iteration
So that you can get feedback on it and make it better
Fascinatingly, one of the other big complaints people had about agile is no iteration. I don't understand how being in an agile environment makes people less iterative, but somehow that seems to be the case. And I think it's because people misunderstand and think that agile is just about putting features out faster, and not about the important part, which is getting something in front of users faster so that you can get feedback on it and make it better.
The most rewarding iterations
Initial designs for sophisticated software applications are invariably complicated, even when developed by competent engineers. Truly good solutions emerge after iterative improvements or after redesigns that exploit new insights, and the most rewarding iterations are those that result in program simplifications.
Evolutions of this kind, however, are extremely rare in current software practice—they require time-consuming thought processes that are rarely rewarded. Instead, software inadequacies are typically corrected by quickly conceived additions that invariably result in the well-known bulk.
To anticipate all the uses and abuses
Success depends wholly on the anticipation and obviation of failure, and it is virtually impossible to anticipate all the uses and abuses to which a product will be subjected until it is in fact used and abused not in the laboratory but in real life. Hence, new products are seldom even near perfect, but we buy them and adapt to their form because they do fulfill, however imperfectly, a function that we find useful.
When we make a model and realize it's rubbish
Much of the design process is a conversation, a back-and-forth as we walk around the tables and play with the models. He doesn't like to read complex drawings. He wants to see and feel a model. He's right. I get surprised when we make a model and then realize it's rubbish, even though based on the CAD renderings it looked great.
He loves coming in here because it's calm and gentle. It's a paradise if you're a visual person. There are no formal design reviews, so there are no huge decision points. Instead we can make the presentations fluid. Since we iterate every day and never have dumb-ass presentations, we don't run into major disagreements.
Building is never a straight line
You might think that Mario 64 was built with tickets and sprints, but, according to interviews, there was no master plan, only the principles that the game should feel good and be fun. They started with just Mario in a small room, and tuned his animations and physics until he felt nice and responsive. After that, the levels were also created as they went, with the designers, developers, and director going back and forth using sketches and prototypes.
Building like this is never a straight line. Ideas and code get left on the cutting room floor because part of innovation is questioning whether what you made should exist. The process is cyclical and iterative, looking something like this.
Between the two spaces
It is widely accepted that creative design is not a matter of first fixing the problem and then searching for a satisfactory solution concept; instead it seems more to be a matter of developing and refining together both the formulation of the problem and ideas for its solution, with constant iteration of analysis, synthesis, and evaluation processes between the two “spaces” – problem and solution.
The game discovering itself
We like to think about this process as the game discovering itself over time. Because as iterators, rather than designers, it’s our job to simply play the game, listen to it, feel it, and kind of feel out what it seems to want to become - and just follow the trails of what’s fun.
Deciding what to design
We Don’t Really Know the Goal When We Start
The most serious model shortcoming is that the designer often has a vague, incompletely specified goal, or primary objective. In such cases, the hardest part of design is deciding what to design.
I came to realize that the most useful service I was performing for my client was helping him decide what he really wanted.
Today, we recognize that rapid prototyping is an essential tool for formulating precise requirements. Not only is the design process iterative; the design-goal-setting process is itself iterative. Knowing complete product requirements up front is a quite rare exception, not the norm. Therefore, goal iteration must be considered an inherent part of the design process.
Embracing the mess
Design is non-linear. At Figma, we often talk about “embracing the mess,” and that really means leaning into the chaos and complexity that makes the design process what it is. Even once you have the seedling of an idea, you need to explore and iterate, then pull back and evaluate to see what’s working and what’s not. Sometimes you’ll scrap an idea after a brainstorm session, and other times you’ll get pretty far with a concept, but still need different perspectives and input to move forward.
Models and iterations
Every month or so, Manock and Oyama would present a new iteration based on Jobs's previous criticisms. The latest plaster model would be dramatically unveiled, and all the previous attempts would be lined up next to it. That not only helped them gauge the design's evolution, but it prevented Jobs from insisting that one of his suggestions had been ignored.
The surprising effectiveness of writing and rewriting
An Article by Matt Webb- The act of writing the first draft creates new “essential data” that feeds the imagination and makes possible figuring out the second draft.
- Or: In your head, ideas expand until they max out “working memory” – and it’s only be externalising them in the written word that you have capacity to iterate them.
- Or: Good writing necessarily takes multiple edits, and the act of writing and act of rewriting are sufficiently different that performing both simultaneously is like rubbing your tummy and patting your head.
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 wouldn’t 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.
The Elements of Typographic Style
Leave the road when you wish
The subject of this book is not typographic solitude, but the old, well-traveled roads at the core of the tradition: paths that each of us is free to follow or not, and to enter and leave when we choose – if only we know the paths are there and have a sense of where they lead. That freedom is denied us if the tradition is concealed or left for dead. Originality is everywhere, but much originality is blocked if the way back to earlier discoveries is cut or overgrown.
If you use this book as a guide, by all means leave the road when you wish. That is precisely the use of a road: to reach individually chosen points of departure. By all means break the rules, and break them beautifully, deliberately and well. That is one of the ends for which they exist.
Typography exists to honor content
In a world rife with unsolicited messages, typography must often draw attention to itself before it will be read. Yet in order to be read, it must relinquish the attention it has drawn. Typography with anything to say therefore aspired to a kind of statuesque transparency. Its other traditional goal is durability: not immunity to change, but a clear superiority to fashion. Typography at its best is a visual form of language linking timelessness and time.
