Notes to accompany Call me Delia design talk

1. 1. Hello
2. There is a lovely quote by Ms van Horne about the passion of cooking. I believe
that this befits design too - design should be entered into with abandon, or not at
all!
3. There's a reason our dear Gordon Ramsey, a 3 Michelin star chef, got so upset on
his TV series when celebrity guest Vic Reeves visited and asked the waiter if the
chef could just do him a 'fried egg as he didn't fancy anything on the menu'. He's
capable of so much more, and the customer blindly disregards his skill to dumb down
his potential. Great chefs, like great designers, are very passionate about what
they do and sadly design is not often seen as the skilled talent it deserves to be
known as. That's why there's often a sweary Gordon at the helm of a design team -
passion.
4. What is good design? What is bad design? What is design?
So how do we know what should be known as good design? To help you understand these
conclusions, I'll take you through what bad design is first.
5.'Design is a relationship' quote (Rand)
One of the most renowned and respected graphic designers, Paul Rand, was once
pressed for a definitive meaning of design. Perceptions can vary and this often
leads to basic miscommunication as to the meaning of the design process. Rand
described design as 'the relationship between form and content'. He refers to the
classic rule of design: 'Form Follows Function'. This does not imply that form is
of less importance than the function (and this applies to fashion, interior design,
architecture, product design, graphic, web, everything) but that the form cannot be
decided without knowing the function. You must have a function, a point, a message
- otherwise 'form' is just wallpaper and has no purpose. Function without form
doesn't communicate and has no emotion, so doesn't attract interest. Both must
engage people to succeed as a design.
It doesn't matter whether we're talking about architecture, fashion, interiors,
product or tattoo design, all is a relationship between the form and the content,
but for the purposes of this short session I'll be dealing with graphic or 'visual
communication' design, which is the foundation of all communication design.
6. What is design?
Design is very often thought to be how something looks, or the aesthetics - this is
completely wrong, and a vast underestimation of the design process. Whether its
graphic design for a simple poster or the product design of a car, the 'looks' are
only a part of the consideration and always should be the result of appropriate
research and use. How something looks should go hand in hand with what it's meant
to do or communicate, and benefit what you're trying to do or say. Paul Rand
pointed out that design is not just 'visual communication', as graphic designers
said our profession should be known, but that design often involves the invisible.
Considerable work goes into the parts that customers often don't see, the research,
the structure, the subtleties - and that is also design.
Steve Jobs, CEO of Apple, famously said "Design is not just what it looks like, and
feels like; design is how it works" and I think there's a key point there. How
something feels, and thus how it gets a response from someone using it, is
dependent on the relationship between form and function. Design should prompt an
emotional or physical response.
7. What makes bad design?
Bad design is not a matter of opinion - something either works or it doesn't,
whether you 'like' it is a matter of taste. Actual bad design is a failure in one
of the many design considerations in the process, or a failure to recognise the
function and thus produce an effective product. Bad design can also be an
inappropriate or misleading use of style or individual elements, which we'll go

2. into shortly. It can even be a result of trying to please everyone, often referred
to as 'design by committee' (which in case you're wondering is not a good thing)
and something ending up homogenous and bland because you don't focus on what it
needs to do and say. If nobody hates it, nobody can love it as there's nothing to
'feel' (remember Steve's quote earlier!).
8. Bad design kills
Contrary to popular belief, something which regularly pops up on 'omg this is the
ugliest website in the world' and 'bad design' showcases, our local Lingscars.com
is not actually BAD design. Of course it's rather garish, and not the most elegant
of aesthetics, but as we mentioned earlier aesthetics is not the sole purpose of
design! Whether you like how something looks or not is a matter of taste, and to
designers with a love of beautiful fonts and beautiful photography this is a bit of
an assault on the eyes - but this is the key. It's MEANT to be. Ling is known as a
unique character, very animated and known for deliberately trying to stand out in
her marketing, and her personality very much shines through in her product.
Information on this site is actually key, the cars and product take centre stage
and having used this for car quotes recently it is actually easy to find what you
need. So when the function and the message come through in a way that's appropriate
to the company behind it, it's not 'bad design'. However this approach only works
in the aesthetic sense and it wouldn't stand out if everyone else did this - you
can't be disorganised with your message, or have a lack of information, or poor
customer service. Bad design in your customer experience is a different thing
altogether.
9. Bad design, more killing
As I mentioned earlier, bad design can be the result of inappropriate usage, which
is usually an accident or a basic case of not doing your research properly. In
certain circumstances inappropriate logos could raise a bit of a laugh and not do
your brand any harm, but when we're dealing with a children's health centre logo
that looks more than a little dodgy (I'll leave the innocent minds amongst you to
work this one out!) it doesn't do too well with your customers. Some simple effort
with the logo design here would have remedied this if only they'd looked and
checked!
Surrey Police here used the famously hated font 'Comic Sans' for a poster dealing
with very emotionally sensitive material - this is inappropriate design. For one,
the name of the font should have given a clue to the person setting the poster that
it did not fit the message or the seriousness it needed to portray - there is
nothing comic-like bout this subject. Also, a childlike look in the design of the
font - which is primarily known for its over-usage in school newsletters and the
like - is not even comparable to a sexual assault message. I'll highlight in a
moment just why typographic choices are important in a design process.
10. So what makes good design?
Good design, being a relationship between the form and the function, should use the
nature of the medium as an advantage and not a restriction. e.g. the printing
process brings countless options to a book or magazine design, and the internet
brings interactivity and varying screen sizes to a website. Nobody ever complained
that books were different sizes, yet we constantly hear it on the web. Nobody ever
complained that books couldn't be made of cheese, we got on with creating beautiful
layouts and technically superb prints for the materials they were made out of. Good
design uses the nature of the medium and its features, for good.
Good design must answer a communication or physical need (for the purposes of this
presentation audience I'm talking about graphic/communication design and not
product/architecture or the like) and a person seeing, interacting with or using
this communication will have an emotional or physical response. The content is WHY
your message is being designed, so this is what you must portray.
An example here is the photographer Andrew Zuckerman. Here he highlights his latest
book 'Bird' which is a collection of highly specialist and beautiful bird

