Review by David Sherwin

The further I’ve progressed in my career as designer, the harder it’s become to share with others exactly what I do.

First, I managed layout at a magazine and bootstrapped a few websites in thrilling Adobe PageMill. Then, within a design studio, I was responsible for creating brands and annual reports—with little to no formal training to the otherwise. Add in a number of years in advertising and marketing, leaven it with a few more of user research and wireframing, and set to “Puree”. When I try to describe to my family what I do nowadays as an interaction designer, the confusion level continues to increase.

Now I don’t need to try and explain anymore. I can just send them a copy of Warren Berger’s extraordinarily well-written book, Glimmer: How Design Can Transform Your Life, Your Business, and Maybe Even the World (Amazon: US|CA|UK|DE).

This is the first book about the process of design as it’s practiced at its highest levels in our profession, written by an expert journalist for the layperson, that describes exactly how designers think about and view the world. It is the product of hundreds of interviews with today’s top designers, across all major disciplines of design, cross-referenced with deep reading into the texts that have informed the growth of our profession, then distilled into plain English that anyone can easily understand. Along the way, stories regarding OXO Good Grips, the One Laptop Per Child program, the Truth anti-smoking campaign, Bruce Mau’s Massive Change exhibit, Architecture for Humanity, Proctor & Gamble, TOMS Shoes, and many others are woven through the narrative, illustrating key points regarding design concepts, principles, and sustainability practices with illustrations and sketches. It also includes a good number of everyday people who came to the design profession late in life, after they had their first “glimmer” moment.

Berger’s goal for Glimmer, put forward in the introduction to the book, states it plain:

“…design is applicable to just about any challenge—and its principles are accessible to anyone. If we can gain a better understanding of the ways designers think and work, it may enable us to do what designers tend to do so well: to recognize that glimmer of potential around us and within us, and to build on those nascent possibilities as we set out fo design a better business or a better life.”

This book is jam-packed with strong material, so I’ll focus on a few key passages that piqued my attention.

What is design, really?

The book is structured around a series of principles that Berger drew from his interviews, as well as Bruce Mau’s An Incomplete Manifesto for Growth. (Bruce Mau is called out on the cover as a major contributor, and wrote a series of brief essays that are woven through the text.)

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The first principle, “Ask stupid questions,” is put to great effect in Berger applying his principles to the process he used in crafting the book, right down to asking the following stupid question: “What is design?” As Berger puts it, “the problem is not a lack of good working definitions, but rather an overabundance of them.”

We are also swimming upstream, against the more conventional definition of design as a function of visual and aesthetic appeal:

“In the business world, the word design has been almost synonymous with style. Until recently, designers were tasked with making products look better and creating eye-catching packaging and communications… But the problem, at least in the minds of some designers, was that ’style’ became a kind of ghetto for them.”

Berger then shares thinking from Donald Norman, Tim Brown from IDEO, and other design luminaries that counter folk wisdom about design as a discretely visual practice. It’s refreshing to see a writer call out on the carpet how we spend so much time describing the shape of our elephant-sized profession, rather than aiming for a shared understanding of what universal attributes inform our working methods.

Embracing ambiguity and complexity

Berger’s second principle is, “Jump fences.” When we are told that a problem has been unsolved, or seems impossible, our first thought should be, “Why?” After asking stupid questions, we can begin to formulate better answers. The more we live through this process, the more likely we are to succeed.

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Roger Martin, dean of the Rotman School of Management, calls this the upward spiral of solving problems, “wherein the more you do it, the more you can do it”:

“An experienced designer will look at an ‘impossible’ problem and his/her reaction… ‘will be, “Ah, I know this game. I’ve been in this situation before. It’s fine if there are no existing good answers out there, because my job is to design a better answer.” And they proceed with confidence from there.’”

But Martin also calls out here that a fundamental attribute of providing better answers is in embracing ambiguity and complexity:

“Most of us, Martin notes, try to simplify problems and make clear-cut choices; we strive to construct a single, clear ‘mental model’ when we’re thinking about a challenge and trying to envision changes and solutions. But a designer… is comfortable holding conflicting ideas in his/her head at the same time. ‘The designer lets a lot of different models float around in the mind at the same time. And they select parts and pieces from those existing models to create new and better models.’”

