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pikacheney posted:My design career recently took a turn towards UI design, which is something completely new to me. I realize this is a broad question, but what are some good resources for learning the basics? I've read "Don't Make Me Think" and enjoyed it but felt a lot of it was already obvious to me from my regular web design experience. I loved Don't Make Me Think and still use the principles today. I think you should also work on the processes of the user (if you're developing multi-page interfaces, or interfaces that will change based on user input). For brainstorming and working through the user's steps, go get some software called FREEMIND. It's free and it's the bomb. Really all it is is creative/brainstorming software, but once you've developed your mindmap, it can be exported as css/html which will help you develop your FRD (Functional Requirements Document). In fact - let's talk about that for a sec. The FRD is the part I hated the most. You spend 3 months developing a user interface, and then you had to document every single piece of the interface for the java developers so they'd understand what each field does etc. It's necessary as much as it's a pain in the rear end. Another thing about UI Design is that it's very similar to Information Design - so go check that out in your research... it's sort of the same thing - designing things to be used the way people expect them to be used. Congratulations. When I got my job, at first I thought I would hate it since I was a graphic designer and the new job entailed so much programming, but in the end, it's made me a much more valuable member of the team because I can design AND program. (worth lots more bling bling).
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Dec 30, 2007 01:09
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| # ¿ May 3, 2024 22:57 |
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Tales Of Interviewing for a Designer I recently went from designer to manager of my department, having to hire my own replacement as well as hiring another graphic artist. After reading a lot of questions in here about upcoming interviews and what is expected to get better money, I figured I'd share what I recently learned. Money I'm starting with this one first because that's the BIG question. After the company has decided to hire you, they take the salary range ($50,000 - $70,000 for instance) and consider how quickly you will be into your position working smoothly and productively. So how do we determine that? Experience in that field. This one is a biggie since graphic designers can work in drat-near any field. If you've spent the past 5 years designing print ads, even if they're the bomb, it will still take awhile to get you up to speed designing web sites. Education vs. Experience Which one gets you the job? Me personally, I'd take a good portfolio and 4 years experience over a great portfolio fresh out of 4 years in art school. Unless the graduate had a mind-blowing portfolio. Why? Because art students lack real-world knowledge. They've spent 4 years working in a vacuum, developing fantastic designs without a real budget, without the constraints of a real office. I've seen it time and time again - a great art student comes up with un-workable designs. They don't have the social graces of an office environment. It sucks, but that's the truth. I would say start freelancing right now while you're in school. Go work in an office somewhere somehow. When I see a portfolio that contains only school assignments, the possibility of hiring that person drops a LOT. If they had just one or two real-world pieces from a paying client, it would improve their hire-ability because I can see that they can design great things, but they can also design within real client constraints. When I was in design school, they never touched on creative guidelines of a company. Monster.com has a 24-page book on how to design online ads for their company. 4 pages alone on logo placement. Same with AT&T, Lincoln-Mercury - ANY national company with a poo poo-ton of money invested in branding will insist that you never run their logo over certain colors, it has to be X picas/pixels from any other element, etc. Art students never seem to grasp that kind of thing too well. So how can you get experience designing stuff for large corporations like that? I have no clue. Fake it. But that kind of stuff is necessary... go ahead, make the amazing full-color 2-page spread ads for pretend chocolate bars, but also design some quarter-page black and white ads for Wendy's or Target, and make it look as much like any other Target ad as possible. The hiring person (me) wants to see how creative you can be, but we also want to see how well you can stay inside the lines when it's necessary. Suit? Jeans? Take out my nose ring? Shave my goatee? These are up to you. But know your prospective employer and dress accordingly. If you're going for a corporation design department, wear a suit, lose the face metal and shave the facial hair. You can always bring all of those things back once you get the job. I did. I put my earrings in 2 weeks after I started at weather.com. Sure, that's a minor thing these days but it STILL might have affected their decision to hire me if I was up against Johnny Teamplayer. Because in the end, that's what we're all looking for. A team player who can fall into step as quickly and painlessly as possible. I don't care if you can paint ciaroscuro and watercolors and do murals or carve statues out of rice kernels. Those are interesting things, but in the end, if it's between you and one other person who is just as qualified, just as creative, just as interesting - in the end, the final decision comes down to "will this person be a good fit?" And in the design world, that has very little to do with education. If you have degree, it just doesn't matter like it would in accounting or architecture. I want somebody who is creative and has experience in my field already. I hope this doesn't come off as a rant or a snobbish post. I remember every design interview I've been on, and I ALWAYS wondered what the gently caress were they looking for, what's the secret handshake to get the drat job. I don't know if I really answered that question in this post, but I hope I helped a little bit.
