Answering listener questions about if should designers should learn to code, making developers a bigger part of your creative process and talking about if digital platforms are killing design.
SHOW NOTES:
http://thecrazy1.com/episode-5-listener-questions-should-designers-code-is-platformification-killing-design/
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Answering listener questions about if should designers should learn to code, making developers a bigger part of your creative process and talking about if digital platforms are killing design.
SHOW NOTES:
http://thecrazy1.com/episode-5-listener-questions-should-designers-code-is-platformification-killing-design/
FOLLOW THE CRAZY ONE:
Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, Facebook
Well, I guess what they say must be true. The time really does fly when you're having fun because I can't believe that already on the fifth episode of The Crazy One podcast, and my name is Steve gates. And so far we've been talking about creativity, we've been talking about leadership. And for those of you who actually make it all the way to the end of the show, and I know that that may not be all of you, because you may be like me that you get to the end of the podcast, you hear the host kind of say, that's all we're going to talk about, and you're on to the next podcast, and I get it. But for those of you who have stuck around, you've heard me say that one of the things I really wanted was to make this show into a dialogue, because I'm crazy enough to think that we can take a one way we medium where I'm standing here and talking into a microphone in my studio and turn it into a dialogue. But I kept encouraging everybody and I would say look, if you have something that you want me to talk more about, if you think there's something that I got right or something I got wrong, send me an email, and you could do that. It just asked at Stephen Gates calm and anybody could do it. And the reason why was because I wanted to be able to make sure that I'm talking about the things that people are interested in. And so I have to say that the reaction just in general to the show has been pretty overwhelming. I think it's always interesting whenever you take on something like this, because you just feel like you have something to say, and you put it out there into the world. And I think we all know that just because you have something to say, doesn't mean that anybody actually wants to listen. And so the fact that people are listening, and they've been commenting, and the types of people who've been listening have been, have honestly been really incredibly humbling. But that being said, this is going to be the first question show because we got a question. And actually, we got two questions in an email. And it came from somebody who I've known for a little while. His name is Craig le Melia. And Craig I always hope that I say your your last name, right. I know that we've known each other for a little bit and I've never actually asked so I guess on the one hand, I hope that I'm saying it right. If I butchered it. Feel free to throw something at me the next time you see me, but Craig lives here in New York, and he's the director of creative tech. knology over at the agency VML. And if you haven't had the chance to go check him out on Twitter, because I think he posts a lot of really good stuff. And I don't think you get a job like that by being a slouch. His last name, just so you know, is e li, m e l, IH. So head on over to Twitter and give him a follow. But he sent me an email. And the email that he sent me actually was kind of a two part question. I thought that they were both so good that I didn't want to wait. And I thought that they actually were both so good that it deserved their own show. So that's what this show is going to be is to go through and talk about two really good questions that I thought that he posed. And so we're just gonna start by reading the first half of his email that he sent me. And it says, a topic near and dear to my heart is creative technology. It's been something that's been a part of me from as young as I can remember. And I've been negotiating the two worlds for most of my professional career. I've worked side by side with great designers and side by side with amazing developers I watched those two worlds collide and become entangled in the most elegant of ways. My technical instinct is where I get my design inspiration and vice versa. For me, these two practices and disciplines cannot be and should not be decoupled. So how do you involve your technologists in design conversations? And how do you inspire designers to design for technology more natively? And this is a great question. This is a question that I get asked a lot by young designers, by developers. And it's something that I've just seen as an interesting question that's come up in the industry a lot. So I think, for me, it's going to be obviously since I'm a designer to answer for the designers first or at least give my opinion on it. And really, what it boils down to is should designers know technology, should they learn how to code? And I would say that the simple answer for me is just simply Yes. Because the reality is that I think if you're going to do anything creatively at all, and this isn't just design, you have to understand The medium in which your creativity is going to come to life. I've always would kind of relate this to and again, if you've listened to this show before, you know, food and being a foodie is a big part of my life. And so if i related this to food, I always think that it's a bit like if I was a chef, who knew how to cut up ingredients and knew what those ingredients were, but I had no idea how to use a stove. It just it wouldn't make any sense to me to be able to do that, but then to be able to execute on it. So I think that the short answer, like I said, is yes, that you do need to understand these things for