This gift of jumping fences—which allows us to provide insight through what John Thackara calls “smart recombinations”—is the most crucial tool in the designer’s arsenal.

Brand experience frameworks and Bluebeard the Pirate

One of my favorite passages in Glimmer regards how we, as designers, are asked to regularly describe what makes up a designed experience – the sum of all the interactions a person has with a company’s products, services, marketing, and so forth. After describing the Compelling Experience Framework, an in-depth research study took on by Doblin Inc. to attempt to describe the stages of a consumer experience, Berger shifts to a discussion he had with the designer Brian Collins, who avoids comlex-looking charts and graphs in describing how to envision a compelling experience:

“Just imagine yourself back in [the 1700s], sailing in a Spanish galleon on the Caribbean… you look out and notice another ship in the distance. When you peer through the microscope to get a better look at that ship, you see a flag flying. As it gets closer, you can make out what’s on the flag – a skull and crossbones. As soon as you see that symbol, you know exactly what kind of an experience is in store for you… [the pirate flag] was a brand promise… and the promise was: You’re f****d.”

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We can spend an inordinate amount of time describing what kind of experiences we want to design, but the actual impact of those experiences leads to how brands are actually manifested in the world. That is where they gain substance and meaning over time. We could call this: Less talk, more wow.

TTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTT

Another key point in Glimmer that was quite potent was a section entitled “How to remain ’stupid’ forever.”

It’s become a truism that in order to succeed in a design capacity, you need to be a T-shaped person. In Fast Company a few years ago, Tim Brown said that T-shaped people have

“a principal skill that describes the vertical leg of the T — they’re mechanical engineers or industrial designers. But they are so empathetic that they can branch out into other skills, such as anthropology, and do them as well. They are able to explore insights from many different perspectives and recognize patterns of behavior that point to a universal human need.”

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In Glimmer, discussions with Bruce Mau yielded this new analogy for the T-shaped life:

“The answer, Mau suggests, is to intentionally and constantly ‘…keep moving away from what you know.’ People tend to design their lives and careers so that they are usually on firm, familiar turf, intellectually speaking; they go with what they know… Mau, and many other designers, opt to go wide as well as deep… this is what makes designers T-shaped in their knowledge, though over time, their knowledge base becomes more like a series of T’s linked together.”

John Maeda concurs with this point of view, which for many designers is a struggle:

“It was the kind of thing where you start to wonder, ‘Am I an idiot. What’s going on?’… But [one of my teachers in Japan] explained that when you get older, the beauty of the ‘broad’ method is that you’ve built this great, grand, symmetrical heap, kind of like Mount Fuji, that is solid and cannot be moved. Whereas in the Western approach, the one thing you’ve made keeps going up and up, but it’s thin and fragile, and if one thing is wrong, the whole hill falls over.”

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I wish this book had existed when I graduated from college, as it would have helped me rationalize my curiosity.

These are just a few moments from Glimmer. I could write a book paraphrasing this book, and will now restrain myself from doing so.

Since so many different perspectives are shared throughout Glimmer, I could see everyone from design students to seasoned professionals learning something new by reviewing this book. As a practical philosophy for the role of design within and outside the confines of its oft-corporate context, Glimmer taps into the primary vein of where our profession is now, and where it’s heading in the future. Now go read it.

DRB Rating: 5/5  

You can buy Glimmer: How Design Can Transform Your Life, Your Business, and Maybe Even the World from Amazon (US|CA|UK|DE) or The Designer’s Review of Books store.

About the Reviewer

David Sherwin is Senior Interaction Designer at frog design in Seattle and maintains the blog ChangeOrder: Business + Process of Design. His first book, on coming up with better design ideas faster, will be released by HOW Design Press in November 2010.

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My thanks to An Event Apart San Francisco for sponsoring The Designer’s Review of Books again through October.

The list of speakers is long, but Dave Shea’s They’re Letting Designers Code Now? and Facebook’s Product Design Manager Julie Zhuo on Design Lessons From 300 Million look particularly provocative.

If you’d like to sponsor The Designer’s Review of Books, please get in touch. We’ll love you for it and send a few books your way too.

