Over the last couple years I have being considering design in terms of my startup Professional You. We are working on something that will have a large amount of complex data in our system and that needs to be easy to access and manipulate.
In my life, design started with Technical drawing at school as child. It than evolved in basic computer games later at school. However it was PageMaker and Quark Xpress both in their first versions that got me really into thinking about what I was creating and the process. I still have this amazing book called ‘One Minute Designer’ by Roger C. Parker that was an amazing help to get me started. This lead me to training professional typesetters how to use the first Desktop Publishing software.
Later in life I took on a computer science degree and studied system design and UX at University which helped me to understand some more of the language and concepts. During my placement year I created with a partner a business to help businesses upgrade their paper based systems to electronic ones particularly Finance and Admin systems. It taught me a lot about change management and the direct impact on people that systems have, thus my design and process became very people aware.
So back to the present, 19 years of marketing later…To help me with startup, which I can visualize entirely in my head I decided to absorbed some books:
- Head First Web Design – Ethan Watrall
- Design Interfaces – Jenifer Tidwell
- Universal Principles of Design – William Lidwell
- Designing Web Navigation – James Kalbach
- Business Model Generation – Alexander Osterwalder
- The new Drawing on the right side of the brain – Betty Edward
- Color – Betty Edward
- Basic Perspective Drawing – John Montague
- Is that there is value in iteration and striving for perfection can lead you down a rabbit hole
- Practice, practice, practice
- Working and playing with good people refreshes the souls and is fun
- Combining the words design and thinking implies there is a process that it is more than just intuition.
- Good design thinking involves engaging both the rational and the emotional parts of your mind.
- That you need to be able to take criticism and other points of view.
- That you have to have some part of you that enjoys turning chaos into order
- That your audience may not think and feel as you do
- That you should never stay still and need to bounce between what is safe and what makes you sacred
- That there needs to be story behind it a consistency of your journey
- That ‘pure’ design is elegant and more often occurs in nature than in human creation
- Simplicity and complexity can both be beautiful
- That whilst we admire perfection we don’t trust it
- Engage the users early and often
Eric Brooke's Blog 