me. I've always grown up with it, like I'm this weird, right brain left brain, almost an equal measure sort of approach to things. And so I grew up working on Apple, two computers, writing Apple soft basic, honestly, back in the days, where if you wanted a video game, you would go out and you would get a magazine that actually had the code in it. And you would have to sit there and actually type in the code to actually make the game. So I grew up kind of learning to program I'm that way and debugging code and things like that. And over the years, it stayed with me just because I always felt like it was part of my skill set that I needed to understand. And so whether it was like Apple soft basic in the early days, or HTML, or even on the ActionScript, whenever I used to custom code, my own sites, or even now I've been known to even get in and dabble and do a little Xcode and things like that. It was always part of just something that I felt like I needed to know, because it just is what I said before. At the very least, you have to understand the form factors and the limits of technology. Because if you don't, you end up with a lot of very pretty designs that aren't going to come to life the right way, they're not going to get executed the right way. And I think that's a really big issue, because that's the real point of our work is at the end of the day. What does it look like when somebody uses it? And the challenge is that whenever they use it, they just understand it for the experience that it is they don't understand it for what it meant to be whenever it was in Photoshop. They don't understand it for what you meant it to be. Before something got D scoped because you design something that the engineering team couldn't actually execute on your platform. So that's why the two are so inextricably linked for me. And it's why you have to be able to put in that time is because for your work to go on and do something great, it actually has to be a great experience. And so I that's what I said is I just think that's gonna be the The short answer for designers. And we're gonna get to a slightly longer answer here in a second, and I'll explain why. But the answer for engineers, and how do I get engineers, to be more creative? is always a little bit of an interesting question. And I think that one of the things that I often find is that in so many agencies in so many companies, the challenges is that all of the developers and all the engineers, if they do their job flawlessly if they do it perfectly, the best they can hope for in a lot of cases, unfortunately, is to not be noticed. Because the reality is, is that they've been given the Creative or whatever that experience is, and they've been asked to create it. And if they created it and it works, well, that's what they were supposed to do. So that the challenges is that so much of their world is downside is is getting blamed for things because we've structured these teams, and these deliverables in a way where that's all that we're really prioritizing for them is to just do what we say. And if you don't, it's all just problems. And that in itself, just the setup, like when we talk about creativity, we talked about setting up a problem the right way. This is, to me were one of the problems where we're setting up the problem the wrong way. And I've always believed that, for me, engineers are creative, and they deserve just as much of a seat at the table as anybody else. This is why I have always felt that something like design thinking, honestly, is probably one of the biggest Trojan horses for change that you could bring into an organization and not just for engineering, not just for tech, because the challenge is, how do I get everybody to the table at the same time? How do we go through and start to solve These problems together. And I think design thinking works really well for that, because the challenge has always been and the reason why I always want everybody together and working on a creative problem is because as you think about it, and if you've ever gone through this process, as anything goes from the spark of inspiration, so the reality of execution, it changes, you have to make compromises that whether it's for the feasibility aspect, whether it's for a business aspect, whether it's just for something and this happens to me all the time, something that sounded great in my head, but look like total crap whenever it got out onto a screen. Those things happen all the time. And the trick here is, how do you bring a team together and not have it be just the downside? How do I bring a team together and get them to understand that to do really great work, they all have to invest and be okay with bringing that great work to life, as opposed to in most places what you see our teams who come Together, and what they invest in is not getting blamed. They document their work, they stay in silos, they continue to take this approach where they think that something's gonna go wrong. And so whenever it does, we all need to stay on our separate camps. And we need to need to document everything to make sure that we're okay. Well, the first thing I'll say, I just I feel like that approach. And that sort of process is that sort of process is the residue of really bad communication. And that the other problem is, is that if you're going to do anything innovative, if you're going to do anything creative, in any industry, things are going to go wrong. Because the reality is, is that to do something innovative, you can't know where you're going to end up from where you start. So if that's the case, and things are going to go wrong, everybody needs to be at the table to solve the problem together the best work that I've ever been a part of the best teams that I've ever seen. have everybody from a design perspective from a copywriting a user experience, a technology, a business, or a product owner all the table and are all working together