Typographic style
Literary style, says Walter Benjamin, “is the power to move freely in the length and breadth of linguistic thinking without slipping into banality.” Typographic style, in this large and intelligence sense of the word, does not mean any particular style – my style or your style, or Neoclassical or Baroque style – but the power to move freely through the whole domain of typography, and to function at every step in a way that is graceful and vital instead of banal.
A state of energetic repose
Read the text before designing it.
Discover the outer logic of the typography in the inner logic of the text.
Make the visible relationship between the text and other elements (photographs, captions, tables, diagrams, notes) a reflection of their real relationship.
Give full typographic attention even to incidental details.
Invite the reader into the text.
Reveal the tenor and meaning of the text.
Clarify the structure and the order of the text.
Link the text with other existing elements.Induce a state of energetic repose, which is the ideal condition for reading.
Evenness of color
The density of texture in a written or typeset page is called its color.
Once the demands of legibility and logical order are satisfied, evenness of color is the typographer’s normal aim. And color in the typographic sense depends upon four things: the design of the type, the spacing between the letters, the spacing between the words, and the spacing between the lines. None is independent of the others.
A single note
The simplest scale is a single note, and sticking with a single note draws more attention to the other parameters, such as rhythm and inflection. The early Renaissance typographers set each book in a single font – that is, one face in one size. Their pages show what sensuous evenness of texture and variety of rhythm can be attained with a single font of type.
The higher courts
Refer typographic disputes to the higher courts of speech and thinking.
Type is idealized writing, and its normal function is to record idealized speech. Acronyms such as CD and TV or USA and UFO are set in caps because that is the way we pronounce them. Acronyms such as UNESCO, ASCII, and FORTRAN, which are pronounced not as letters but as words, are in the process of becoming precisely that. When a writer accepts them fully into her speech and urges readers to do likewise, it is time for the typographer to accept them into the common speech of typography by setting them in lower case. Other acronymic words, such as laser and radar, have long since traveled the same road.
An antiphonal geometry
A book is a flexible mirror of the mind and body. Its overall size and proportions, the color and texture of the paper, the sound it makes as the pages turn, and the smell of the paper, adhesive and ink, all blend with the size and form and placement of the type to reveal a little about the world in which it was made. If the book appears to be only a paper machine, produced at their own convenience by other machines, only machines will want to read it.
Sizing and spacing type, like composing and performing music or applying paint to canvas, is largely concerned with intervals and differences.
The page is a piece of paper. It is also a visible and tangible proportion, silently sounding the thoroughbass of the book. On it lies the textblock, which much answer to the page. The two together – page and textblock – produce an antiphonal geometry. That geometry alone can bond the reader to the book. Or conversely, it can put the reader to sleep, or put the reader’s nerves on edge, or drive the reader away.
Pure but silent
Architects build perfectly proportioned kitchens, living rooms and bedrooms in which their clients will make, among other things, a mess. Typographers likewise build perfectly proportioned pages, then distort them on demand. The text takes precedence over the purity of the design, and the typographic texture of the text takes precedence over the absolute proportions of the pure but silent page.
A sterile sameness
Another kind of random variation involves the interaction of the craftsman’s skill and the texture of materials. The letterforms of Griffo and Colines were cut with immense care. But the letters they cut were struck by hand in copper or brass, then cast and dressed and set by hand, inked by hand with handmade ink and printed by hand in a handmade wooden press on handmade paper. Every step along with way introduced small variations planned by no one. In the world of the finely honed machine, those human-scale textures are erased. A sterile sameness supervenes.
The computer is, on the face of it, an ideal device for reviving the old luxury of random variations at the threshold of perception (quite a different thing from chaos). But conventional typesetting software and hardware focuses instead on the unsustainable ideal of absolute control – and has been hamstrung in the past by the idea of a single glyph per character. There have been several recent attempts to introduce a layer of random variation, but all have had to work against the grain of technological development.
Waiting to repay the gift of vision
Like a forest or a garden or a field, an honest page of letters can absorb – and will repay – all the attention it is given. Much type now, however, is delivered to computer screens. It is a good deal harder to make text truly legible on screen than to render streaming video. Both fine technology and great restraint are required to make the screen as restful to the eyes as ordinary paper.
The underlying problem is that the screen mimics the sky instead of the earth. It bombards the eye with light instead of waiting to repay the gift of vision – like the petals of a flower, or the face of a thinking animal, or a well-made typographic page. And we read the screen the way we read the sky: in quick sweeps, guessing at the weather from the changing shapes of clouds, or in magnified small bits, like astronomers studying details. We look to it for clues and revelations more than wisdom. This makes it an attractive place for the open storage of pulverized information – names, dates, or library call numbers, for instance – but not so good a place for thoughtful text.
Respect
Respect the text first of all, the letterforms second, the type designer third, the foundry fourth.
The needs of the text should take precedence over the layout of the font, the integrity of the letterforms over the ego of the designer, the artistic sensibility of the designer over the foundry’s desire for profit, and the founder’s craft over a good deal else.
Little by little
Check every text you set to see where improvements can be made. Then return to the font and make them. Little by little, you and the instrument – the font, that is – will fuse, and the type you set will start to sing. Remember, though, this process never ends. There is no such thing as the perfect font.
An end in itself
Typography, like language, is more important to me for what it allows to happen than for anything it accomplishes on its own. I hope that in writing a book on the subject I have not given the impression that either typography or design is an end in itself.
Not as a star
But I’m warning you,
this is my last existence.
Not as a swallow, not as a maple,
not as a cat-tail and not as a star.