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Review by Patrick Holt

Because the design industry is populated not only by the well-educated, but also by the self-taught and the self-tutored-after-a-mediocre-education (I fall into the latter), it’s likely that many of us missed an opportunity to read Philip Meggs’ A History of Graphic Design (Amazon: US|CA|UK
|DE), now in its fourth edition, during our formative years. And since textbooks rarely find a place on the bookshelf after one leaves school or if one never attended in the first place, it’s also likely that few designers have sought this work out during their professional lives.

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The book begins at the beginning, as literally as can be interpreted: one of the first images is of the more than 10,000-year-old cave paintings at Lascaux, France. Philip Meggs and Alston Purvis then work their way to the near-present through global innovations in symbolic representation, the creation and development of alphabetic systems, technologies that allow the recording and dissemination of information, and the aesthetic developments that accompany them.

Although it is a history of graphic design, works from other visual arts are addressed whenever relevant, such as the invention and refinement of photography and the influence of modernist painting. And the authors, to their vast credit, define graphic design broadly enough so to include typography, illustration, information design/architecture, environmental design, and motion graphics, providing thorough consideration of each while many books covering graphic design treat these “other” areas as related but less important topics. Perhaps this book should have been called Meggs’ History of the Graphic Arts. Perhaps an industry-wide dialogue on the definition of terms is in order.

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Meggs and Purvis enliven their historical narrative with interesting and entertaining micro-biographies of the figures involved and descriptions of the broader historical contexts that influence and are influenced by graphic design. He quotes a child psychologist’s criticism that early children’s book illustrator Kate Greenaway created “a false and degenerate race of children in art” and laments the mysterious disappearance of the young and talented designer Ethel Reed in 1888. Particularly interesting are cases where design, history, ideology, and personality intersect, as with Jan Tschichold’s change of heart about his New Typography:

“His 1928 book, Die Neue Typographie, vigorously advocated [his] new ideas. Disgusted with ‘degenerate typefaces and arrangements,’ he sought to wipe the slate clean and find a new asymmetrical typography to express the spirit, life, and visual sensibility of the day…

“In March 1933, armed Nazis entered Tschichold’s flat in Munich and arrested him and his wife. Accused of being a ‘Cultural Bolshevik’ and creating ‘un-German’ typography, he was denied his teaching position in Munich… [After moving to] Switzerland, Tschichold began to turn away from the new typography and use roman, Egyptian, and script styles in his design…

“In 1946 he wrote that the new typography’s ‘impatient attitude conforms to the German bent for the absolute, and its military will to regulate and its claim to absolute power reflect those fearful components of the German character [that] set loose Hitler’s power and the Second World War.’”

As with most historical overviews, recent history is an awkward thing to discuss. Young voices in design are given as much respect as they deserve; however, one gets the feeling that, though the selected designers may be capable and exemplary, future editions may or may not include any given individual in favor of a more appropriate choice. It is absolutely forgivable not to be clairvoyant, and we should in fact be thankful that the authors forego the hyperventilated tone so prevalent in other books announcing today’s best this or that.

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Web design and Internet-oriented graphic arts are introduced with skillful brevity (they may represent the same philosophical conundrum of graffiti and the like), but the appropriateness of selected examples is doubtful at best. It is likely that, since the newest website represented in the book is from 1996, there has to have been some more recent example that illustrates a given concept more effectively.

Some gaps I wish were addressed more thoroughly include the very brief mention of the posters of the WPA, especially curious considering the book’s emphasis on posters. It could also address more “unofficial” work, including graffiti, posters and flyers for small music venues, and worldwide vernacular design, though these areas might represent a philosophical shift too dramatic to account for. (Another proposal, then: a people’s history of graphic design?) Still, Meggs stated in Heller & Pettit’s Design Dialogues that the book is meant to provide “a basic conceptual overview of the field, a first step in an exploration of design history”, and in this it is entirely successful.

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I sought out Meggs’ History of Graphic Design as a first step on the road toward doing good design rather than just good-enough design. Whether I achieve that goal remains to be seen, but reading this work will no doubt reward any designer with a greater understanding of and appreciation for the rich historical and social contexts of his or her own contemporary work.

