collaboration
It passes by the river
Business people and developers
Engineering, design, and product management
The problem with CAD
We want you to work with an artist
The power of One
picnic.lectoro.me
Designer + Developer Workflow
An Article by Dan MallThe way designers and developers work together today is broken. Itâs too siloed and separate; âcollaborationâ is a fantasy that few enjoy.
The state of advertising in the 1940s was similar. All of that changed when copywriter Bill Bernbach met art director Paul Rand. Their collaborative working style led to the birth of the idea of âthe creative team,â the mutual respect and partnership between art director and copywriter that tended to yield unique results. Bob Gage, an art director that worked for DDB, the agency Bernbach co-founded, described it like this:
âTwo people who respect each other sit in the same room for a length of time and arrive at a state of free association, where the mention of one idea will lead to another idea, then to another. The art director might suggest a headline, the writer a visual. The entire ad is conceived as a whole, in a kind of ping pong between disciplines.â
Isnât that what we all strive for in our jobs? True collaboration with equals and partners? Ideas that build off one another? Why does this seem so far away for some of us?
The Hot Potato Process
An Article by Dan MallThe big misconception Iâve seen designers and developers often fall victim to is believing that handoff goes one way. Designers hand off comps to developers and think their work is done. That puts a lot of pressure on the designer to get everything perfect in one pass.
Instead, great collaboration follows what Brad Frost and I call âThe Hot Potato Process,â where ideas are passed quickly back and forth from designer to developer and back to designer then back to developer for the entirety of a product creation cycle.
Nobody gives a hoot about groupthink
An Article by Baldur BjarnasonTwo relatively common âfashionsâ today are real-time collaboration and shared data repositories of one kind or another.
Both increase productivity in the naive sense. We work more; everybody is more active; the group feels more cohesive.
The downside is that they also both tend to reduce the quality of the work and increase busywork.
Pair Design: Better Together
Pair design is the counterintuitive practice of getting more and better UX design done by putting two designers together as thought partners to solve design problems. Itâs counterintuitive because you might expect that you could split them up to work in parallel to get double the design done, but for many situations, youâd be wrong. This document will help explain what pair design is, how it works, and tour through the practicalities of implementing it in your practice.
Asynchronous Design Critique: Getting Feedback
An Article by Erin CasaliGetting feedback can be thought of as a form of design research. In the same way that we wouldnât do any research without the right questions to get the insights that we need, the best way to ask for feedback is also to craft sharp questions.
When we were all together in-person
AÂ QuoteâWe believe that in-person collaboration is essential to our culture and our future,â said Deirdre OâBrien, senior vice president of retail and people, in a video recording viewed by The Verge. âIf we take a moment to reflect on our unbelievable product launches this past year, the products and the launch execution were built upon the base of years of work that we did when we were all together in-person.â
Building Momentum
An Article by Dan MallFight the Waterfall
Start all of the pieces of work a little bit earlier. The key to starting work early is not succumbing to the pressure of having to finish the work. Donât worry about finishing. If youâre a developer, you can start doing things while your design or information architect are working because a lot of your work actually isnât dependent on their work. Some of it is, so you probably wonât be able to finish, but that shouldnât stop you from starting.
Share Work-in-Progress Early and Often
When you share work-in-progress, share it with the caveat that no feedback is needed at this point. Youâre simply sharing it to let people know where you are. For example, if you have to make 12 wireframes, share it when you finish 2 or 3. Rather than spending a whole week to drop 12 wireframes, share 2 â 3 wireframes every 2 days. The more often you do this, you start to build rhythm, and rhythm builds momentum.
The Small Group
An Article by James MulhollandLying somewhere between a club and a loosely defined set of friends, the SMALL GROUP is a repeated theme in the lives of the successful. Benjamin Franklin had the Junto Club, Tolkien and C.S. Lewis had The Inklings, Jobs and Wozniak had Homebrew.
Around a dozen members is the sweet spot of social motivation: small enough to know everyone, yet large enough that the group wonât collapse if one or two membersâ enthusiasm wanes; small enough that you are not daunted by competing with the whole world, yet large enough that you still need to be on your toes to keep up.
Scenius
Scenius stands for the intelligence and the intuition of a whole cultural scene. It is the communal form of the concept of the genius.
Mutual appreciation
AÂ Fragment by Matt WebbTo use slightly different terms, mutual appreciation is a healthy jealousy without envy â a drive to achieve the same but without wanting to take it from the other.
- ââThe Small Groupââ
- ââSceniusââ
Interaction of Color
- ââThe deception of colorââ
- ââPractice before theoryââ
- ââ50 redsââ
- ââNot the what but the howââ
- ââScotopic seeingââ
- ââIrwin Fluorescentsââ
The deception of color
In order to use color effectively it is necessary to recognize
that color deceives continually.What counts here â first and last â is not so-called knowledge
of so-called facts, but vision â seeing.Practice before theory
Instead of mechanically applying or merely implying laws and rules
of color harmony, distinct color effects are produced
â through recognition of the interaction of color â
by making, for instance,
2 very different colors look alike, or nearly alike.The aim of such study is to develop â through experience
â by trial and error â an eye for color.
This means, specifically, seeing color action
as well as feeling color relatedness.As a general training it means development of observation and articulation.