because they're all in invested in getting that best work out the door. So I think that that that's how I get them to be more creative is to just simply give them a seat at the table, and an acknowledgement or even just an expectation that we want them to be creative. We want them to participate that no longer can they be just simply a passive passenger in this process. And I think that for some people, they take to this very, very naturally for some, it kind of freaks them out. I think it's for the same reason why I've seen some engineering organizations will freak out whenever you actually move them into an agile methodology. Because as a creative, we're very, very used to getting a problem and jumping off the cliff and building our wings on the way down. We're very used to the fact that we don't necessarily know the answer, but we're going to be okay with that. The challenges and especially as you move over to agile or some of these other methodologies, that the rest of the organization from a business from an engineering standpoint, aren't used to that same level of uncertainty. They're very much used to going from A to B and noise What B is before they leave a. And so I think that a lot of cases, it's making them into creative technologists or creative engineers or something where the expectation is much greater than execution. And like I said, for some of them, it's a very easy transition, something they want to do. For some of them. It's completely terrifying. But I think that in either case, I've always felt like as being the person who was the design lead, it was up to me to try to construct an environment where that felt like it was okay that it was possible that failure was possible. And it could be a part of that conversation. I will say, though, at the same time that I think you do also need to go through and to make sure that all the disciplines holistically, kind of respect their lane. And the way that I've always described this is again, if that team is all responsible for executing on that great idea. You do still need to hold the individual disciplines responsible for the artifact that that discipline produces. So that will say that if it's a designer, I'm going to hold them accountable for actually doing The designs if it's the engineer, I'm gonna hold them accountable for the code, it doesn't mean that the rest of the team doesn't have a say so in it. But at the same time, you have to respect everybody's position and let them be the subject matter experts so that it just doesn't simply break down and become chaos. Because I've seen that as well, where all of a sudden, I'll end up with an engineer, who may be there to do the coding who may be there to work on the stack or an API or something like that. But they will also then simply declare that, well, they're also a UI or UX expert, and that they want to have an opinion. And then all of a sudden, I find myself in this competition, almost of like, who's going to be the creative director? Well, we can't have that you can't have because at the same point, if the shoe was on the other foot, and all of a sudden I was coming in and commenting on the way that something should be coded or was coming in and correcting some of that, that's not going to end well either. And so I think that that's the only part of this is is to bring everybody to the table to set that expectation to create that empowerment because I think that that so often is the point to me where I don't see the engineer is kind of being engaged. In that way, because I think in most cases, they just they simply aren't invited or if they are invited, they aren't actively engaged or they aren't set that expectation to simply be and try to be more creative. And again, to try to make that a safe space where we're not expecting them to suddenly get into Photoshop and to put my head on Brad Pitt's body, which would be not only comical, but probably a hell of a lot of work. That for me is kind of the the simple answer. But also, as I kind of sat and thought about this a little bit, I think that the whole answer is honestly probably a bit more complicated. Because the reality is that at the end of the day, if you work on something like digital design, design and technology are linked, they're completely interlinked, and they're completely dependent on each other. This is the, the cook with the ingredients in the stove. Like unless you're a Raw Chef, you're not actually going to get a meal in the same way that you know, unless I'm going to become a fine artist. I need technology to bring this to life. And think that whenever I went through this, the challenge Is design without technology and digital is just an art gallery. And technology without design is it's probably Microsoft, I guess, because it's just these are the problems is that they are interdependent. And there are many examples of if one leans one way or the other way, it doesn't really work. But the problem I think also goes much deeper, because the tools that we work with are still so separate. And I think that's really one of the things where the tools that we work with are so behind the times, because our tool sets are so separated. And it makes it very, very difficult for either side, to try to come and work with the other because as a designer, the tools that I can have access to that can start to produce code, never produce the quality of code that an engineer that I've worked with ever actually wanted to use. And I think that as an engineer, you look at a tool like Photoshop, or you look at something like that, which is an incredibly daunting application that has an insane amount of overhead and I I think that's part of the problem is just from the very foundation of the things that we work with, were just pulled apart. And I think that we've started to see hints or hope that some of this might start to come together. But I think that we've seen this in the past, I think that we've