rowid,title,contents,year,author,author_slug,published,url,topic 311,Designing Imaginative Style Guides,"(Living) style guides and (atomic) patterns libraries are “all the rage,” as my dear old Nana would’ve said. If articles and conference talks are to be believed, making and using them has become incredibly popular. I think there are plenty of ways we can improve how style guides look and make them better at communicating design information to creatives without it getting in the way of information that technical people need. Guides to libraries of patterns Most of my consulting work and a good deal of my creative projects now involve designing style guides. I’ve amassed a huge collection of brand guidelines and identity manuals as well as, more recently, guides to libraries of patterns intended to help designers and developers make digital products and websites. Two pages from one of my Purposeful style guide packs. Designs © Stuff & Nonsense. “Style guide” is an umbrella term for several types of design documentation. Sometimes we’re referring to static style or visual identity guides, other times voice and tone. We might mean front-end code guidelines or component/pattern libraries. These all offer something different but more often than not they have something in common. They look ugly enough to have been designed by someone who enjoys configuring a router. OK, that was mean, not everyone’s going to think an unimaginative style guide design is a problem. After all, as long as a style guide contains information people need, how it looks shouldn’t matter, should it? Inspiring not encyclopaedic Well here’s the thing. Not everyone needs to take the same information away from a style guide. If you’re looking for markup and styles to code a ‘media’ component, you’re probably going to be the technical type, whereas if you need to understand the balance of sizes across a typographic hierarchy, you’re more likely to be a creative. What you need from a style guide is different. Sure, some people1 need rules: “Do this (responsive pattern)” or “don’t do that (auto-playing video.)” Those people probably also want facts: “Use this (hexadecimal value)” and not that inaccessible colour combination.” Style guides need to do more than list facts and rules. They should demonstrate a design, not just document its parts. The best style guides are inspiring not encyclopaedic. I’ll explain by showing how many style guides currently present information about colour. Colours communicate I’m sure you’ll agree that alongside typography, colour’s one of the most important ingredients in a design. Colour communicates personality, creates mood and is vital to an easily understandable interactive vocabulary. So you’d think that an average style guide would describe all this in any number of imaginative ways. Well, you’d be disappointed, because the most inspiring you’ll find looks like a collection of chips from a paint chart. Lonely Planet’s Rizzo does a great job of separating its Design Elements from UI Components, and while its ‘Click to copy’ colour values are a thoughtful touch, you’ll struggle to get a feeling for Lonely Planet’s design by looking at their colour chips. Lonely Planet’s Rizzo style guide. Lonely Planet approach is a common way to display colour information and it’s one that you’ll also find at Greenpeace, Sky, The Times and on countless more style guides. Greenpeace, Sky and The Times style guides. GOV.UK—not a website known for its creative flair—varies this approach by using circles, which I find strange as circles don’t feature anywhere else in its branding or design. On the plus side though, their designers have provided some context by categorising colours by usage such as text, links, backgrounds and more. GOV.UK style guide. Google’s Material Design offers an embarrassment of colours but most helpfully it also advises how to combine its primary and accent colours into usable palettes. Google’s Material Design. While the ability to copy colour values from a reference might be all a technical person needs, designers need to understand why particular colours were chosen as well as how to use them. Inspiration not documentation Few style guides offer any explanation and even less by way of inspiring examples. Most are extremely vague when they describe colour: “Use colour as a presentation element for either decorative purposes or to convey information.” The Government of Canada’s Web Experience Toolkit states, rather obviously. “Certain colors have inherent meaning for a large majority of users, although we recognize that cultural differences are plentiful.” Salesforce tell us, without actually mentioning any of those plentiful differences. I’m also unsure what makes the Draft U.S. Web Design Standards colours a “distinctly American palette” but it will have to work extremely hard to achieve its goal of communicating “warmth and trustworthiness” now. In Canada, “bold and vibrant” colours reflect Alberta’s “diverse landscape.” Adding more colours to their palette has made Adobe “rich, dynamic, and multi-dimensional” and at Skype, colours are “bold, colourful (obviously) and confident” although their style guide doesn’t actually provide information on how to use them. The University of Oxford, on the other hand, is much more helpful by explaining how and why to use their colours: “The (dark) Oxford blue is used primarily in general page furniture such as the backgrounds on the header and footer. This makes for a strong brand