DRB Rating: 4.5/5  

Buy Meggs’ History of Graphic Design on Amazon (US|CA
|UK
|DE) or The Designer’s Review of Books store.

About the Reviewer

Patrick Holt is a sometimes-designer/artist and a graduate of the University of North Carolina’s School of Information and Library Science. His master’s thesis discusses the information age as it is portrayed in science fiction.

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I have been wanting to write the review of Daniel Eatock’s book, Imprint, (Amazon: US | CA| UK | DE) for some time. It has lain on my desk for weeks and I have delved into it over an over, but the truth is that I have struggled to really work out how to describe it. Martin Soames does a good job in Eye magazine by using Eatock’s list-making obsessiveness to describe Eatock and the book itself, but he also barely scratches the surface of its complexity. (Incidentally, there is a good piece on Eatock in the current issue of Eye).

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Imprint is a collection of Eatock’s works spanning 1975–2007. Yet it is a book that could only have really existed in our age of networked, participatory media. There is a distinctly web and blogger feel to the collection of oddities grouped together by Eatock’s editorial eye. A large part of the content is made up of Thank You Photographs, a section of Eatock’s web site the exhibits pictures his readers have sent to him. These are more than just fan mail – the participants are executing the visual and editorial algorithms that Eatock has set up through his work. The results could happily be tagged and act in much the same way as a cleverly thought-out Flickr pool, but his collection of them somehow adds an editorial process that a database lacks.

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Opening with a long and entertaining interview with Eatock and interspersed with insightful captions, Imprint is a glimpse into a remarkable mind. Clearly Eatock is obsessive, whether listing ideas, facts, images or seeing an idea through to its extreme end, but there is such a sharp intelligence to the obsessiveness that it is hard not to be infected by it. No wonder the participatory projects do so well.

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Eatock studied at Ravensbourne College of Design and Communication and later at the Royal College of Art, but has long harboured a desire to dematerialize the graphic process, “exploring objectivity, systems, and concepts, and remove as many aesthetic decisions from the design process as possible”. He describes his days a high school when a schoolmate, Daniel Forster, was making “amazing pen drawings on the beach”.

“I am competitive, and since I knew I could not compete with Dan’s drawing ability, I understood that to be happy, I had to invent a creative way around the problem of making things look beautiful. So while Dan was drawing perfect renderings of the beach, I drew two straight lines on a page, dividing it into thirds. I wrote ’sky’ in the top third, ’sea’ in the second, and ’sand’ in the bottom third.

“I realized in that instance that the craft and skill of drawing can be overcome with an idea. This simple realization has changed the way I approach almost everything I make. If something does not come naturally, I search out an alternative way to respond to the problem.”

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Of course, the objectivity Eatock tries to bring into the work ends up carrying his signature way of seeing the world and it is this that makes his work so interesting. It is full of circularities (Eatock enjoys self-referential scenes and objects as well as drawing circles) and systems, inquiry and double-takes. Imprint is at times hilarious and others a confirmation that a simple idea, well-executed or, indeed, executed at all, has enormous potency. “My obsession,” he says, “is to find the sense in nonsense and nonsense in sense.”

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Despite the underlying schemes, lists and processes that drive his work (and life, it seems), there remains something slippery about Imprint. Its constant self-and cross-referencing works across its text, images and layout and I found myself continually flipping back and forth trying to grasp the big picture, but it remains infuriating just out of reach. Reading it is like surfing through StumbleUpon, but with a great deal more beauty. My guess is that Eatock has the whole thing somehow clearly stored in his quite remarkable brain – a human Google cache tracking visual relationships in the everyday world.

Despite being difficult to describe, Imprint makes so much sense when it is in your hands that it has become one of my favourite books of inspiration and reference.

DRB Rating: 5/5  

Imprint is published by Princeton Architectural Press (look for the video of Eatock putting his thumbprint on every book spine). If you would like to support The Designer’s Review of Books you can buy it from Amazon (US | CA| UK | DE) or The Designer’s Review of Books store.

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Review by Daniel Gray

Within minutes of picking up Roy R. Behren’s Camoupedia (Amazon link), I was regurgitating fascinating bits of camouflage-related trivia at anyone who would listen, like some kind of third-rate Stephen Fry. Did you know that in 1918, Walt Disney drove an ambulance for the Red Cross, covered not with a standard camouflage design but with early Disney cartoons? Or that snipers in WWII would hide inside fake horse carcasses? How about the fact that there is a specific technique for painting sweet potatoes to render them virtually invisible?

