let yourself start to believe that you're a bad designer

Just like creative block

You've got to understand

That as a designer, your job is to come up with ideas

And as your job is ideas

Not all of them are solid gold

And you've got to be OK with that

Because as soon as you are

And you can dismiss the bad ideas easily

The good ideas suddenly start appearing

And then you get to the solid gold ones

MUSIC

This was AADA, and I'm Craig Burgess

Music featured in this episode was

Creative Destruction by Nihilore

Slow Nights by Sro

Synthetic Feels by Sro

 For a line by line rundown of this episode go to askadesigneranythingdotcom/ep127

I'm back tomorrow

Support Ask a Designer Anything

Ask a Designer Anything Website

Twitter (@craigburgess)

Ask a Designer Anything on Facebook

Leave me a review on iTunes

What do you do when you run out of ideas?

 

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Music and links from this episode

Not Locrian by Captive Portal

Beautiful Reciprocal (Half Mix) by Captive Portal

Line-by-line notes

Today’s episode has a double-edged meaning

On one instance

I’m discussing the idea of struggling to find ideas

And in the other instance

The reason I’ve done this episode

Is because I’m struggling for ideas

This is AADA, and I’m Craig Burgess

MUSIC

No matter what kind of creative person you are

An artist, a designer, a musician, a writer

You’re going to hit creative block

You’re going to hit a point where suddenly

You can’t think of any ideas

You’re going to go from being an absolute ideas machine

Where they come freely and easily

To a complete idea vacuum

Where nothing exists anymore

And that…is scary

Different creative people react to this kind of thing differently

Some relish the challenge

And some get scared

It’s OK to feel like that

When you trade on your ideas and suddenly your stock has vanished

That’s scary

I think that a creative shouldn’t be judged on their creative output

Although that’s important

But a truly experienced creative should be judged on their ability to consistently come up with good ideas

And also should be judged on their ability to recover from creative block

An experienced creative knows that they’ve not just become irrelevant

They don’t get scared by creative block

And they have endless strategies on how to overcome such a situation

Overcoming creative block isn’t a skill you develop overnight as a creative

I don’t even think that’s it’s something that you could teach to a young creative

It’s just a thing you develop with experience

And pressure

And really, doing things wrong and running out of ideas

I talk a lot about the creative muscle and needing to exercise it regularly

If you’re not regularly flexing that ideas muscle, your creative muscle

It gets smaller and harder to use, and it burns out quicker

Mood, anxiety and just generally being in a bad mood affects all this too

If you’re in a bad place, ideas are hard to come by

And that can be a vicious circle that’s hard to escape

You’re in a bad mood, you get creative block, it makes you in a worst mood, and so on

So creative block is more complicated that it looks

It’s hard to combat and hard to come out of

Sometimes the only way out

Is just get doing

Just start writing, designing, drawing, whatever it is

And creative block just disappears

MUSIC

This was AADA, and I’m Craig Burgess

Music featured in this episode was

Not Locrian by Captive Portal

Beautiful Reciprocal (Half Mix) by Captive Portal

For a line by line rundown of this episode go over to askadesigneranythingdotcom/ep126

I’m back tomorrow

Support Ask a Designer Anything

Ask a Designer Anything Website

Twitter (@craigburgess)

Ask a Designer Anything on Facebook

Leave me a review on iTunes

Self awareness. It's an important thing.

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Music and links from this episode

Suspension by Jorge Mario Zuleta

Effects of Elevation by Revolution Void

Ahead Of The Curve by Creo

Line-by-line notes

Hello, it’s me again, Craig

Before we start the episode proper

I’m going being a dirty tease again

Just a quick update on the whole interview podcast thing

I’ve got a couple of guests lined up

And I’m going to start recording some of the episodes soon

I still don’t have a name

But the format will very likely be a couple of hour episode every 2 weeks

I’ve decided not to edit the episodes beyond just making them sound better

So they’ll sometimes be long conversations

The first episode will likely be out within the next 2 months

I really can’t wait to release it 

And I think you’re really going to love it

Maybe even more than this podcast, if you prefer listening to conversations

Anyway, back to this podcast.

Cue the episode!

INTRO

I don’t envy young designers

All the stuff you have to learn can be overwhelming

And especially now, where’s there’s so much new stuff ALL THE TIME

You’ve lots of stuff to learn, constantly

And it’s not easy

Because you’ve got to be good at everything as well

But one thing a lot of young designers struggle with

And young people in general really

Is awareness

This is AADA, and I’m Craig Burgess

MUSIC

Self awareness is a tough one

You won’t find self awareness listed on any curriculum anywhere

And you’d probably even struggle to define it

And if you went to any other seasoned designer

They’d probably never even mention self awareness

But having said all that

And after probably making you think this whole thing isn’t even important

I’m going to tell you it is

And it’s probably one of the most important things designers need to know

So, what is self awareness?