presence throughout the site. Because it features so strongly in these areas, it is not recommended to use it in large areas elsewhere. However it is used more sparingly in smaller elements such as in event date icons and search/filtering bars.” OpenTable style guide. The designers at OpenTable have cleverly considered how to explain the hierarchy of their brand colours by presenting them and their supporting colours in various size chips. It’s also obvious from OpenTable’s design which colours are primary, supporting, accent or neutral without them having to say so. Art directing style guides For the style guides I design for my clients, I go beyond simply documenting their colour palette and type styles and describe visually what these mean for them and their brand. I work to find distinctive ways to present colour to better represent the brand and also to inspire designers. For example, on a recent project for SunLife, I described their palette of colours and how to use them across a series of art directed pages that reflect the lively personality of the SunLife brand. Information about HEX and RGB values, Sass variables and when to use their colours for branding, interaction and messaging is all there, but in a format that can appeal to both creative and technical people. SunLife style guide. Designs © Stuff & Nonsense. Purposeful style guides If you want to improve how you present colour information in your style guides, there’s plenty you can do. For a start, you needn’t confine colour information to the palette page in your style guide. Find imaginative ways to display colour across several pages to show it in context with other parts of your design. Here are two CSS gradient filled ‘cover’ pages from my Purposeful style sheets. Colour impacts other elements too, including typography, so make sure you include colour information on those pages, and vice-versa. Purposeful. Designs © Stuff & Nonsense. A visual hierarchy can be easier to understand than labelling colours as ‘primary,’ ‘supporting,’ or ‘accent,’ so find creative ways to present that hierarchy. You might use panels of different sizes or arrange boxes on a modular grid to fill a page with colour. Don’t limit yourself to rectangular colour chips, use circles or other shapes created using only CSS. If irregular shapes are a part of your brand, fill SVG silhouettes with CSS and then wrap text around them using CSS shapes. Purposeful. Designs © Stuff & Nonsense. Summing up In many ways I’m as frustrated with style guide design as I am with the general state of design on the web. Style guides and pattern libraries needn’t be dull in order to be functional. In fact, they’re the perfect place for you to try out new ideas and technologies. There’s nowhere better to experiment with new properties like CSS Grid than on your style guide. The best style guide designs showcase new approaches and possibilities, and don’t simply document the old ones. Be as creative with your style guide designs as you are with any public-facing part of your website. Purposeful are HTML and CSS style guides templates designed to help you develop creative style guides and pattern libraries for your business or clients. Save time while impressing your clients by using easily customisable HTML and CSS files that have been designed and coded to the highest standards. Twenty pages covering all common style guide components including colour, typography, buttons, form elements, and tables, plus popular pattern library components. Purposeful style guides will be available to buy online in January. Boring people ↩",2016,Andy Clarke,andyclarke,2016-12-13T00:00:00+00:00,https://24ways.org/2016/designing-imaginative-style-guides/,design 67,What I Learned about Product Design This Year,"2015 was a humbling year for me. In September of 2014, I joined a tiny but established startup called SproutVideo as their third employee and first designer. The role interests me because it affords the opportunity to see how design can grow a solid product with a loyal user-base into something even better. The work I do now could also have a real impact on the brand and user experience of our product for years to come, which is a thrilling prospect in an industry where much of what I do feels small and temporary. I got in on the ground floor of something special: a small, dedicated, useful company that cares deeply about making video hosting effortless and rewarding for our users. I had (and still have) grand ideas for what thoughtful design can do for a product, and the smaller-scale product design work I’ve done or helped manage over the past few years gave me enough eager confidence to dive in head first. Readers who have experience redesigning complex existing products probably have a knowing smirk on their face right now. As I said, it’s been humbling. A year of focused product design, especially on the scale we are trying to achieve with our small team at SproutVideo, has taught me more than any projects in recent memory. I’d like to share a few of those lessons. Product design is very different from marketing design The majority of my recent work leading up to SproutVideo has been in marketing design. These projects are so fun because their aim is to communicate the value of the product in a compelling and memorable way. In order to achieve this goal, I spent a lot of time thinking about content strategy, responsive design, and how to create striking visuals that tell a story. These are all pursuits I love. Product