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Before I got into it, I was half expecting a Jane’s Reference-like book, full to the brim with painstakingly catalogued military markings (something that the superglue-fingered Airfixkid in me would have treasured), but its scope is far broader than that. Encompassing everything from Picasso to the evolution of mice, this is an essential reference for anyone interested in the subject matter and its broader context.

“By far the most famous eyewitness account of modern camouflage is reported in Gertrude Stein’s autobiography, which she impishly mistitled The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas. During the first winter of the Great War, as she and Pablo Picasso were walking at night on the Boulevard Raspail, ‘All of a sudden down the street came some big cannon, the first any of us had seen painted, that is camouflaged. Pablo stopped, he was spellbound. ‘C’est onus qui avons fait ca,’ he said, ‘it is we who have created that.’”

A lot of the entries are biographical entries of key camoufleurs (the artists and officers responsible for the techniques), which in themselves are quite dry. However, the tapestry of these characters comes to life when you come across an entry about how their work has been adopted by the fashion world or incorporated into a audacious method for hiding entire munitions factories. Behrens clearly knows his stuff, and is generous with his references to other resources. As well as the encyclopedic structure. there’s a comprehensive bibliography, index and timeline (which goes all the way back to Darwin’s theory of natural selection).

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Of course, as fascinating as the text is, when you pick up a book about camouflage, you want pictures. Big pictures. Big colour pictures. This is where Camoupedia’s format lets the subject-matter down a little. Where the reproduced pictures are simple line-work, such as the numerous drawings submitted for bizarre patent applications, the black-and-white print works fine. However, when you’re looking at a picture of a brightly-coloured aircraft or an animal blending in to its background, the lack of colour robs it of any impact. Ironically, the camouflage on display is so good, at times you can’t actually see it. I’m sure the author would have loved to have had a full-colour coffee table tome, so it is not so much a criticism of his work, but of the budgetary constraints of a book that is unlikely to shift huge numbers and whose source material was probably black and white in any case.

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That said, at least there is no shortage of pictures. A lot of attention is paid to dazzle-painted camouflage – the technique of using brightly coloured, high contrast disruptive shapes on a ship’s hull, not as a means to hide it, but to force enemy U-boats into miscalculating its distance, speed and trajectory. Despite the lack of colour, the numerous photographs and technical drawings on display here contradict the common image of steel-grey WWII warships, instead revealing them to be garish and visually arresting, a style that rightfully garnered comparisons to the cubist movement. For me, looking at these designs led to a far-too-long stint on Google to look for bigger and better pictures, now armed with knowledge of the history behind them.

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On its own, this book is good – you learn some interesting things, you get a feel for the cultural context of the form – but Camoupedia’s real strength is as a starting point from which to explore one of the numerous intriguing avenues it sends you down. The breadth of the information contained in this book demonstrates how design can sit comfortably in the intersection of topics as diverse as nature, science, art and warfare. That such an encyclopedia still has a place in the modern I’ll-just-look-it-up-on-Wikipedia world is testament to the authority of Behrens’ research and his contagious love for the subject.

DRB Rating: 3.5/5  

Camoupedia is published by Bobolink Books, Amazon US or The Designer’s Review of Books store.

About the Reviewer

Daniel Gray is a graphic designer living and working in York. He also writes the blog Binky the doormat and manages the Flickr group The Face (1980-2004)

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I did a bit of moonlighting for Core77’s Hack2Work event, which is a collection of essential tips and tricks for the design professional. My contribution is a fairly arbitrary selection of 19 Books Every Design Professional Should Own.

The list could be much, much longer (and we will be reviewing the new Lawrence King publication, Bibliographics: 100 Classic Graphic Design Books, soon) but I wanted to make a selection of 10 essentials plus a few oddballs thrown in.

Slot number 20 is for your own suggestion, so go take a look and leave a comment!