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Dec 30, 2007 01:45
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IntoTheNihil posted:Quite simply, i'm 17 and am interested in making a career out of graphic design. I'm decent at photoshop and fairly well off with art. What do I need to do schooling/job-wise to get my feet wet? The best advice I got when I started out was to open up the nearest magazine to any page and recreate the ads on that page. Maybe not the exact same photos or fonts, but start out learning design by copying the basic layouts of ads that are right in front of you. That will teach you about curves lines shapes, font sizes, weight, leading the eye through an ad, how to draw attention to the most important thing in an ad, etc. And as a bonus, the more of these you design, the more you'll be able to put into your portfolio - just be sure to tell them that you were copying somebody else's ad to learn how to use the application, etc. I got my first design job (a nightclub) by copying their ad out of the local paper. That's all I had for a portfolio was their ad. Which of course was their biggest question - "can you design our ad for us every week along with all the other stuff". As soon as I showed them the ad, I was in.
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Dec 30, 2007 01:53
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Deep Hurting posted:Okay, well, I'm already graduated and I need a job. How am I supposed to get professional experience if nobody will hire me because I don't have professional experience? It's a tough one. But like I said - my first job - all I did was copy their existing ad but just change the fonts and then add a little bit of my own thing to it... the point is, I made it very easy for them to imagine me doing that kind of work. Remove as much guesswork for your applicant. If you're applying to Nike, include some REAL SHOE ads, even if you're just mocking them up. The interviewer won't wonder if you really worked for them - you can say "I just threw something together for this intervew". In fact, the last person I hired did this. Coming from print design to flash/html, she didn't have any flash work in her portfolio, so she built an ad just to run on weather.com. I did the same thing when I interviewed for them 6 years ago... they need to see proof of concept - proof that you can walk in the door and start working.
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Jan 5, 2008 01:16
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Deep Hurting posted:Does my portfolio not show this? Your "BRIEF" and "VIEW PROJECT" buttons are only the text. Put a transparent button over the text to increase the clickable area. You don't have to increase the text of the buttons, just make it easier to click them. I know it may seem like little things to you, but those are the big giveaways that it'll take more time getting you up to speed. On your indie expo piece - change the button's actions so the information area doesn't disappear as soon as I mouse away. Leave it up until the next link is moused over... it's frustrating because the mouse area is so tiny, if my mouse moves away a little bit, the info area disappears. Visually, your work is awesome. Technically, you're missing some things that tells me you didn't do any of these with a paying client. On your silent movie, give a note that they're going to be downloading a movie file. Same with the tools movie as well. Up until then, "view project" means "open a website"... the quickest fix is to build a flash movie player, so it'll pop up a site that plays the movie instead of making me download the movie. These may seem like nitpicky things, but when I've got 10 submissions and I'm trying to figure out who to bring in for an interview, especially if I've been interviewing for weeks already, I'm going to start seeing past the design and scrutinizing the technical parts. Unless you're positioning yourself as a concept artist and don't plan to do any flash design on your own, you need to address these things... FIRST OF ALL, get rid of that "Click here to activate" message. Like I said - your design work is great, but you're missing the little things that really matter when comparing your work to somebody who's been working for even two years in the workplace. quickie edit: most of my suggestions are programming/technical issues and a lot of flash artists will declare "but I'm a designer, let somebody else do the code!" but these days, I think there are very few places that hire a flash designer without expecting them to know a little bit of code -- just for fixing things like these. If you want help with those fixes just ask. magnificent7 fucked around with this message at 14:58 on Jan 5, 2008 |
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Jan 5, 2008 14:53
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Deep Hurting posted:Why? How is clicking anyplace to bring up a menu any different than clicking a specific link that says "menu," other than giving the end user more freedom of movement (which would seem like a plus, from a usability standpoint)?  No no - my comment was about something before even THAT. On a PC, in IE, when you hover over your page before doing anything, a message pops up saying "Press spacebar or enter to activate and use this control". And it's happening on any of your other sites that have just a flash file embedded. And anything interactive on your site won't work until I click on the flash ares first (which btw is surrounded with an ugly grey line as well). This happened thanks to a lawsuit between MS and Eolas - some company that lays claim to the embed tag or some nonsense. You now have to have an external javascript file embed the flash movie for you. It blows, but it's necessary. quote:Maybe I should make the hot area for each one a little bigger, but the hot area is certainly not just the text. Unless you and I are talking about two different things, which is possible. quote:(indie expo information) I'm not entirely sure what you mean by this. Which area are you talking about? quote:{the movie isn't embedded in a flash file) IMO, those should just be integrated directly into the portal instead of opening a new window, via that thing loads an external flv or something. Which I think is what you're saying I should do, but I'm not sure.
