Doing great work like this clients will keep videographers in the advertising business for a long time because they make you want to follow the brand, buy the brand and be part of culture....Kudos to the photographer-turned-filmmaker Nabil Elderkin, who’s made his name directing videos by Kanye West, Bon Iver and Nicki Minaj, among many others.
In this video, the clip (from R/GA's London and Los Angeles offices) weaves in flashbacks to Williams's childhood in Compton, Calif., as she pushes through her workout, while the song "Black Unicorn" by 2 Chainz featuring Sunni Patterson plays.
Design is a rather broad and vague term. When someone says "I'm a designer," it is not immediately clear what they actually do day to day. There are a number of different responsibilities encompassed by the umbrella term designer.
Design-related roles exist in a range of areas from industrial design (cars, furniture) to print (magazines, other publications) to tech (websites, mobile apps). With the relatively recent influx of tech companies focused on creating interfaces for screens, many new design roles have emerged. Job titles like UX or UI designer are confusing to the uninitiated and unfamiliar even to designers who come from other industries.
Let's attempt to distill what each of these titles really mean within the context of the tech industry.
UX designers are primarily concerned with how the product feels. A given design problem has no single right answer. UX designers explore many different approaches to solving a specific user problem. The broad responsibility of a UX designer is to ensure that the product logically flows from one step to the next. One way that a UX designer might do this is by conducting in-person user tests to observe one's behavior. By identifying verbal and non-verbal stumbling blocks, they refine and iterate to create the "best" user experience. An example project is creating a delightful onboarding flow for a new user.
"Define interaction models, user task flows, and UI specifications. Communicate scenarios, end-to-end experiences, interaction models, and screen designs to stakeholders. Work with our creative director and visual designers to incorporate the visual identity of Twitter into features. Develop and maintain design wireframes, mockups, and specifications as needed."
Example of an app's screens created by a UX designer.Credit: Kitchenware Pro Wireframe Kit by Neway Lau on Dribbble.
Deliverables: Wireframes of screens, Storyboards, Sitemap
Tools of the trade: Photoshop, Sketch, Illustrator, Fireworks, InVision You might hear them say this in the wild: "We should show users the 'Thank You' page once they have finished signing up."
Unlike UX designers who are concerned with the overall feel of the product, user interface designers are particular about how the product is laid out. They are in charge of designing each screen or page with which a user interacts and ensuring that the UI visually communicates the path that a UX designer has laid out. For example, a UI designer creating an analytics dashboard might front load the most important content at the top, or decide whether a slider or a control knob makes the most intuitive sense to adjust a graph. UI designers are also typically responsible for creating a cohesive style guide and ensuring that a consistent design language is applied across the product. Maintaining consistency in visual elements and defining behavior such as how to display error or warning states fall under the purview of a UI designer.
"Concept and implement the visual language of Airbnb.com. Create and advance site-wide style guides."
A visual designer is the one who pushes pixels. If you ask a non-designer what a designer does, this is probably what comes to mind first. Visual designers are not concerned with how screens link to each other, nor how someone interacts with the product. Instead, their focus is on crafting beautiful icons, controls, and visual elements and making use of suitable typography. Visual designers sweat the small details that others overlook and frequently operate at the 4x to 8x zoom level in Photoshop.
"Produce high-quality visual designs — from concept to execution, including those for desktop, web, and mobile devices at a variety of resolutions (icons, graphics, and marketing materials). Create and iterate on assets that reflect a brand, enforce a language, and inject beauty and life into a product."
It is also fairly common for UI designers to pull double duty and create the final pixel perfect assets. Some companies choose not to have a separate visual designer role.
A visual designer lays out guides and adjusts every single pixel to ensure that the end result is perfect.Credits: iOS 7 Guide Freebie PSD by Seevi kargwal on Dribbble.
Tools of the trade: Photoshop, Sketch
You might hear them say this in the wild: "The kerning is off and the button should be 1 pixel to the left!"
Remember the subtle bouncing animation when you pull to refresh in the Mail app on your iPhone? That's the work of a motion designer. Unlike visual designers who usually deal with static assets, motion designers create animation inside an app. They deal with what the interface does after a user touches it. For example, they decide how a menu should slide in, what transition effects to use, and how a button should fan out. When done well, motion becomes an integral part of the interface by providing visual clues as to how to use the product.