seen, Dreamweaver tried to talk about how easy it is for a designer to use, or we've seen a lot of these applications try to bridge the gap, but we've never really gotten there. And I think that part of this challenge is, is that it's just we have to figure out and acknowledge the fact that the two are interlinked, and our tools have to follow that. But I think that the other part of this, if I'm being honest, is that I think, if I took a step back, I would probably say that just simply trying to figure out how to get a designer to code more or an engineer to design more, probably also is missing a bit of the bigger problem. Because the reality is, is that most times whenever I'm asked, should designers learn to code I'll answer yes. with an asterisk, and the asterisk is because of the fact that I think if you're going to do any profession, you have to take the time to learn your craft, you have to put in the 10,000 hours to become great at something that's just simply part of the process. That's the entry fee to come on the ride. But once you do that, I think that the focus has to be on learning those tools, at least for somebody who's like me, that's creative to the point where the tool becomes transparent. And so that no longer Am I going in whenever I'm in sketch from in Photoshop, and I'm thinking about how do I make a line? How do I make a box? How do I put this web page together? How do I size the image the right way? What I start to think about is just simply my idea because the tool has become transparent. That's why I've used these applications so long that you'll see me rarely ever touch a menu because I know all the hotkeys I've done it so long, that I'm just simply and purely creating. And so I think that for both sides, you need to think about that the answer I've given so far is true for the first part of your career. But we need to get to a place where we can recognize that there should be a another part of our career. And so that's why so often whenever I'm asked a question like this, I'll say that for me, I think that the thing that we need to recognize is the fact that both designers and engineers also need to start learning business. Because I think we live in a world right now, where technology and design are playing an unprecedented role. For the first time in my lifetime, at least, you're starting to see chief design officers, you're starting to see technology officers play a very, very different role than they ever have in the past, but to be successful there. And I think to also to truly be a leader in this space, you have to understand business, you have to understand how does the design How does the technology translate in a business environment into success? And I think that's the part where I see so many people fail is because they just get blinded by it almost stuck in this mindset, of purely just being the executioner of just being the designer or the engineer. They don't start to understand that whenever you go into a corporation, how do you become successful. And I think especially in a world where we're seeing it released, I've been seeing a lot of the really good talent I know is leaving the agency world, they're going client side, because for me, personally, I got to a place where I realized because of my work, that building a brand, building a team, building a product was a much more significant challenge, and for me a much more satisfying challenge than just building an ad for a product. And so as a result, I went client side. And as a result, I'm seeing more and more people do that. But the other thing that I'm seeing is I'm seeing more and more of the people whenever they do that fail, because they don't understand the business of it. They just understand the creative of it. And so I think this is the other part where I just think we all have to acknowledge and we all have to aspire to just simply play a bigger role. And to do that you have to start to learn business and to something beyond your craft. That's why most of the time if you look at the required reading that I get every month It's design magazines, but it's also Harvard Business Review, because I think both of those, for me are required reading for the place that I need to put my head and the things that I need to be thinking about. So I think that would be ultimately my answer is that yes, each side has to understand the other. But in the same place, I think each side also has to try to aspire to more and grow more in your career, because I just think that is the missing skill set that more and more people are going to really Chase. The days of the unicorn designer who can design and code will probably always be there. But I think that it's one of those things that I'll often joke about at work, that if I come into work every day, and I do something miraculous, I pull off a huge Feat. Well, by the second or third week that I'm doing that no longer is it miraculous. And it's just something where people just simply look at that and say, Oh, that's what I do when I come to work every day. The scale readjusts and all of a sudden, what's extraordinary, is something different. And so I think that we're in a place Right now where we aren't quite to that place where it's fully adjusted, but I think you're definitely starting to see the signs. And for those people who I think are aware enough, those people who are thoughtful enough, you need to start preparing for that you need to start looking at how you can grow beyond just simply your craft. So that was the first part of the email. And the second part and the second question reads, whatever I think of the singularity, the chat bots and metric messengers represent where everything is delivered in a uniform format, that the content of the conversation start to become what really drives the experience. And his question, is his platform application killing design? We probably could have another question there. But if he just created