3. photography. The communication is undeniable - it's a photo of a bird. It's clean,
just like his style and his books, and the navigation design is very simple and
clean. It's a perfect example of the function working with the form to communicate
what he does and what the product is.
11/12. Critical ingredients
So what are the critical ingredients for good design? Well there are far too many
to cover in detail for a half-hour talk, and this is why the design process is a
very skilled undertaking when done properly, but I'll run through some key design
theory fundamentals which are important in the recipe for good and effective
design. Firstly, your most important tool is never, ever Photoshop (or the Mac, or
any other item) - it's your brain, the thinking throughout the ideas and solution
process, and also time. Design is often rushed or skimped upon in time and budget
because it's not seen as being important - viewing design as just aesthetics leads
people to believe design is the end of a process and not as important, which is not
true. Good design takes time, and this leads to a quality solution.
13. Critical ingredients
Firstly - research, research, research!! Research is the cornerstone to your design
and any design process. It gives you the context, history and meaning to what
you're working on. If you don't know WHY and you don't know WHO is going to use it,
or what is already out there how can you begin to design? If you don't work out the
context and always ask questions, you'll never hit the right solution.
Saarinen quoted that you should â œAlways design a thing by considering it in its
larger context. A chair in a room, a room in a house, a house in an environment, an
environment in a city planâa which is key to all design elements. All things must
exist somewhere, and in some context. Your website's buttons are part of an
instruction, that instruction is part of a page, that page part of a section and
the section part of the site. The site will be used by a certain person for a
certain need, in a certain context - these must all work together to benefit, which
creates a good design relationship.
Critical ingredients - a shopping list
14. Personality - how do you want or need to be perceived? Is humour appropriate?
If your company/brand/product/service was a person how would they act, what would
they enjoy and how would they be perceived? Identifying personality traits is
essential. After all, Harrods clientele would not be looking for a Lings Cars wild
and humorous personality when buying luxury and bespoke products, and Ling's
personality would not come across in a sedate and elegant Harrods-like aesthetic
treatment.
15. Space - known as 'white space' it's essential to a design to allow your brain
time to process the information it's communicating. If everything is crammed
together it becomes difficult to separate content and thus to know what's
important. A cluttered design can also suggest being disorganised, desperation by
throwing all content at the customer at once, and lead to information overload. An
interior designer wouldn't throw 300 chairs into your living room even though they
could fit - it would not be easy to use, it would create confusion. Good design
allows space to perceive the information.
16. Simplicity - a well known design rule is taught: 'take something away - if it
works without it, you didn't need it'. It's a way of reducing clutter and ensuring
a message is received clearly without distraction. Paul Rand went on to clarify
that 'less is more' is slightly misleading, after all some designs are more complex
than others depending on the personality and style. He said 'just enough is more'.
Nike is known for their iconic logo, a simple tick. Their slogan and ethos was
'just do it', and the tick represented what they wanted to communicate, perfectly.
Sometimes simplicity is perfect, 'just enough'.
Tiffany & Co are known for beautifully crafted, luxury jewellery items. They don't

