 Can you all hear me okay? All right, welcome to Let's Get Uncomfortable. I'm Ken Woodworth, I'm a designer, a front-end developer, and most recently, a manager. I'm VP of Design at Atten, a digital strategy design and development shop in Denver, Colorado, and we like to work with cause-driven organizations like the World Wildlife Fund or Stanford or the World Resources Institute, those are just some examples. At Atten, I head up our design and UX team, and these are just some of the people I work with, and one of the challenges that I face on a daily basis is that I remotely manage them, and so that can be tricky. I thought it'd be great to get a nice embarrassing photo of them as well as me in here, too. So I'd like to start by talking about process. As designers, we spend a lot of time improving our process, refining every step, but what if our process was hurting our work or stifling our creativity? Aaron Levy, I think said it really well when he said too little process and you can't get good work done, too much process, and you can't get any work done, and most companies never find the middle, so finding that middle is the sweet spot, that's where you wanna be. You have just the right amount of process to still be creative but still get things done. So how do you get this process right? How do you find that perfect process? My parents owned a garden center in upstate New York, and I spent a lot of my childhood and into my teenage years working for them and watching them as they grew their business. It started as a small stand at the side of the road selling flowers that my dad grew in a rented garage, and then it actually, the business grew into a 25 greenhouse business with loyal employees and customers, and I think their success really hinged on their ability to adapt, to look at what they had done and improve upon it. So sometimes that meant trying something new, like new varieties of plants. It meant listening to their customers to give them what they want each year because that would change year after year, and finally it meant differentiating themselves from the competition, providing their customer services that others couldn't. So how does this relate to the design process? Well, what if we approached each new project with different perspectives and approaches? And what if the way we work with clients is inhibiting our projects? And what if the perfect process was one made up of any number of possible steps customized for each project? All that sounds a little scary, right? So, but wait a minute. What do we as designers have to be afraid of? We're experts, right? We present ourselves to both clients and peers as masters of our craft, knowing all the answers. But I think what we're really presenting sometimes is ego, and that can really inhibit what you do. So what happens when we let that go? What happens when we stop trying so hard to be the expert in the room? What do we become? I think becoming a beginner is really important to being creative and to working with clients and being successful. And to become a beginner, you need to stop assuming you know all the answers. Shinryu Suzuki says, in the beginner's mind, there are many possibilities. In the expert's mind, there are a few. And personally, I take many possibilities over a few any day. So how do we become beginners? Well, if you're asking this question, you're on the right track. I think one of the first steps to becoming a really great beginner at anything is to ask questions. I ask a lot of questions. I ask questions to clients, to the people I work with. I ask questions about the work I'm doing. Sometimes it may feel awkward asking questions that you think you should already know the answers to. But what's the worst that could happen? Your question gets answered, so you move on. Or the answer isn't known and it's a good thing you asked. Jason Freed, one of the owners of 37 Signals, which I guess is now Basecamp, had a really interesting post where he listed some of the questions he asks when reviewing a design and I've highlighted just four of them that I think are really great. Why do we need to say that here? What's memorable about this? What's the simpler version of this? What just happened? So he goes into a design looking at it as if he's never seen it before and has no understanding of what's supposed to be happening. And he asks these questions and I think he lists over 30 different questions that he uses when looking at design. Well, another way to be a beginner is to explore. I think as we refine our processes, we often forget that exploration is the best way to be creative. And I think that we're seeing that a lot now in web design that people are embracing more exploration in their process. And that's taken forms of things like mood boards where you're showing examples of different directions the design could take, style tiles. We're showing variations on the components of the design and not different comps for a page. And then also element collages. I think element collages are a really great way to explore design outside of that context of a page and to really have a lot of creative freedom while you explore. But these are three very specific ways. So what other approaches can we take to solving design problems? I think the important thing is to explore in the way that provides the most freedom and makes the most sense for the project. So that's what you need to be doing. Mark Edwards writes about an art director he worked with who was an amazing designer. And they were going through this process of creating designs for a site and the art director kept coming up with new ideas and new designs. And at one point, Mark said to him, you're the art director, why don't you just, you pick the one that works best. You already know this. Why are you doing all of these different versions? And he realized that without exploring all of those different versions, they wouldn't have gotten to that best result. So the thing that's important is deferring that judgment until that last possible moment. And that's when you can really, really create something that's successful. But finally, to become a beginner, you need to learn new tools. I think as designers, we're often crippled by the tools we use. I mean, Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign. These are kind of industry standards and it's really challenging to find anything that compares to them on certain levels. But if you look at hand lettering right now, I think this is a really great example of an area where it's kind of blowing up and there's so many different ways to approach it. And look at the number of tools they have to pull from as they're lettering. Or maybe even a better example that maybe is a little closer to home. Front-end developers, right? It seems like every week, a front-end development tool is coming out. So how do we as designers embrace new tools like these other people are? Well, I think the web is driving the creation of new tools, fortunately. Photoshop is often denounced as