Well, it’s an awareness of yourself

Obviously

It means you’re really aware of what you’re good at

And you’re really aware of what you’re bad at

Basically, you’re really aware of yourself

Yes, I’m aware I’ve just turned the words self and awareness around a few times to explain the term self awareness

Knowing what you’re good at and what you’re bad at is harder than you think though

It’s some parts confidence

Confident in your abilities

And it’s some parts being pragmatic

And some parts being honest

Admitting things that you’re not so good at

Isn’t easy for most people

Especially as a young designer, you’re just not aware of what you’re best at

And you want to try everything, so you’d probably never admit you’re not that good

And actually, some people just plain aren’t aware that they’re bad at things

And if you’re not aware of what you’re bad at

There’s no way you could ever improve 

And that means there’s no way to ever become a better designer

And that is why self awareness is the single most important thing to develop

This is definitely something I never realised when I was a young designer

And it lead to some really uncomfortable conversations with my boss about my design work that wasn’t up to scratch

I didn’t have the design knowledge to know that the work I was producing wasn’t good enough

And I didn’t have the ability to step out of my own work and admit it wasn’t good enough

I actually developed self awareness without being aware of myself

Which is weird

But if I could go back now

And talk to my 18 year old self

This is the single thing I’d be shouting out 

Go learn to some self awareness

And forget everything else

MUSIC

This was AADA and I’m Craig Burgess

Music featured in this episode was

Suspension by Jorge Mario Zuleta

Effects of Elevation by Revolution Void

And this quirky little song playing right now, Ahead Of The Curve by Creo

For a line by line rundown of this episode go over to askadesigneranythingdotcom/ep125

I’m back tomorrow

Support Ask a Designer Anything

Ask a Designer Anything Website

Is a style for a designer a good thing to cultivate, or a bad thing?

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Music and links from this episode

Trampled by P C III

Waitng by Ars Sonor

In curtains by J Hacha de Zola

Line-by-line notes

I’ve always been heavily conflicted as a designer

I’ve never really thought I fit in with what lots of other designers think of themselves

I love designing things, and I love coding things

I love technical stuff as much as design stuff

But I call myself a designer

That puts me in a weird no mans land with lots of designers

And the other thing I’ve never had

Is an outright style as a designer

Let’s talking about designer’s styles for a bit

This is AADA, and I’m Craig Burgess

MUSIC

Style

Having a style works for lots of things

This podcast, has a style

A model may have a particularl style

And a singer usually sings in a certain way or style

It’s still a weird thing to me to associate with design though

In design, you should be producing the work that’s most appropriate for the situation

Regardless of personal preference, and style

Maybe I’m being a little idealistic

After all, we all have styles, whether they’re carefully cultivated or not

We all have go to typefaces, or colour combinations that we like

We all have styles of photos that we like and layouts that we think work best

All this stuff builds up a style

And at first, this style is an unconscious thing for most people

Eventually though, a designer twigs on and starts to make more work like their other work

And this is where things get weird for me

Because I genuinely don’t understand this bit

Why, as a designer, would you ever want to suddenly start making the same work using the same methods, over and over?

I understand the idea of niches, and how you can make a lot of money if you stick to a niche

I get all the commercial reasons

I just don’t get the personal reasons

To me, once you’ve settled on a style, that’s it

You’re developing a designer as far and wide as you could be any more

You’ve decided you’re going to sit in a very particular box

And you’ll continue to do your work from inside that box

For me, I love making all sorts of things in all different styles

I relish the challenge of producing a brand for something I’ve never done before

Or designing something in a style I’ve never even considered

They’re all interesting challenges to me

And as I take on things like that I become a better designer

But if you suddenly develop your style, you don’t really get any of that opportunity anymore

To some extent, the people commissioning the work are to blame

They’ll go hunting on behance and pinterest and look for things that fit their new ad campaign

Then they’ll find something, go to the original designer, and ask them to do the same thing again but for their campaign

“In their style"

This usually happens when somebody becomes known for a particular piece of work

And they’ll find themselves—if they’re not careful—recreating the same piece of work over and over again

In different scenarios for different people

Some designers embrace that challenge

And I guess on some level, restricting yourself to one style presents a different kind of design challenge to being able to do what you want

But at its very core

The idea of designers have a particular style

 And developing that style

And then reproducing that style over and over for different clients

I don’t understand on a human level

We all have an innate design to keep improving, to keep getting better at things

And working as a designer producing work of a particular style makes it harder to improve all the time

It’s a bit like being a football goalkeeper with a hand tied behind your back

It’s possible, but it’ll be twice as hard to get good at it

I don’t intend this to be an episode of me bashing designers who have a style

Some of my favourite designers have styles

People like James White of Signalnoise and

Yes, video games are an art form. Today I give some love for the video games.