This book, therefore, does not follow an academic conception
of âtheory and practice.â
It reverses this order and places practice before theory,
which, after all, is the conclusion of practice.50 reds
If one says âRedâ (the name of a color)
and there are 50 people listening,
it can be expected that there will be 50 reds in their minds.
And one can be sure that all these reds will be very different.Not the what but the how
Our concern is the interaction of color; that is, seeing
what happens between colors.We are able to hear a single tone.
But we almost never (that is, without special devices) see a single color
unconnected and unrelated to other colors.
Colors present themselves in continuous flux, constantly related to
changing neighbors and changing conditions.As a consequence, this proves for the reading of color
what Kandinsky often demanded for the reading of art:
what counts is not the what but the how.Scotopic seeing
The sensitivity
and consequently the registration of the retina of an eye is different
from the sensitivity and registration of a photographic film.Normally, black-and-white photography registers all lights lighter
and all darks darker than the more adjustable eye perceives them.
The eye also distinguishes better the so-called middle grays,
which in photography are often flattened if not lost.This shows what a higher key in light can lose in photography.
The greatest advantage the eye has over photography
is its scotopic seeing in addition to its photopic seeing.
The former means, briefly, the retinal adjustment to lower light conditions.Disliked colors
We try to recognize our preferences and our aversions â
what colors dominate in our work; what colors, on the other hand,
are rejected, disliked, or of no appeal. Usually a special effort
in using disliked colors ends with our falling in love with them.Color intervals
The tune of âGood morning to youâ consists of 4 tones. It can be sung
in a high soprano, a low basso, and in all in-between voices, as well as
on many levels and in many keys. It can be played on innumerable instruments.In all possible ways of performance, this melody will keep its character
and it will be recognized instantly.Why? The intervals of the 4 tones, that is, their acoustical
constellation (again comparable with a topographical relationship),
remains the same.Although it is not common practice, one can also speak of intervals
between colors.
Colors and hues are defined, as are tones in music, by wavelength.Any color (shade or tint) always has 2 decisive characteristics:
color intensity (brightness) and light intensity (lightness).
Therefore, color intervals also have this double-sidedness, this duality.Time and space
Tones appear placed and directed predominantly in time from before to now to later.
Their juxtaposition in a musical composition is perceived
within a prescribed sequence only.
Horizontally, the tones follow each other,
perhaps not in a straight line, but of necessity in a prescribed order
and only in 1 direction â forward.
Tones heard earlier fade, and those farther back disappear, vanish.
We do not hear them backward.Colors appear connected predominantly in space. Therefore,
as constellations they can be seen in any direction and
at any speed. And as they remain, we can return to them repeatedly
and in many ways.
This remaining and not remaining, or vanishing and not vanishing,
shows only 1 essential difference between the fields of tone
and color.The accuracy of perception in one field is matched
by the durability of retention in the other, demonstrating
a curious reversal in visual and auditory memory.A cook with taste
Observe the interior and exterior, the furniture and textile decoration
following such color schemes, as well as commercialized color âsuggestionsâ
for innumerable do-it-yourselves.Our conclusion: we may forget for a while those rules of thumb
of complementaries, whether complete or âsplitâ, and of triads and
tetrads as well.
They are worn out.Second, no mechanical color system is flexible enough
to precalculate the manifold changing factors, as named before,
in a single prescribed recipe.Good painting, good coloring, is comparable to good cooking.
Even a good cooking recipe demands tasting and repeated tasting
while it is being followed.
And the best tasting still depends on a cook with taste.Flexible imagination
By giving up preference for harmony,
we accept dissonance to be as desirable as consonance.Besides a balance through color harmony, which is comparable
to symmetry, there is equilibrium possible between
color tensions, related to a more dynamic asymmetry.Again: knowledge and its application is not our aim;
instead, it is flexible imagination, discovery, invention â taste.Does it have color?
Whether something âhas colorâ or not is as hard to define verbally as are
such questions as âwhat is musicâ or âwhat is musical."The Weber-Fechner law
Exponential increases in physical stimuli produce linear perceptual increases.
Thinking in situations
Naturally, practice is not preceded but followed by theory.
Such study promotes a more lasting teaching and learning
through experience. Its aim is development of creativeness
realized in discovery and invention â the criteria of creativity,
or flexibility, being imagination and fantasy. Altogether
it promotes âthinking in situations,â a new educational concept
unfortunately little known and less cultivated, so far.Not of method but of heart
In the end, teaching is a matter not of method but of heart.
The teacher actually is right and always will gain confidence
when he admits that he does not know, that he cannot decide, and,
as it often is with color, that he is unable to make a choice
or to give advice.Besides, good teaching is more a giving of right questions
than a giving of right answers.Results of a search
This book presents results of a search, not of what is academically called research.
In addition to the dedication of this book, I should like to state that my students in color have taught me more color than have books about color.
Simple forms
The concept that âthe simpler the form of a letter the simpler its readingâ was an obsession of beginning constructivism. It became something like a dogma, and is still followed by âmodernisticâ typographers.
This notion has proved to be wrong, because in reading we do not read letters but words, words as a whole, as a âword picture.â Ophthalmology has disclosed that the more the letters are differentiated from each other, the easier is the reading.
Without going into comparisons and the details, it should be realized that words consisting of only capital letters present the most difficult readingâbecause of their equal height, equal volume, and, with most, their equal width. When comparing serif letters with sans-serif, the latter provide an uneasy reading. The fashionable preference for sans-serif in text shows neither historical nor practical competence.