"Proficiency in graphic design, motion graphics, digital art, a sensitivity to typography and color, a general awareness of materials/textures, and a practical grasp of animation. Knowledge of iOS, OS X, Photoshop and Illustrator as well as familiarity with Director (or equivalent), Quartz Composer (or equivalent), 3D computer modeling, motion graphics are required."
A UX researcher is the champion of a user's needs. The goal of a researcher is to answer the twin questions of "Who are our users?" and "What do our users want?" Typically, this role entails interviewing users, researching market data, and gathering findings. Design is a process of constant iteration. Researchers may assist with this process by conducting A/B tests to tease out which design option best satisfies user needs. UX researchers are typically mainstays at large companies, where the access to a plethora of data gives them ample opportunity to draw statistically significant conclusions.
"Work closely with product teams to identify research topics. Design studies that address both user behavior and attitudes. Conduct research using a wide variety of qualitative methods and a subset of quantitative methods, such as surveys."
Front-end developers are responsible for creating a functional implementation of a product's interface. Usually, a UI designer hands off a static mockup to the front-end developer who then translates it into a working, interactive experience. Front-end developers are also responsible for coding the visual interactions that the motion designer comes up with.
Tools of the trade: CSS, HTML, JavaScript
You might hear them say this in the wild: "I'm using a 960px 12 column grid system."
Product designer is a catch-all term used to describe a designer who is generally involved in the creation of the look and feel of a product.
The role of a product designer isn't well-defined and differs from one company to the next. A product designer may do minimal front-end coding, conduct user research, design interfaces, or create visual assets. From start to finish, a product designer helps identify the initial problem, sets benchmarks to address it, and then designs, tests, and iterates on different solutions. Some companies that want more fluid collaboration within the various design roles opt to have this title to encourage the whole design team to collectively own the user experience, user research, and visual design elements.
Some companies use "UX designer" or simply "designer" as a catch-all term. Reading the job description is the best way to figure out how the company's design team divides the responsibilities.
"Own all facets of design: interaction, visual, product, prototyping. Create pixel-perfect mocks and code for new features across web and mobile."
This is the single most common phase I hear from new startups. What they are usually looking for is someone who can do everything described above. They want someone who can make pretty icons, create A/B tested landing sites, logically arrange UI elements on screen, and maybe even do some front-end development. Due to the broad sweeping scope of this role, we usually hear smaller companies asking to hire a "designer" rather than being specific in their needs.
The boundaries between each of these various design roles are very fluid. Some UX designers are also expected to do interaction design, and often UI designers are expected to push pixels as well. The best way to look for the right person is to describe what you expect the designer to do within your company's process, and choose a title that best represents the primary task of that person.
A version of this article originally appeared here. It was republished with permission.
[Image: Abstract via Shutterstock, GIF: An interaction designer is responsible for deciding how the menu should fan out. Credit: iOS Menu Concept by Jeremey Fleischer on Dribbble.]
It turns out, Lady Gaga and her (now former) manager, Troy Carter, realized the importance of social media early on. In 2008, she was one of the first artists to begin utilizing Twitter to interact with fans. It made sense, because of her brand platform, but they soon realized that, while they didn’t own their Twitter followers or Facebook likers (Gaga has an amazing 66 million likes), they could drive them to their own space, LittleMonsters.com, and use the resulting data in fascinating new ways.
Gaga can customize set lists for concerts based on the listening habits of her fans in a particular location on Spotify—be sure to play this song, leave that one out. She’s taken fan-created artwork, uploaded to her website, and printed it on t-shirts, driving merchandising sales up more than 30 percent.
And the music industry is catching on. A service called Next Big Sound, which counts all the major record labels as customers, can predict (with great accuracy) which acts will be huge hits before they’re ever signed to a label by mining social media.
But it’s not just the music industry that can use big data to its advantage. Any company—or indeed anyone—can, and should use data to make better decisions. And companies who don’t do that will be left behind.
Data is changing your cabs, cigarettes, and corn.
When it comes to the impact of data, there are other great examples of how some companies are challenging traditional industries by learning more about their customers with data and technology.