a web design tool. And so people are looking for alternatives. So what are these alternatives? Sketch is one that I think is really promising. It embraces a lot of the features of Photoshop but in vector form. It can export assets at any resolution. It also integrates with something called Sketch Mirror, which is a tool for previewing your designs on various devices. And then the one I'm most excited about is Macaw. Macaw lets you design responsive sites directly in the tool. And so this is great for designers who maybe don't have that front-end experience to illustrate how they think their designs should adapt. It also has global styles that translate to CSS. It has a remote preview. And these tools are improving quickly. They may not be quite there yet but I'm really excited about where they're going. So now that we've sort of confronted our fears, let's work on how we collaborate. As designers, collaboration often means working with clients. And the feeling heard often from designers is something like, ah, clients, they don't get it. They are screwing up the project. They don't understand, their feedback sucks. And it becomes this them versus us thing. And the clients are often seen as the weakest link. I mean, just look at this site, clients from hell. I don't know if you all have heard of this. But I think this site is a really great example of how frustrated designers get with clients. And I like this one particular example best to illustrate this point. The client says, I don't like the type. The designer says, what don't you like? I don't like how it goes to one side. You mean range left? Yes, yes, a range left. How do you want it? To be the same on both sides. Justified? I don't have to justify anything. I own the fucking company. And basically this conversation, it's not really happening. The designer isn't really talking to the client and helping them understand the issues they're dealing with. And the client is getting really frustrated. So this isn't working. You know, I read a lot of these examples on this site and I think that the site might be better named designers from hell, because I think the problem here is that the clients are seen as enemies. When really clients are partners, if a coworker or a friend doesn't understand something, you're telling them, you don't turn around and complain about how stupid they are, right? You explain it better. You do it in a way that they can understand. So earlier, when you complained about clients, what you really might have been complaining about was communication. I assumed my client knew the process of designing a website, just as well as I did, and now I'm paying for it. Sure they may take some hand-holding, but they're going to do a ton of that with you too. And if they don't understand something, educate them. Bradford Schellhammer said in a post where he compared politicians and designers, he said the best politicians are not the ones who try to be everything to everyone. They're the ones who take their skills and couple that with the needs of their constituents and then make hard but thoughtful and inclusive decisions. And I like that last part the best, the inclusive decisions where you're not just saying, I'm right and you're wrong, this is how we're doing it. You're making decisions that are including the concerns of everyone involved. So how do you get clients on board? Well, we found that one of the best ways to get clients actively involved in a design process is with a design studio. We hold a design studio at the beginning of every project. And it helps to have some of the strategy work before you do it. So we usually have personas and user stories established. And this helps to keep things focused. And basically, in a design studio, we either meet in person or over video chat. Everyone sketches and everyone shares. So we talk about the sketches and come up with ideas that can be used in the design. Each person in the design studio gets to work on a specific persona. So they aren't just saying, this is what I think this page should look like. They have a very specific goal they're trying to solve with what they're sketching. And that helps to really focus the sketches and really solve problems. And it's been invaluable for getting clients to submerge and excited about the process. We also do a lot of collaborative writing with clients. We use Google Docs for a number of different parts of our process. So meeting notes, site maps, content. And the commenting features are really fantastic. And the way that you can collaborate with people is great. But what about design? How do you collaborate with people on design? One thing that we've found is really useful is something called Redpen, redpen.io. And basically what this lets you do is upload an image of your design and then clients can click on different parts of it and comment right on that part of the design. And if you have it open, you can watch their comments come in and respond directly to those comments. So you can actually have sort of a conversation within this tool about the design. And that helps to eliminate some of those long feedback cycles where clients are reviewing, they send their feedback back to you, you make some changes, send it back to them, that sort of thing. So clients can be challenging. But what about coworkers? It can be really hard working with the number of different people involved in our industry right now. I mean, this is just a sample of some of the different roles that people play in the process. But everyone has different ideas and goals. And I think we've seen that the traditional sort of waterfall process doesn't work well. It doesn't foster collaboration and it's not very effective. Collaboration can't happen if you aren't working together. And I think a more realistic process looks something more like this where you still have that heavy strategy up front. But designers are involved and even developers can be involved at the beginning of the project. And the strategy doesn't end before design and development begin. The design continues throughout the project. So everything that gets created at any point as a designer is involved. And finally, development comes in early enough to impact strategy and design and help create solutions to problems. And the last thing I wanna talk about is getting creative. So designers, we have a problem. Problem. Ah! A website design is not a large background image with white text and a button on top of it. I don't know when we're gonna buck this trend but I really hope it's soon. And let's talk about typography. Okay, here's a quick quiz. Which one of these is Gotham? Who thinks Gotham's on the top? Show of hands. Who thinks Gotham's on the bottom? All right, it's the top one. All right, here's another one. How about Proxima Nova? Which one's Proxima Nova top? Bottom? That's a trick question. They're both Proxima Nova. But I think that as designers, we're kind of falling back on these crutches that are easy. We know that these fonts look good, so we