Journal

Here’s a brief outline of my workshop at the Data Summit on Friday 27th June. 3:30-4:15 — Shut your laptop and do some work Ben is Creative Director at import.io, he has been designing things longer than lots of people have been alive. His workshop will help you to focus on not building something right, but building the right thing. The first step is turning off your phone and computer. During the workshop you will be learning: The data behind doodling How to brainstorm How to rapid prototype How to set artificial constraints in order to help you turn your...

I’ve been writing one of the Five Simple Steps series of Pocket Guides. Working with Emma Boulton and the team, albeit very briefly so far, has been really enjoyable and they clearly have this publishing thing down. They provided clear contracts, writing styleguides and simple, lean, processes to follow through from writing, editing to publishing. I imagined writing a book would be a very enjoyable self-indulgent process, sketching out my ideas on post-its and typing away in the luxury of iA Writer using markdown to write huge passages of meaningful prose. The reality was I instantly transformed into a Woodey Allen-esque cliche,...

I recently changed job, moving from Head of UX at a large company of over 130 people to Creative Director at a Hoxton-based startup, import.io, with less than 20 in the entire team. There were a number of triggers leading to my decision to move. I’d been at my previous company for over three years and slowly found that working in a larger company gradually meant less accountability for what I was doing and I felt very under-challenged. It eventually seemed like I could have done an amazing job or an utterly appalling job and it would have made no difference...

Designers should know how to code… (yawn) Recently I tweeted “A [web] designer who doesn’t code is like a print designer who doesn’t understand bleed, creep, halftones, trapping and paper finishes.” It instantly got retweeted and quoted around the design community, for a few brief exhilarating moments of wonder my push notifications were going crazy. It generated some good responses, some negative comments and provoked some interaction with a few trolls. I lost a bunch of followers but I gained a lot more a few hours later. Of course, my opinion is that I firmly believe that a digital product...

API-first design allows you to deliver a consistent User Experience across multiple platforms. I’ve been thinking a lot about new processes of late. We’re constantly thinking design “content first” – but in digital product design, why not design API first? It’s like designing content in it’s rawest form and provides a perfect guide for future work. APIs and Information Architecture are closely linked, in some ways they’re the same. If you don’t understand one you can’t fully understand the other. In User Experience terms it gets your team thinking about actions, not interfaces and establishes a data driven product. In...