his own word and using platform application, but I think that the meaning basically is our the fact that so often the work that we're doing the design and the technology, the fact that it used to be where we would, we would almost build our own cities. If you wanted a community experience you would have to build it if you wanted social experience, you would have to build it Well, those days are gone. That now if you want to community experience, you go create one on Facebook or Snapchat or Twitter or Instagram or a host of any other hundreds of thousands of sites. So that those are the platforms that we have to get on top of and is that actually killing design? And here again, I think it's a little bit of a complicated answer. Because on the one hand, the thing that I would say is, I feel like pixel perfect design has been dead for quite a while, because there used to be the time where you'd go in, you'd pick your screen ratio, you would go in and you do your design, and you would know that every place wherever I put it is where the content would stay. That's not the case anymore, because we have moved on to two different types of designs. The first is to design for these pre existing cities, these pre existing platforms like Facebook. And I think that the thing that I would say there is, I don't think that it's really killing design in the traditional sense of the word. I think that it's just simply redefining it. The way that it's redefining it is that I think in a very real sense, what it's doing is it's, it's just making you focus on the content of your experience, because so much of the design isn't controlled by you anymore. And I think honestly, this has been true for quite a while because it used to be that if I was a fine artist, I could have a canvas and do a painting. But the reality was, I could never really control the room that it sat in. If I created an application, I wouldn't I could control that. But I could never really control how the phone looked. And so there's a little bit of depending on how existential, you want to get that we've never been able to control this. But I think that all along what it's really made us start to focus on is the content. And the interesting thing is going to be to see if we can actually do that because I think a very real way. I would bet that after Gutenberg invented the printing press, one of his best friends stood on a stage and talked about how content is king and how that is going to be you know, the biggest thing that everybody's gonna focus on now I've talked about this before I talked about it in the last episode where we talked about social media But I think this is why is because so often as we lose control of the design, and design is simply just relegated down to avatars and header images in those ways that it really does become about the content. And I think that design also has to become much more meaningful, I think it has to become much simpler, it has to communicate more easily with less control. And I think that's where I don't think it's killing design. I think it's changing it. And I think in that place, what it's doing is it's just simply giving us less control over the execution, which, as far as I'm concerned, as long as you have a strong brand and a clear message it'll overcome. Because again, and I've said this before, for me, technology is no better than a pencil. If you have nothing to write, and if you have nothing to say it's not going to communicate. So well yes, I it's some part of me does yearn for the days where I can control every pixel on a screen. The reality is, is that's just not what we do anymore. And I think that the other part of it is that we do also see especially in digital design, that this what we're doing has honestly changed because it Used to be, again, that we would do those pixel perfect designs. Well, we don't really do that anymore. What we do now is we really create much more kind of these dynamic design systems. Because we've had to come up with ways to adapt to all these different multiple form factors. And that was the reaction from the industry was things like responsive design for web, you'll see, if you look at Apple's architecture, trying to push people towards the ability to use these flexible frameworks in the way that their apps are done. We've seen the rise of written content has been replaced with dynamic data, and multilingual content and all these other things where suddenly, you have to design a system that you can try to almost design proof against the world. Because so often in my career, I create these systems and I turn them over to people. And almost the day that it launches, I've lost real control of the design, because other parts of the organization are suddenly now in control of that they're the ones that are putting the content in there. So some part of it is that it forces you to be a better designer to be a more systemic designer to be a different thinker about how can I still keep design and beauty and elegance and soul in my work at a time when I'm not the one who may be able to control all the factors that surround it. And so it's like I said, I don't think that it's killing it. I just think that it's changing it. But here again, I think that this is the era where our tools are letting us down. Because of the fact that since it is so hard for us to develop these systems, it's why you started to see so many prototypes in front end coders come into these teams. That that's the real challenge is because if we could get to a place where instead of going into something like sketch and having to set up three different artboards, one for mobile, one for tablet, one for desktop, that I could honestly just start to work with dynamic living systems in a very easy way that I think the majority of designers could do, because I know that there are ways you can do this. I know that there there's framer, and there's a ton of different technologies that