Journal notes

‘Talk me through it’

As a designer, it’s important that you’re able to share and articulate your visual design ideas with clients in an appropriate and meaningful way. It may not be a formal presentation or pitch, it could be sharing assets through Basecamp or a test URL and following up with a Skype call or additional notes. You should take this opportunity to ‘pitch’ your ideas with belief and conviction and talk confidently about what you’ve done and ensure it’s clear that you’ve made informed design decisions. When a client asks, be ready to answer the question ‘Talk me through it’.

If pitching or sharing your design ideas formally is part of your job or something you’re used to then story telling is a must and you may be more articulate than many, but a lot of designers work less formally with their clients, particularly freelancers. It’s so important to tell a story, say why you’ve made the decisions you have and enter thoughtful discussions about why your ideas look the way they do.

I’ve been through the initial design sharing process with clients many times and along the way I’ve developed an interesting little trick to inform my approach. In the early days I would often enter into discussion armed with a sense of ‘it just feels right’ but no discerning story to tell. That’s not to say my ideas were poorly judged, I just hadn’t ‘recorded’ my thought processes that informed my decisions. I was under prepared and couldn’t react to some of my clients’ questions.

So how do I explain my ideas to my clients? Perhaps a better question, initially, is ‘How do I explain my ideas to myself?’ If you can do that then you’ll have a much stronger story to tell your client.

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I hate the term ‘flat design’ and particularly referring to colours as ‘flat colours’. It just doesn’t make any sense to me, perhaps that’s just because I come from a print design background. But now it’s all over the internets, so it looks like we all have to live with it.

In 2011 Microsoft gave birth to the Windows Metro UI which is now called Windows 8 due to legal action taken against Microsoft for infringing on the Metro trademark by the German company Metro AG.

Remember Microsoft Zune? It was one of the first user interfaces to incorporate this new typographic led style, which then was subsequently used for Windows mobile and Windows 8 UI.

It seems to me that what I call ‘Metro UI style’ is now being referred to as flat design, which essentially is based around the principles of typographic Swiss graphic design which was developed in the 1950’s which emphasises cleanliness, readability, grid systems and objectivity, with a particular colour palette.

Apple have now ditched skeuomorphism, which mimics real objects as an interactive cue, in their latest operating system iOS 7 in favour of what is now coined flat design. Which means that Apple is no longer the leading pre-emptive design powerhouse it once was in terms of user interface design and they are now drafting behind Microsoft to some degree, which is something I thought would never ever happen.

I suppose that I can learn to live with the term ‘flat design’ but I still can’t stand the term ‘flat colour’ isn’t this just a particular colour palette choice by the designer? What’s the next trend? Perhaps it’s long shadow design.

Rant over. Let me know your thoughts.