design is a different beast. When designing a homepage, I can employ powerful imagery, wild gradients, and somewhat-quirky fonts. When I began redesigning the SproutVideo product, I wanted to draw on all the beautiful assets I’ve created for our marketing materials, but big gradients, textures, and display fonts made no sense in this new context. That’s because the product isn’t about us, and it isn’t about telling our story. Product design is about getting out of the way so people can do their job. The visual design is there to create a pleasant atmosphere for people to work in, and to help support the user experience. Learning to take “us” out of the equation took some work after years of creating gorgeous imagery and content for the sales-driven side of businesses. I’ve learned it’s very valuable to design both sides of the experience, because marketing and product design flex different muscles. If you’re currently in an environment where the two are separate, consider switching teams in 2016. Designing for product when you’ve mostly done marketing, or vice versa, will deepen your knowledge as a designer overall. You’ll face new unexpected challenges, which is the only way to grow. Product design can not start with what looks good on Dribbble I have an embarrassing confession: when I began the redesign, I had a secret goal of making something that would look gorgeous in my portfolio. I have a collection of product shots that I admire on Dribbble; examples of beautiful dashboards and widgets and UI elements that look good enough to frame. I wanted people to feel the same way about the final outcome of our redesign. Mistakenly, this was a factor in my initial work. I opened Photoshop and crafted pixel-perfect static buttons and form elements and color palettes that — when applied to our actual product — looked like a toddler beauty pageant. It added up to a lot of unusable shininess, noise, and silliness. I was disappointed; these elements seemed so lovely in isolation, but in context, they felt tacky and overblown. I realized: I’m not here to design the world’s most beautiful drop down menu. Good design has nothing to do with ego, but in my experience designers are, at least a little bit, secret divas. I’m no exception. I had to remind myself that I am not working in service of a bigger Dribbble following or to create the most Pinterest-ing work. My function is solely to serve the users — to make life a little better for the good people who keep my company in business. This meant letting go of pixel-level beauty to create something bigger and harder: a system of elements that work together in harmony in many contexts. The visual style exists to guide the users. When done well, it becomes a language that users understand, so when they encounter a new feature or have a new goal, they already feel comfortable navigating it. This meant stripping back my gorgeous animated menu into something that didn’t detract from important neighboring content, and could easily fit in other parts of the app. In order to know what visual style would support the users, I had to take a wider view of the product as a whole. Just accept that designing a great product – like many worthwhile pursuits – is initially laborious and messy Once I realized I couldn’t start by creating the most Dribbble-worthy thing, I knew I’d have to begin with the unglamorous, frustrating, but weirdly wonderful work of mapping out how the product’s content could better be structured. Since we’re redesigning an existing product, I assumed this would be fairly straightforward: the functionality was already in place, and my job was just to structure it in a more easily navigable way. I started by handing off a few wireframes of the key screens to the developer, and that’s when the questions began rolling in: “If we move this content into a modal, how will it affect this similar action here?” “What happens if they don’t add video tags, but they do add a description?” “What if the user has a title that is 500 characters long?” “What if they want their video to be private to some users, but accessible to others?”. How annoying (but really, fantastic) that people use our product in so many ways. Turns out, product design isn’t about laying out elements in the most ideal scenario for the user that’s most convenient for you. As product designers, we have to foresee every outcome, and anticipate every potential user need. Which brings me to another annoying epiphany: if you want to do it well, and account for every user, product design is so much more snarly and tangled than you’d expect going in. I began with a simple goal: to improve the experience on just one of our key product pages. However, every small change impacts every part of the product to some degree, and that impact has to be accounted for. Every decision is based on assumptions that have to be tested; I test my assumptions by observing users, talking to the team, wireframing, and prototyping. Many of my assumptions are wrong. There are days when it’s incredibly frustrating, because an elegant solution for users with one goal will complicate life for users with another goal. It’s vital to solve as many scenarios as possible, even though this is slow, sometimes mind-bending work. As a side bonus, wireframing and prototyping every potential state in a product is tedious, but your developers will thank you for it. It’s not their job to solve what happens when there’s an empty state, error, or edge case. Showing you’ve