don't try other things. Cameron Moll actually had a really interesting article called Stereotype. The diminishing role of font originality in interface design. And he talks about the lack of variation in fonts used. And he goes on to say that the reason typography all looks the same is twofold. First, because we're riding a wave, just like we rode the wave of Georgia and Helvetica or Georgian Aerial because those were what we had. We're riding this wave now. We'll be riding a different wave hopefully soon. And then second, that typography is taking a backseat to content and functionality. And I think that's a good thing. I mean, I think content and functionality are very important. I still think type is important too. So if you get the chance, look at more font options than Proxima Nova Avenue or Gotham. And to his credit, he even showed some font exploration, he called it, for the authentic job site, where I think they explored something like 30 different font pairings to try to find the perfect font for that site. So what do we do? How do we get creative? There was a really interesting article on NPR about this doctor, Dr. Denise Park, a neuroscientist at the University of Texas at Dallas who randomly assigned 200 older people different activities. So some of them were tasked with just kind of hanging out. Some of them had to do things like go for walks. And some of them got more challenging things like learning digital photography and Photoshop. And it was found that the seniors who learned more difficult tasks had improved memory. So the ones using Photoshop and doing digital photography had much better memories. And that's not just because they're using Photoshop. I know Photoshop can be really challenging and good for your brain, I'm sure. But it's that they were doing something different, they were really challenging their minds. Another issue is that we sit too much. We're all sitting right now, you've probably all been sitting all day, all week basically. But a recent Stanford study finds that walking improves creativity and not only is walking healthier for you, it's better for your brain. A word of warning though, it is really hard to run and design, so I do not recommend it. So getting into that creative zone can be challenging. So how do you do that? Well, let's say you work in an office and you're often distracted by people walking around and talking to you and things like that. Well, I think coffitivity is a really interesting tool and basically it mimics the sound of a coffee shop. And studies have found that that level of ambient noise is actually perfect for creativity. It really stimulates those parts of your brain that help you become more creative. On the other side, if you want to be more analytical, turn off all your sound and work in a quiet place. So maybe you need to encourage more creativity among team members. Zerb does this thing called the Friday 15. Zerb is a design and product shop and basically what they do is they say they let loose for 15 minutes of creativity to create a fun culture and grow relationships. And one of the things that I like was their 30-second story where people team up, write 10 random words and then have to write a story using the other person's words in only 30 seconds. So that sounds really awesome for getting people talking and being creative. And the Friday 15 site is really great because it even tells you what you're going to get from these exercises. So in this case, it's, you know, practicing thinking on your feet under pressure, which is something that as designers we often have to do when we're talking to clients and, you know, we get feedback that we don't necessarily agree with. Being able to respond to that quickly and in a good way is really important. So now what? We've talked about fear. We've talked about collaboration. We've talked about creativity. How many of you are familiar with Sisyphus? So Sisyphus was, he was punished for chronic deceitfulness by being compelled to roll an immense boulder up a hill only to watch it roll back down and to repeat the action forever. So like Sisyphus, it may feel like the work we do repeats itself. That we struggle with the same problems over and over again. But it doesn't have to be that way. We are not Sisyphus, right? We don't have to keep doing the same thing over and over always with the same result. So I want to challenge you to look for opportunities to try something new, to ask questions, and to get uncomfortable. Thank you. Any questions? The opposite way, you know, where now we've got, well, there's 5,000 fonts I can pick from, so let's pick 400 and show them that. Yeah, so the question was, are we at risk of going the opposite way with web fonts where before we only had a few options, so that's what we were stuck with, and now we have almost unlimited options. So how do we stop ourselves from using all of them? Well, I think, luckily, a lot of the tools that provide web fonts show you how much actual weight you're adding to your pages when you add too many fonts, so that can be a great way to know that you're going too far. I also think that, you know, luckily we're, I think we've learned that you don't want to just use a different font for every piece of your content or, you know, something like that. So I think that as a community of web designers, we've evolved to the point where we know better, hopefully, and that's something that you may do once and then learn right away that it just doesn't work. So I'm not too concerned about that. What I am concerned about is definitely that people are settling for just what's worked for other people. Any other questions? Can you just give us a little snapshot of, like, a couple of the routines that you have with your own remote designers to kind of spur the communication and just in the ideation process? Sure. So we do a lot of sketching and that's really helpful and very, very quick. We actually are all in our own hip chat room all the time, so we're always in constant communication. We're often in video chats. I actually go to Denver about once a month for a week just to make sure that I'm working with people in person. And basically we use Basecamp for communication internally and send comps as soon as we can. I mean, the idea, our process is built around establishing a design direction in our design phase. We aren't trying to design every page of the site. So what that means is that we want to solve design problems quickly and get to the point where we can start working the browser as fast as possible. So what that means is those comps that we're sharing internally are posted quickly when they may be somewhat rough, but it's a way that everyone on the team can start providing feedback. And one thing we try to do as much as we can is involve any front-end developers or developers who'll be working on the project from the beginning so that they know what's happening in design and what's going to impact the functionality of the site. Does that help? No, it does. Well, thanks everybody.