4. communicate this with clutter and myriads of colour - they're known for quality so
they let the products speak for themselves with clean, simple photography as the
focus.
17. Relationship & proximity - related items, whether it be a logo, a website or a
system, are related in function for a reason. They should be close to one another
and properly linked, as items close to one another are perceived by our brains to
be more related than ones further apart. This creates a single visual unit. iTunes
interface is used here as an example; the playback controls are grouped together at
the top as one visual unit with volume, which is functionally related to the
playback as a secondary action (you need the volume once you're playing a track,
not before) nearby. The Library, Store and Playlist elements on the left group
their own sub-elements into 3 distinct groups of their own, but their proximity to
one another allows the sidebar to also be perceived as an inter-related whole (i.e.
they are all different collections of things).
18. Colour - colour is a massive study on its own, but I'll briefly touch upon
this. Colour is deeply linked to human psychological response and is observable
from our very early growth, so this can be used to trigger immediate associations
(such as 'red for danger' and 'green is OK'). Remember these may differ from
culture to culture, as red in the Far East is known for being lucky! Colour can
also be used to show consistency in a design and to highlight actions or certain
types of content. Here Barclays use a green login button to signify trust (as green
is known for 'go' and 'ok' with positive connotations) with their brand blue -
which incidentally was chosen because blue is seen as trustworthy and a calm colour
- used for all action buttons. This is immediately recognisable throughout their
website that a blue button performs some kind of action.
Consider other variants - in other cultures colours can mean different things, and
also colour blindness affecting roughly 20% of men genetically can be a major
factor if your target audience are mostly male. Colour blindness testers are
available online and in the printing process.
19. Hierarchy - this is how you give perceived importance to elements in a layout
or structure. Not all elements are the most important - however, clients can
wrongly claim this, as stakeholders will often want 'their' particular department
or feature to be noticed. Sorry, but not everything is your primary message so
leave secondary content out of it otherwise everything in your design fights for
attention and the message is lost! As shown here, Barclays give most prominence to
their main products (UX/user experience research can help determine exactly what
your users need and want to find on the website, just as user research can
determine what customers make a beeline for in a supermarket layout). Barclays then
give less space and less highlighting to the secondary messages of 'ask a question'
but still feature them on the main page, with promotional offers towards the
bottom.
20. Type - this is where I break out the wooden spoon and hit people for using
Brush Script. There is no excuse, other than irony (and that is rare) for bad
fonts. There are hundreds of thousands of beautifully designed (that means
structure and technical expertise as well as the aesthetics, remember) available so
do your research! Remember you need to communicate a personality, and the message
needs to be communicated well, so a badly constructed font or a poor use of it can
drag a design down quickly. Example here with a script font set in all caps - don't
do it. Also, fonts designed so they only work with a set amount of kerning (the
space between the letters) is a poor design in itself - choose a better font and
set it well!
21. Alignment - if elements randomly float around an area, be it a book cover or a
website or a logo, they lose relationship to other elements and look unimportant or

5. unnecessary. Alignment is important to visually link information and create a
unified design and message.
23. Taste is subjective
Good or bad design is not a matter of 'I like it' or not. That is taste, and while
everyone's 'taste' may be different, because good design is the solving of a
communication problem in response to a well-structured and researched brief, when
it's successful and answers the brief that cannot be disputed. Form follows
function, and where the form actually suits and communicates the personality and
message of the function, it works.
24. It's shit.
Poorly constructed feedback does nothing and is the problem of the observer. If you
simply say something is shit, you're wrong unless you can define what is actually
the problem and what's needed to solve it. Constructive feedback solves problems
and this is what the design process is about. Remember that you the client or you
the designer are most often NOT the target audience of whatever
message/product/item you're communicating, so your personal 'taste' doesn't factor
in decision making. Client comments I've received in the past such as 'oh my wife
likes blue so it has to be blue' are rubbish, unrelated to the brief and will not
improve design. Again, pleasing everyone (such as the client's wife) is NOT the
objective of good design. Good critique is proper feedback on the message and
design elements, or even acknowledging a failure in the brief or research, from
those who understand the relationship of form and function. In other words, let the
designer do their job to solve the communication need.
Seek other designers' opinions - as our host pointed out, he comes to me for design
feedback even though I shout at him for using bad fonts (honestly I'm not that
mean). I will always be honest but never criticise 'taste' - I respond with
constructive feedback to improve an issue, if one is needed.
25. Pinch of salt.
You may need this from time to time, for the occasional difficult brief or
client ;)
Thank you for your time and for watching my presentation, I hope you found it
useful and once again thanks to all who gave very lovely feedback - if you need any
design advice or solutions please contact me via http://twitter.com/minxlj or at
leannej@mobious.net