accounted for these scenarios will win a developer’s respect; failing to do so will frustrate them. When you’ve created and tested a system that supports user needs, it will be beautiful Remember what I said in the beginning about wanting to create a Dribbble-worthy product? When I stopped focusing on the visual details of the design (color, spacing, light and shadow, font choices) and focused instead on structuring the content to maximize usability and delight, a beautiful design began to emerge naturally. I began with grayscale, flat wireframes as a strategy to keep me from getting pulled into the visual style before the user experience was established. As I created a system of elements that worked in harmony, the visual style choices became obvious. Some buttons would need to be brighter and sit off the page to help the user spot important actions. Some elements would need line separators to create a hierarchy, where others could stand on their own as an emphasized piece of content. As the user experience took shape, the visual style emerged naturally to support it. The result is a product that feels beautiful to use, because I was thoughtful about the experience first. A big takeaway from this process has been that my assumptions will often be proven wrong. My assumptions about how to design a great product, and how users will interact with that product, have been tested and revised repeatedly. At SproutVideo we’re about to undertake the biggest test of our work; we’re going to launch a small part of the product redesign to our users. If I’ve learned anything, it’s that I will continue to be humbled by the ongoing effort of making the best product I can, which is a wonderful thing. Next year, I hope you all get to do work that takes you out of our comfort zone. Be regularly confounded and embarrassed by your wrong assumptions, learn from them, and come back and tell us what you learned in 2016.",2015,Meagan Fisher,meaganfisher,2015-12-14T00:00:00+00:00,https://24ways.org/2015/what-i-learned-about-product-design-this-year/,design 46,Responsive Enhancement,"24 ways has been going strong for ten years. That’s an aeon in internet timescales. Just think of all the changes we’ve seen in that time: the rise of Ajax, the explosion of mobile devices, the unrecognisably changed landscape of front-end tooling. Tools and technologies come and go, but one thing has remained constant for me over the past decade: progressive enhancement. Progressive enhancement isn’t a technology. It’s more like a way of thinking. Instead of thinking about the specifics of how a finished website might look, progressive enhancement encourages you to think about the fundamental meaning of what the website is providing. So instead of thinking of a website in terms of its ideal state in a modern browser on a nice widescreen device, progressive enhancement allows you to think about the core functionality in a more abstract way. Once you’ve figured out what the core functionality is – adding an item to a shopping cart, posting a message, sharing a photo – then you can enable that functionality in the simplest possible way. That usually means starting with good old-fashioned HTML. Links and forms are often all you need. Then, once you have the core functionality working in a basic way, you can start to enhance to make a progressively better experience for more modern browsers. The advantage of working this way isn’t just that your site will work in older browsers (albeit in a rudimentary way). It also ensures that if anything goes wrong in a modern browser, it won’t be catastrophic. There’s a common misconception that progressive enhancement means that you’ll spend your time dealing with older browsers, but in fact the opposite is true. Putting the basic functionality into place doesn’t take very long at all. And once you’ve done that, you’re free to spend all your time experimenting with the latest and greatest browser technologies, secure in the knowledge that even if they aren’t universally supported yet, that’s OK: you’ve already got your fallback in place. The key to thinking about web development this way is realising that there isn’t one final interface – there could be many, slightly different interfaces depending on the properties and capabilities of any particular user agent at any particular moment. And that’s OK. Websites do not need to look the same in every browser. Once you truly accept that, it’s an immensely liberating idea. Instead of spending your time trying to make websites look the same in wildly varying browsers, you can spend your time making sure that the core functionality of what you build works everywhere, while providing the best possible experience for more capable browsers. Allow me to demonstrate with a simple example: navigation. Step one: core functionality Let’s say we have a straightforward website about the twelve days of Christmas, with a page for each day. The core functionality is pretty clear: To read about any particular day. To browse from day to day. The first is easily satisfied by marking up the text with headings, paragraphs and all the usual structural HTML elements. The second is satisfied by providing a list of good ol’ hyperlinks. Now where’s the best place to position this navigation list? Personally, I’m a big fan of the jump-to-footer pattern. This puts the content first and the navigation second. At the top of the page there’s a link with an href attribute pointing to the fragment identifier for the navigation.