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Review by Andrew Shea

We all want to know what our ancestors were like 50, 100 or even 200 years ago. Rafael Goldchain’s new book, I Am My Family: Photographic Memories and Fictions (Amazon: US|CA|UK|DE), answers these questions by dressing up as his deceased relatives and taking black and white photographs that represent his scattered and forgotten family history.

Martha Langford, an independent curator, introduces the book with an engaging essay that underscores Goldchain’s driving desire to connect his newborn son with the memory, imagination and identity of his Jewish ancestry:

“Each of these characters is appealing through the photographer for remembrance. The surprising thing is that some of these never-to-be-forgotten were never in fact born, or, if they were, may not have been related to Goldchain. I Am My Family is as much about imagining as remembering, though this kind of imagining is remembering…[it] can be read as an extended search for identity, this time embodied (literally) in those who gave him life.”

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Goldchain openly admits that he had to imagine much of his family history. In fact, some of the photographs have little or no reference to his ancestors but were inspired by a family story or memory. His Artist Statement follows Langford’s essay and he talks about being disconnected from his family history (his family fled Poland for Chile during the Nazi occupation and he has since moved to Mexico, Israel and now Canada), the photographic genre of self-portraiture and his process. Goldchain also points out the ghostly connotations that result from “emulating the look of early twentieth-century formal family-portrait photographs”:

“…in each of these portraits there are at least two main subjects: the ancestor being reenacted, and myself as the performer. These two subjects hover like ghosts in the photo, forcing the viewer to move between them, never able to see both at once.”

The fifty-four self-portraits come next. The first plate depicts Goldchain’s grandfather as a schoolboy and, like many of the photographs, is accompanied by a written description. This is Goldchain’s only performance as a child and it shows his willingness to fictionalize the ancestors he plays. In fact, there are no photos of his grandfather as a schoolboy. Goldchain candidly reveals which details are authentic in each photograph and which are fabrication or imitation. The most striking example in this photograph is the eagle emblem on the boy’s hat that was downloaded from the internet and Photoshopped onto the pin after the photograph was taken.

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There are only a few self-portraits where you struggle to see traces of Goldchain. Even when depicting the wrinkled age of his heavily accessorized ancestors, the personality of Goldchain’s eyes reveals his identity. As he puts it:

“…the ghostly figures of my ancestors emerge into visibility while simultaneously concealing themselves behind my own likeness and behind the conventions of the photographic portrait.”

It is hard to page through these images and not think of other self-portraiture photographers like Nikki Lee, who transforms herself into people that she met on the street. More famously, Cindy Sherman photographed herself in portraying actresses who belong in foreign films, B-movies, and film noir. Both of these photographers mask their identify in self-portraits but neither of them focus on such personal subject matter. Goldchain reinvents this photographic sub-genre by making it his mission to “…stage familial ghosts while simultaneously emphasizing and mourning their loss.”

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Goldchain’s portrayal of his paternal grandmother is one of my favorites. He closely approximates his grandmother’s hair, her listless expression and her striped blouse that is pinned with a broach. He convincingly crosses the gender except for a few nuanced details in her hair, dress and lighting. He also describes his process in the fourth section of the book, where you can see a photograph of his grandmother and his sketches.

The extensive research into his family tree is the focus of the fourth part of the book. This section clues the reader into Goldchain’s transformation into each character using makeup, wigs, lighting and the assistance of a small crew. As a performer, he plays the part of musicians, soldiers, rabbis and radio personalities that were bald, bearded, fat or gaunt.

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The book is beautifully designed. Each photograph has room to breath and is poetically described. Goldchain succeeds in making us interested in his family history. More important to the graphic design community is Goldchain’s total authorship of his personal project. This is not just a book of photos. Goldchain designed this project from his research into each character and his performance and authorship shows that he is entirely in control.

When I started to study photography, a friend told that every picture I ever take will be a self-portrait. I took the comment to be a needless distraction but I Am My Family embraces the adage and helps us to imagine ourselves in the faces of our family history.

I Am My Family: Photographic Memories and Fictions
by Rafael Goldchain
168 pages, Princeton Architectural Press, 2008

You can support The Designer’s Review of Books by buying I Am My Family: Photographic Memories and Fictions from Amazon (US|CA|UK|DE) or through The Designer’s Review of Books store.

