Tag: design

Mid-journey designer

About a week ago, good friend and head of design (of a leading edtech company), Hardik Pandya, advertised a position (on x/twitter) for a designer who needs to be comfortable using midjourney for design work for a new product.

This (quite obviously) got a lot of eyeballs and opinions – basically did what it was supposed to do.

At the root of this, this essentially validates something that I have been saying for a while. This whole generative AI thing (and I am not generalizing AI for this) is something that is going to enhance the productivity of specialists. Sure some mid level people who are either not competent enough or are not adapting fast enough might get affected. But the general rule of thumb is – if you are adapting yourself to latest tools, you should be fine. This is something that you should have anyway been doing all the while.

Let us take the example of designers in this specific context of the tweet.

  • A good designer’s competency is his way of framing a UI screen / graphic. The way the colour palette is chosen. The way copy enhances the visual. The gradients. The user interactions. The way by which you lead the users’ attention/flow. Once the designer has this nailed (or has the capability to iterate to nail), then its a question of using the right tool for the job.
  • A good designer has probably anyway evolved throughout their career – from photoshop to sketch to figma. This is based on my exposure to the tool chain for a limited use-case superset that I have been involved in. I am sure there are other tool chain evolutions that others can quote.
  • The latest is evolving to a way by which the designer describes all of the above by way of a good prompt. Most likely, the designer would get a 80% accurate outcome (or some similar high percentage), and then the designer iterates on a tool of choice to get the final outcome.
  • The better the designer is with generating the prompt, the quicker (and lesser number of iterations) they get to a high fidelity outcome close to the final. By the time, they are extremely efficient, they are probably close to 95% accurate through their prompting and just have to add finishing touches outside of genAI.
  • Do you see the parallel with extremely competent high productivity PMs <> designers combos?
  • If not, I will give you an example. At Travenues (early stage small team size startup), when I used to sit down with Das (Abhisek Das), our designer with whom I have worked with in the past, and work on a screen/graphic. I would keep rattling off my product thoughts, and Das’s hands flew on figma. It was magic watching the design come alive in front of me, as I iterated, gave feedback, gave more product thoughts, and it just evolved.
  • The expertise power shifts right with genAI. If the designer learns how to translate my PM thoughts into a design prompt, imagine the rate of productivity improvement.
  • Also, do notice here, that the designer cannot be replaced with the PM. The designer knows how to prompt way better, because he has the outcome in his mind, and he is getting the machine to churn that out as closely as possible to what he has in his mind.
  • The designers competency in this grows as he does this more and more (and the models become better and better).

Out of several fields getting impacted with GenAI, this is one of those where I can see first hand (in my mind and in real life recently), how this can practically increase productivity significantly. (The other one is of course code generation, which I am not that close to, but I see very similar parallels).

Tab Order in LinkedIn Post Commenting

I just commented on a post on LinkedIn. I found a minor UI nit. This kind of bugged me and in fact, made me lose data once. Let me elaborate.

When I want to comment on a post, I click inside the comment box and start typing. So far so good, and it looks like below.

taborder1

 

Now when you are done typing up the post, if you are a heavy keyboard user like me, on seeing the above order of the buttons, I would tab twice. You would expect one tab to get to the Cancel button and another to get to the Comment button.

But nope, that does not happen.

LinkedIn engineers, in the pursuit of productivity, I guess, have reversed the order. First tab goes to the Comment button and the second tab goes to the Cancel button.

And if you are a heavy (and impatient) keyboard user like me, you would have done a double tab and hit enter too. What does this do? Cancel all that you have typed and clears the comment slate. Woah! Yes, and thats how I lost my text comment. I had to type it all over again.

LinkedIn — please fix this !!

Knolling

knolling-bag

Knolling is the practice of organizing objects in parallel or at 90° angles. The term has been popularized by artist Tom Sachs; he picked it up from Andrew Kromelowwhen both were working at Frank Gehry’s furniture fabrication shop. Gehry was designing chairs for furniture company Knoll, and Kromelow would arrange unused tools in a manner similar to Knoll furniture. Hence, knolling.

[link]

PillPack – Another Great Ideo Idea

Another super idea from Ideo – the design firm. Basic premise is to help folks take their medicines correctly at the right dosage at the right times. Without having to sort through medicines by yourself and figure what to take in the morning, afternoon, or night, pillpack works with your prescription and gives you these small tearable pouches with the date and time printed on them. You just tear the appropriate pouch and take the pills in the pouch. Nice. Another real world problem solved.

(via fastcodesign)

Turn your window into a power outlet

Wow. Just read this in Fast.co. This is still in concept stage. But if someone ever makes this, I want one. Please Please. A mindbogglingly simple solution. And its portable too.

Just see these images below and wow yourself.

solar1 solar2 solar3 solar4

(click to enlarge)

Read the full article here.

All images from the same URL above.

Beautiful Branding – Puma

IMG-20130424-00401

Came across this beautiful bill board. You should note a few things – the shoe takes center stage. The story takes center stage. The Nature of Performance takes center stage. You get to see the name of the shoe only in a few tactfully hidden places – “Available at the PUMA Store”. And the ubiquitous puma jumping symbol. Beautiful. That is branding.

Not sure if Puma has always been like this, or they have been learning about Nike. Nike is even more manic about this. You would see a sportsman or sportswoman wearing the shoe and excelling. And the Nike swoosh symbol in the footnote. Some ads would not even have the word Nike. It would just have the Nike swoosh symbol.

nike

For more Nike ads, you should look here -> http://pinterest.com/pin/169870217167015064/

 

Feedly

Since the beloved Google Reader died, I have been using feedly. It is amazing to see how quickly Feedly has been innovating so that the Google Reader immigrants are appeased. The first set of fixes gave an option to make the feed view much denser – much like the Google Reader. This must have made most of the immigrants happy. The next fix was to get the feed list to the left of the page – again to make it look very much like Google reader.

The latest fix that hit me today is the one that I am going to scream in joy about. This is not quite to mimic google reader, but something that has just been designed so tastefully.

I have the feed to be displayed as tiles. I click on the tiles and I get the article, and the escape and it shrinks back to the tile. I scroll down the page looking at the interesting tiles. And when the stories are over, what do I get?

feedly

That blows my mind. Yes, I am done with the feed. Click on the big grey check mark, and it becomes a beautiful green for a second, and feedly marked all the stories in the feed as read. And moves on to the next feed. Just beautiful. Thanks feedly.