Uber, a much talked-about car sharing service, has made waves both with it’s app-based bookings to request a car, and it’s acquisition by Google for a huge price. It’s also just one example of a new wave of services that are part of what’s being called the disruption economy. Companies like Uber, AirBnB (a web service that allows people to rent out rooms in their homes as hotels) and Coursera (a free education company) are using data and technology to outpace their traditional counterparts in the service economy.
They’re also being hit by a wave of regulatory backlash, but as Bloomberg notes, the writing seems to be on the wall, that service companies which don’t embrace technology will be on the way out.
The rise of ECigarettes, the smokeless electronic nicotine inhalers, isn’t due solely to the technology that makes the actual physical product possible; they’re also utilizing technology in other ways. Smokio is an eCigarette that comes with an app that monitors your nicotine intake. QuitBit is a “smart” lighter that connects to your phone via Bluetooth to keep track of your smoking habit, and IntelliQuit is the world’s first smoking cesation biosensor—a lighter-sized carbon monoxide detector that purports to help you quit smoking the way you started: one puff at a time.
Even the good, old fashioned family farm isn’t so old fashioned any more. Tractor and farm equipment manufacturer John Deere now uses data and analytics and many farmers rely on data to optimize fertilization and productivity. The company employs automated crop reporting that provides in-depth information about crops for farmers to assist in filing crop insurance claims. The data can also help farmers make difficult decisions about planting, harvesting, and more. Deere also provides a web-based solution for farmers to manage their fleets, decrease downtime, and save on fuel all based on sensors built into the tractors.
Companies that are embracing technology and finding ways to put data to use for their customers are not just ahead of the curve, but setting the standard for the way their industries will work in the future.
Does your industry embrace technology and data? Or are you lagging behind? I’d love to hear your ideas, concerns and examples in the comments below.
Apple is synonymous with upper echelon design, but very little is known about the company's design process. Most of Apple's own employees aren't allowed inside Apple's fabled design studios. So we're left piecing together interviews, or outright speculating about how Apple does it and what it's really like to be a designer at the company.
Enter Mark Kawano. Before founding Storehouse, Kawano was a senior designer at Apple for seven years, where he worked on Aperture and iPhoto. Later, Kawano became Apple's User Experience Evangelist, guiding third-party app iOS developers to create software that felt right on Apple's platforms. Kawano was with the company during a critical moment, as Apple released the iPhone and created the wide world of apps.
In an interview with Co.Design, Kawano spoke frankly about his time at Apple--and especially wanted to address all the myths the industry has about the company and about its people.
"I think the biggest misconception is this belief that the reason Apple products turn out to be designed better, and have a better user experience, or are sexier, or whatever . . . is that they have the best design team in the world, or the best process in the world," Kawano says. But in his role as user experience evangelist, meeting with design teams from Fortune 500 companies on a daily basis, he absorbed a deeper truth.
"It's actually the engineering culture, and the way the organization is structured to appreciate and support design. Everybody there is thinking about UX and design, not just the designers. And that's what makes everything about the product so much better . . . much more than any individual designer or design team."
It has often been said that good design needs to start at the top--that the CEO needs to care about design as much as the designers themselves. People often observe that Steve Jobs brought this structure to Apple. But the reason that structure works isn't because of a top-down mandate. It's an all around mandate. Everyone cares.
"It's not this thing where you get some special wings or superpowers when you enter Cupertino. It's that you now have an organization where you can spend your time designing products, instead of having to fight for your seat at the table, or get frustrated when the better design is passed over by an engineering manager who just wants to optimize for bug fixing. All of those things are what other designers at other companies have to spend a majority of their time doing. At Apple, it's kind of expected that experience is really important."
Kawano underscores that everyone at Apple--from the engineers to the marketers--is, to some extent, thinking like a designer. In turn, HR hires employees accordingly. Much like Google hires employees that think like Googlers, Apple hires employees that truly take design into consideration in all of their decisions.
"You see companies that have poached Apple designers, and they come up with sexy interfaces or something interesting, but it doesn't necessarily move the needle for their business or their product. That's because all the designer did was work on an interface piece, but to have a really well-designed product in the way Steve would say, this 'holistic' thing, is everything. It's not just the interface piece. It's designing the right business model into it. Designing the right marketing and the copy, and the way to distribute it. All of those pieces are critical."