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Jan 7, 2008 18:43
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I think the wide-open interface is a great idea but a horrible execution. But to set this up - I spent 4 years as a user-interface designer, so I tend to focus on "how easy is it to find what I need?" more than "how cool is this!!" It also kills any impact you might want to achieve when they first see your site. All that's there is essentially the same as a splash page. Since those are frowned upon these days, you're screaming "hey! I love 2002! Just can't let it go! nope!" - just VISUALLY. Interacting with the site reveals that it's more than that, but visually, all you see is a logo and a sentence saying "click to..." and BAM you've jumped back 5 years. But really - I'm making a mountain out of a molehill. But you asked why hasn't anybody called you for interviews - I'm just trying to point out what I see compared to some other sites I saw. But to be fair - the people I ended up hiring, the website design wasn't really anything outstanding. If I were you, I would try to get some more real-world completed pieces in there, fewer comps. Even if it's just trading out logos for real businesses and filler text with real text.
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Jan 8, 2008 01:17
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Deep Hurting posted:So if I'm reading you right, it sounds like what you're saying is I need to come up with a different (maybe even only a slightly different) approach to express the same basic idea. Is that right? quote:Okay. In school they warned us about using copyrighted material in our portfolios, even in comps. I don't want to get sued (though I must admit there were a couple of times where I fudged the rules even so). Do I not need to be so worried about that at this point after all, long as it's not something I'm doing for some client or other (a no-duh situation, in other words)? What you're trying to do with your portfolio is two things - show them that you can design like a mother, and make it easy for them to imagine you working for them - because that's what's going through their head - "how would these designs work for my client/boss/product?" So make it easy for them, but point out that this is just a mockup, not the real thing.
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Jan 8, 2008 15:26
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CoffeeIsForClosers posted:Sorry to quote myself, but my question kinda got lost in the shuffle. If it seems too vague or general, it's because I really don't have the first clue about these things.
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Jan 8, 2008 15:30
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[warning this is maybe a bit of a rant] Here's some advice for you post-school-pre-big-world commercial artists. Before you do anything, ANYTHING, on a job, read the requirements and guidelines associated with that job - from the branding guidelines to the publisher's guidelines. I had an idiot at an agency turn over a flash ad yesterday with a framerate of 120 fps. What the hell. 24. That's the industry standard. Mark that in your mind right now. 24. And the guy started bitching at me, asking why didn't I TELL him there was a limit. It's published on our site under "advertising guidelines". It's also the industry standard set down by the IAB. Rock the boat and go out of the box in some areas, but if you can't adhere to the guidelines you'll end up doing a lot more work fixing things. Okay I'm done.