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Music and links from this episode

To run in an elevator in a dream in a fiction in space by Monplaisir

Simplify and Black Riders Anthem by Little Glass Men

YFMIFY by Alpha Hydrae

Line-by-line notes

Videogames have been a part of my life for as long as I can remember

I don’t remember much of my youth

Because I have a terrible memory for important things like that

But I do remember pretty much all of my video game consoles

And boy, did I have a lot of them

Atari, Commodore 64, NES, SNES, Dreamcast, Mastersystem, N64, Playstation, XBOX… I’ll stop there

Today I want to talk about design in a different medium

The video game

This is AADA, and I’m Craig Burgess

MUSIC

Video games are dismissed

And they’re dismissed a lot

They’re dismissed because they’re dangerous,

they’re silly,

they rot your brain

they make you fat

oh yeah, and they inspire you to kill people, rape people, or generally do harm you wouldn’t normally do to people

And finally, Games are for kids, right?

Wrong

Despite making a cool $91 billion per year globally

And that’s more than Hollywood by the way

Video games still aren’t taken seriously

They’re not considered a serious medium

And they’re still seen by lots of people as something for kids

People don’t say this about music, or books or films

But they do still say it about video games

And if I was to tell you that video games are art

I’d be laughed out of at least 50% of the rooms I walked into

But, they ARE art

And they’re more engrossing than every other artistic medium that exists today

Games have made me laugh, made me sad, made me scared, and made me question my entire existence

Sometimes they’re throwaway experiences and sometimes they’re serious

Every single one of them have affected me in a way no other traditional art form could do

And it’s all because video games have a secret trick up their sleeve

It’s because they're interactive

And this is the power that video games has over any other medium

Sure, some pieces of art can be interactive

But a lot of it isn’t

And most pieces of music you listen to you can’t affect with your actions

And most movies you watch don’t change depending on what button you press

This is the power of video games

And it turns it into a completely different art form

Just that one simple thing—interactivity—pulls you in to it SO much

The fact that it’s me controlling my character walking down a corridor

And I’m not just watching passively somebody walk down a corridor

Enhances the experience ten fold

And then when we extrapolate that out to experiencing different things

Driving a car I could never afford to buy

Or running around in an action game doing things I could never dream of doing

Games become much more than what they appear to be on the surface

Not only are they easy ways to escape from the humdrum of normal life

They’re easy ways to experience things you’d never hope to experience

Games allow you to live your dreams, quite literally

People who make video games are making dreams

And then unleashing them on the public to let these dreams by experienced by lots of people

I’m not trying to use hyperbole here, I’m being genuine

If you don’t like playing video games

Or you’ve never got into them

I urge you to go give them another chance

Start with something like Unchartered, an absolute modern day masterpiece

And come back in 2 months time and tell me you didn’t experience something really special

Games are an art form, no matter what anybody says

They’re a very special art form unlike anything else

And they’ll always have a special place in my heart

MUSIC

This was AADA, and I’m Craig Burgess

Music featured in this episode was:

To run in an elevator in a dream in a fiction in space by Monplaisir

Simplify and Black Riders Anthem by Little Glass Men

YFMIFY by Alpha Hydrae...

Ian Moss asked me a question I just had to answer: what's your favourite kind of design?

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Music and links from this episode

Follow An Ar Christ Rabbit by Fields Ohio

Neon Hippies by Fields Ohio

Wolf Dunes by Fields Ohio

Line-by-line notes

I was asked by Ian Moss

Quite a long time ago now

Sorry Ian

What my favourite piece of design is

And what areas, such as communication, graphic design, architecture

This is new for this format of AADA

Because I’ve never answered somebody’s question before

But Ian is a good friend, and it’s a good question

So I’m going to do my best to answer it

Let’s give it a try.

This is AADA, and I’m Craig Burgess

MUSIC

There’s two things I remember distinctly when I first started realising I was into design

One of them I only realised retrospectively

And the second one was my first love of graphic design

The retrospective one is something I’ve spoken about way back in episode 81, the design disease

I mentioned the WWF logo, the World Wrestling Federation

At the time in my teens, I was mega into wrestling

And I used to love reproducing their logo with a marker pen over and over

It was the only logo I could draw, so I went nuts with it

I got pretty good at drawing it too actually

Looking back at this now, I wonder if the WWF—now WWE made their logo like that on purpose

The two things I’ve long since had in my head about logo design

Is it should be simple enough so anybody can draw it

And it should be able to fit on a postage stamp

The WWF logo did both of those things

And it was accessible

It wasn’t a great logo from any technical standpoint

But it fit the bill, it fit the kind of audience they wanted to attract

And it meant young teenagers like me could draw it easily and spread their message