Facebook has hundreds of designers. Google may have 1,000 or more. But when Kawano was at Apple, its core software products were designed by a relatively small group of roughly 100 people.
"I knew every one of them by face and name," Kawano says.
For the most part, Apple didn't employ specialist designers. Every designer could hold their own in both creating icons and new interfaces, for instance. And thanks to the fact that Apple hires design-centric engineers, the relatively skeleton design team could rely on engineersto begin the build process on a new app interface, rather than having to initiate their own mock-up first.
Of course, this approach may be changing today.
"For Apple, having a small, really focused organization made a lot of sense when Steve was there, because so many ideas came from Steve. So having a smaller group work on some of these ideas made sense," Kawano says. "As Apple shifted to much more of a company where there's multiple people at the top, I think it makes sense that they're growing the design team in interesting ways."
Notably, Jony Ive, who now heads usability across hardware and software, is reported to have brought in some of the marketing team to help redesign iOS 7. It's a coup, when you think about it, for marketers to be deep in the trenches with designers and engineers. (That level of collaboration is frankly unprecedented in the industry.)
Apple products are often defined by small details, especially those around interaction. Case in point: When you type a wrong password, the password box shakes in response. These kinds of details are packed with meaningful delight. They're moments that seem tough to explain logically but which make sense on a gut level.
"So many companies try to mimic this idea . . . that we need to come up with this snappy way to do X, Y, and Z. They're designing it, and they can't move onto the next thing until they get a killer animation or killer model of the way data is laid out," Kawano explains. The reality? "It's almost impossible to come up with really innovative things when you have a deadline and schedule."
Kawano told us that Apple designers (and engineers!) will often come up with clever interactive ideas--like 3-D cube interfaces or bouncy physics-based icons--during a bit of their down time, and then they might sit on them for years before they make sense in a particular context.
"People are constantly experimenting with these little items, and because the teams all kind of know what other people have done, once a feature comes up--say we need a good way to give feedback for a password, and we don't want to throw up this ugly dialog--then it's about grabbing these interaction or animation concepts that have just been kind of built for fun experiments and seeing if there's anything there, and then applying the right ones."
But if you're imagining some giant vault of animation ideas hiding inside Apple and waiting to be discovered, you'd be wrong. The reality, Kawano explains, was far more bohemian.
"There wasn't a formalized library, because most of the time there wasn't that much that was formalized of anything that could be stolen," Kawano says. "It was more having a small team and knowing what people had worked on, and the culture of being comfortable sharing."
There was a commonly shared piece of advice inside Apple--maybe you've heard it before--that a designer should always take the stairs, because if you met Steve Jobs in the elevator, he'd ask what you were up to. And one of two things would happen:
1. He'd hate it, and you might be fired.
2. He'd love it, the detail would gain his attention, and you'd lose every foreseeable night, weekend, and vacation to the project.
Kawano laughs when he tells it to me, but the conclusion he draws is more nuanced than the obvious Catch 22 punchline.
"The reality is, the people who thrived at Apple were the people who welcomed that desire and passion to learn from working with Steve, and just really were dedicated to the customer and the product. They were willing to give up their weekends and vacation time. And a lot of the people who complained that it wasn't fair . . . they didn't see the value of giving all that up versus trying to create the best product for the customer and then sacrificing everything personally to get there."
"That's where, a lot of times, he would get a bad rap, but he just wanted the best thing, and expected everyone else to want that same thing. He had trouble understanding people who didn't want that same thing and wondered why they'd be working for him if that was the case. I think Steve had a very low tolerance for people who didn't care about stuff. He had a very hard time understanding why people would work in these positions and not want to sacrifice everything for them."
As for Kawano, did he ever get an amazing piece of advice, or an incredible compliment from Jobs?
"Nothing personally," he admits, and then laughs. "The only thing that was really positive was, in the cafeteria one time, when he told me that the salmon I took looked really great, and he was going to go get that."
"He was just super accessible. I totally tried to get him to cut in front of me, but he'd never want do anything like that. That was interesting too, he was super demanding . . . but when it came to other things, he wanted to be very democratic, and to be treated like everyone else. And he was constantly struggling with those roles."