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Jan 25, 2008 14:19
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SO YOU WANT TO GO INTO ADVERTISING... (I thought about making this a separate thread, but this is definitely career advice). I've been in graphic design and advertising for 15 years, give or take. And I started late. I loved the challenge of reaching out to the common man with a message - every day - no - every design was a competition to be heard over the next designer. Get through the noise with a smarter message, a better layout, a cleaner concept - it was great. This was back in 92 and before internets. I was doing print design for a rock club that booked some of the biggest national acts. It was a great time to be doing design, and the freedoms bestowed upon me allowed me to make great rock posters and meet some of my heroes. And then I quit that and went into vacation travel advertising. And then I left that to go to school. While I was in design school, I did the layout for algebra books. That was hell. Fast-forward 12 years and here I am, a Creative Director of sorts for an in-house ad agency for weather.com, designing ads for external clients. Some campaigns have been fantastic and rewarding, but for the most part, I've been designing the things that people hate. So much so, that they'll blog about it, post screenshots of my work, and what the hell, my work even appears in major advertising websites. Always with complaints about the sad state of online advertising. Don't get me wrong. Some of the poo poo we throw up is crap. It's annoying, the client WANTS it to be annoying and isn't interested in less obnoxious solutions, until it's their ad thrown up on the article talking about the sad state of advertising. So. What I'm saying is, don't do it. Sure, there's the occasional ad campaign that wins high marks (http://halloween2-movie.com/banners/H2_mockBook_300x600.html) but for the most part, you're selling the new line of Sham-Wows, with the same pizzazz and bling that was on the last one, that's been mocked everywhere. Or you're being asked again to make something that's never been done before so they'll get more press about it. And they want it today. I've loved working in advertising. I've enjoyed taking the truly lovely ideas and at least rolling them in glitter. I've enjoyed educating our clients so that their ads aren't so much annoying as they are eye-catching. But there's days - months sometimes - where those opportunities don't exist. All you're doing is scooping up the poo poo, throwing it on the page. You want to tell yourself you're making the user experience better because, poo poo, you should have seen what they WANTED to run, but in the end, nobody gives a gently caress. All they care about is that you were a part of the team that's contributing to the whoring of the universe. Some folks can live with that. I mean, hell, I can. Tomorrow? It's a new day with new chances to roll new turds in glitter. But those really cool tv shows about ad agencies - the ones that pulled me in and told me being an ad-man was hip and cool and out there - gently caress those shows. Don't get me wrong - those agencies exist and I'd love to work for them... but even THEN, you're still talking to a client. And the client doesn't know poo poo about design, messaging, concepts. All they know is that the Snuggee looks best on their wife, so by god, put that bitch in the commercial or gently caress off. Oh - and - good luck with your career! Have fun! It's supposed to be zany and fun!
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Aug 26, 2009 22:01
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Defenestration posted:Stop putting up ads that pop up a big fruity gum picture over the drat weather map. you're weather.com not big fruity gum picture.com. http://adage.com/digital/article?article_id=138554 Pantothenate, you've picked the higher ground. As designers, we're typically at the mercy of the concept. As writers, you ARE the concept quite often, so you're driving the better ads. Unfortunately, there are very few groups out there who see the virtue to a wordsmith/ideaman. Take your writing skills and push to become a copywriter for an agency. gently caress newpapers. If you get a gig writing at a place like Tribal or Ogilvy, you'll be treated like a king... well... an idiot savant at the least. Unfortunately, when it's time for the axe to fall, everybody assumes they can write so you guys are the first to go. That Mentos ad? That's the straw for me. I've been pushing to develop ads that are intrusive but crafty, attention-getting, but not in a goddamn welcome-to-vegas kind of way. Along comes THAT client with THAT ad (and I promise, that ad is smaller than the original one). I went into great lengths to explain that the ad would annoy some people. And then I heard that they wanted to run it EVERY loving day for a month. Everyday. Do you know why the first comment after mine mentioned Mentos, and not Disney, or Ford, or Home Depot, or any of the other hundreds of advertisers who run ads just like that one? Because THAT ad slaps people in the face, day after day, over and over. So of COURSE it's become notorious. And honestly, I finally gave up the battle and assumed they wanted the notorious level of attention. I mean hell, they just got a screen shot of their ad on Ad Age. You can't BUY that kind of publicity! Well. You can if you have the budget to run your ad everyday on the homepage of weather.com. So, in a way, they did buy it. But now they're shocked and amazed that they've been called out and want me to tell them how I misled them. As designers/concept people, we are the whipping-boys of the advertising food chain. They want the creative now now now, and then if it fails, we're the ones going under the bus. Don't get me wrong - it's a very exciting industry but I'm loving ground down from episodes like this. And as a final disclaimer - I love LOVE the company. Prior to weather, I'd spent 2-3 years at every place that I designed. I've been with weather for 7 years and I do hope to stay there... I just gotta find a way to get past this kind of bullshit. I hope the agency that built that ad takes the time to read the article and think about it. It DOES make a good point. Sorry for the long-winded rant. There's days that I love the job. Hell, I invented a technology that has a patent. Hell yeah, I've got a patent. In advertising no less. But poo poo like this just baffles me.
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Aug 27, 2009 13:19
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qirex posted:Nobody gets paid to just relax and screw around with fun software all day though.
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Oct 23, 2009 06:19
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| # ¿ May 3, 2024 22:57 |
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Consider your career path in two separate parts - the software and the design. Learning the software will not give you much insight into the principles of design like color theory, directing the eye, etc. Lynda.com has some great segments on design principles (I'm halfway through their color theory class) - so you can get value from lynda.com, coupled with a 2-year school that focuses on creativity and core design principles.
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Nov 24, 2010 17:06
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