Logos have long since been a favourite part of design for me

They are the perfect distilled version of graphic design

It takes so much skill to create something that looks so simple

And it’s why I’m constantly fascinated with logos

It’s my favourite part of design to produce, and admire

And as for my favourite logos

I’m probably a bit predictable here

I love Coca Cola’s logo, not just because it looks nice, but because they’ve had the balls to stick with it

And whilst I’m not a big fan of Apple as a business or company anymore, their logo through the ages and today is just perfect

I also have a soft spot for the new Juventus FC logo, but that’s probably because I’m not a football fan and I like that it looks different to every other football logo

The second thing I adored then I first started in design

Was everything that The Designers Republic did

As a kid, I got the original Playstation with Wipeout for christmas

And back then I used to love looking through the manuals after I got the game

Some game companies put effort into these manuals

And this was a game that put a lot of effort into the manual

Not only that, the case was so nice

All the graphics and artwork was—to my young eyes—just so cool

Even looking back at it now

Some 22 years later

It still looks so cool

In their hey day, that’s what The Designers Republic were really good at

Making things just look so damn cool

Designers are usually pretty good at making stuff look cool

But The Designers Republic went a step further than that

Everything they touched, from video games to coke bottles to record sleeves

All just looked so cool

It’s a style these days that has been emulated endlessly

But some of the originals who worked there

Like Michael C Place

Still create really cool looking stuff to this day

I’m nearly out of time for this episode

And I have to put a time limit on this because I could gush for days about my favourite design

But I just quickly wanted to mention one final thing I love

Wit

Wit in any form of design, and here I mean clever design

I just love in any medium

Maybe I’ll expand on this on a future episode

MUSIC...

No matter what you're designing, designers have a special code we all follow. It's called The Process.

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Music and links from this episode

Gorgon by Jesse Spillane

No sudden movements by rui

Interstate 70 Rain Chants by Fields Ohio

Line-by-line notes

Buildings

Bridges

Roads

Websites

Restaurant menus

They’ll all made by following a set process

This process, whilst usually similar for every designer

Allows designers all over the world to make very special things

This is AADA, and I’m Craig Burgess

MUSIC

A problem

Every design process

Whether you’re designing a city or designing a business card

Begins with a problem

Design only really has one purpose: to solve problems

And if there’s no problem to solve, there’s no point designing anything

These problems range from simple stuff like a problem of a business not looking professional enough

To complicated problems like too many traffic jams on a particular road

You can’t find a solution, until you’ve identified the problem

And the design process is the only one that can solve such a problem

After that, designers start to collect information to understand the problem

This step is a mix of research and finding inspiration

By seeing what others have done before, you can analyse what went wrong

And of course, what went right and what you may want to emulate

I’ve been pretty vocal in some past episodes about the inspiration gathering step

And being very careful not to cross the line of inspiration to downright copying other’s work

Now comes the fun part, ideas generation

This is my favourite part of any design project

Being alone with a sketchbook and working on ideas

Younger designers too often skip this step, or go about it in the wrong way

The point of the ideas step is to indiscriminately create ideas

That is, to create ideas without thinking they’re good, bad, or anything else

At this step, it doesn’t matter if your idea is bad

Or if you think you’ve found a solution to the design problem

That is not the point here, it’s just to let your brain be free

And make ideas

And then take those ideas, and turn them into solutions

This is a really difficult step, because now you’ve got so many ideas

You need to analyse them, and work out which ones are good

Or appropriate solutions

Lots of designers like to leave this step to their clients

They’ll create quite a few ideas, and ask their clients to pick which is their favourite

I prefer to be much more critical at this stage

And I normally only present one solution to a client

If we give the client the choice, we’ll either end up with a frankestein’s monster of a design with lots of solutions turned into one

Or we’ll end up with the solution we like the least

It isn’t the client’s place to do our job for use at this stage

And we need to be ruthless and pick the best solution for the job

This slots neatly into feedback

This is the stage which can cause the most problems in the design process if not handled properly

A client isn’t usually experienced in the design process

And we ask them which one they like the most

This is not the correct question to ask them

We should be asking them which is most appropriate

The one that is the best solution to the design problem is the best

And we need to make sure we tell our clients that too

The final step

Is improve

In lots of design projects, we may go back and forth between feedback and improve

Before we get the best solution

And that’s OK

So long as we’re working towards the same goal

To make the best solution for the design problem we’ve set

It’s amazing when you think about it

That no matter what you’re designing

This process is largely similar across any medium

It’s really special

And also quite humbling

MUSIC

This was AADA, and I’m Craig Burgess

The music featured in this episode was

Gorgon by Jesse Spillane

No sudden movements by rui

Interstate 70 Rain Chants by