you can use to do this, but I think We also have to admit that the learning curve on those is not insignificant. The learning curve is vastly higher than what you would see in sketch or something else like that. And so that the sooner that all of these companies who are working on this stuff, whether it's Bahamian coding, whether it's Adobe, whether it's anybody else, can start to deliver ways for us to not just simply put our screens onto these devices and flip through them, but can give us ways to start to design these these interactive and dynamic systems more elegantly. I think that's when we're going to start to see the next dawn or the next evolution of digital design because it tends to ebb and flow. We're so often you'll see that the systems get put in place that the technical underpinnings and then follows are the great designs but then usually the design start to get over bloated they start to get overworked and overdone and then the reaction is that a new system, a new structure will often come in to try to create a new form factor to try to counterbalance that. And I think it's this natural pendulum swing. That happens that keeps so much of design in check. I think that it it's just one of the places where we're still heavily on the structure side. And we haven't necessarily swung all the way back the other way. On the design side since, honestly, only in the last, I don't know what year or two, maybe a little bit more have, we started to get back to a place where we are almost in the early days of desktop publishing, where you could start to use the font you wanted, in most digital experiences. And so again, I think that the time is coming, and I think this is where I am. I'm very hopeful for the direction that I see going with something like sketch the ability to do plugins, the ability to pull in these things from different places. I'm very hopeful for what Adobe is doing with their XD software, where you can see that having in one working surface, the designing and the prototype, and you've seen them do demos of where the content can come in dynamically so that I can start to work with these constraints in real time and can start to design for them in more real time and to do it a little bit more elegantly in a little bit more beautifully than what I've ever done before. I think That the challenges and honestly, the reason why you see me testing out some of these things why you see me working as a partner, why you see me popping up in quotes for these companies is because I think it's on me to try to be one of the people who is helping these companies shape that future just speak for the design voice. And I would highly encourage anyone who is listening to do the same, to not just simply look at it as beta software or something like that, because I think that's far too short sighted, that if this is the case, where you are unhappy with the tools that are out there, if you're unhappy with the state of the industry, you have to be more than just a passive participant, you have to step up and try to talk to them, you have to step up to try to lead them to help them to do these things to get the tools where we need to go. And I think I'll very openly say that I've been working with Adobe for a very long time that I've seen some of the good starts that haven't necessarily panned out, but as I look at some of the people who were there and I look at some of the work that they're doing, I have a tremendous amount of hope. But I think that you open one hand and you hold something real on the other hand, you see which one gets full first But to me, this is why I choose to try to participate in to spend my time is because I do think that for me, at least I feel some responsibility to the industry that has given me so much to try to give back to try to move it forward. And I think that this is really the challenge is, how do we all do this? How do we all recognize the other side? How do we recognize how the two halves are so inextricably linked, how much we need each other? How much they're starting to blur, but how far we still have to go. But I think that we all need to be able to do it together. So I think that ultimately is the thing about the platform of vacation is I think that it happens in almost every medium and I think we'll continue to see it happen in a new way. And I'll do this podcast and in five or 10 years and talk about some new trend in technology and design and how we've gone through this cycle again. So I think that it like I said it's it's not killing it. It's just understanding where it is understanding that it's our responsibility to get out there and try to change it. And it's our ability again to to not be the cocoa has The ingredients and doesn't know how to use the stove. And so with that I will honestly thank Craig for what I felt like were two really good, really timely questions. Like I said, you don't get a job like his by being a slouch. For those of you who might have missed it and other shows, maybe we're aware of it. Now, if there's something you have to say about this, whether it's good, whether it's bad, shoot me an email, and you can send it to ask at Stephen Gates calm, because I know that this is something where I do want to hear from people and make sure that I'm talking back. If you like the show, I always definitely appreciate if you can go and leave a review on any of those platforms, because obviously that helps me talk to more people. Because I think that ultimately is what I'm trying to do here. The boys down and legal, as always want me to remind everybody that what I'm talking about here is just my own views. These don't represent any of my current or former employers. This is just me out here talking. And as always, I say thank you because I still know that time is the ultimate luxury and that I always am appreciative and humbled by the time That you give to me to listen to this show. So, until next time, stay crazy