DRB Rating: 3.5/5  

About the Reviewer

Andrew Shea is currently a graduate student in the department of graphic design at the Maryland Institute College of Art. His thesis research focuses on the underlying principles that guide design for social change.

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My thanks to An Event Apart – Chicago for sponsoring The Designer’s Review of Books this month, especially with Design Disasters being the major post of the month. Like the other AEA events, the line up is looking pretty impressive.

If you are interested in sponsoring The Designer’s Review of Books there are spaces available in the main ad rotator for September and later in the year. The sidebar is also available. Please get in touch if you would like to place an ad.

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Disasters. We’ve all had them. The wonderful Fail Blog is a daily source of distraction and cautionary tales of idiocy. The #fail Twitter tag turns up a treasure trove of frustrations, usually with bad design or decisions.

I once made a phone number typos on a 20,000 flyer run that went through the letterboxes of everyone in my neighbourhood. And whilst I didn’t kill anybody, the old lady whose number I had inadvertently used was not amused despite the bouquet of apology flowers.

It is easy to imagine that the big names in design whose successes we admire have seldom experienced failure. But Design Disasters: Great Designers, Fabulous Failure, and Lessons Learned (Amazon: US|CA|UK|DE) is an engaging record of misfortune and misadventure.

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Edited by the prodigious Steven Heller, a self-professed connoisseur of failure, the book is a selection of short (four paragraphs in the case of Stefan Sagmeister) reminiscences and commentaries on failure in design. Most of all, it is a celebration of failure in design:

“Learning to learn from failure is not instinctive. It takes intestinal fortitude not to be devastated by failure and then real-searching to find the proverbial silver lining,” writes Heller.

It is divided into four sections: Learning From Failure, The Language of Failure, Succeeding from Failure and The Objects of Failure.

Core77’s Allan Chochinov kicks of with a witty series of iterations – honing and tweaking the same paragraph before returning to the original. It is the only essay that deliberately plays with the textual form (apart from the deliberate cut-off titles), but within it is a potent kernel of truth, particularly for those teaching design:

“For all the talk of the value of learning through failure, it is difficult to get the concept across if we continue to use the word ‘failure’ in that sentence. People have a natural aversion to the term, and it is next to impossible to reclaim it for pedagogic purposes.”

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Some essays, such as Rik Meyerowitz’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Ulcer in which he recounts the tale of a nightmare client and Ben Kessler’s Failure: An Owner’s Manual, focus on the messy reality of designing for a living:

“Designers who strive for success should prepare themselves for the challenges of doing creative work in the middle of an endless, polyglot failure party,” writes Kessler.

Sagmeister takes the blames his own lack of better judgment in his small, but very amusing anecdote of Deathdrome. A Video Game Package. His brutal self-assessment and honesty is a lesson to any of us with a tendency towards ego caressing:

“I made the mistake of accepting a job I had no interest in … My first presentation with the client was somewhat below mediocre – I made another mistake and showed several possibilities – and it went downhill downhill from there – with enough people, money, and meetings involved, we managed to quickly pass awful and moronic to end up with the remarkably pure piece of shit you see attached.”

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Naturally, many of the essays explore the idea of failure as a necessary component to and virtue of design. Iterations and prototypes are all designed for failure to some extent, for this is the design process. Ralph Caplan in Stumbling is the Cost of Doing Business points to the rows of pop psychology books and observes,

“Someone is bound to say, or to have already said, that failure is the new success. They won’t be far wrong … You can’t learn from your mistakes without making some. That self-evident dictum applies to life generally but is particularly applicable to professions that traffic in discovery.”

Others, such as Richard Saul Wurman’s Hailing, Failing, and Still Sailing: Proper management of failure breeds success argue that it is not failing that counts, but how you fail and proffers some comforting anecdotes from history:

“Great achievements have been built on foundations of inadequacy and error. The discovery of America was made when Christoper Columbus took a wrong turn en route (he thought) to the East Indies. Charles Goodyear bungled an experiment and discovered vulcanized rubber. Sir Isaac Newton failed geometry, and Albert Einstein lacked an aptitude for Math. Paul Gauguin was a failed stockbroker, and Alfred Butts invented the game of Scrabble® after he lost his job as an architect during the Depression. Robert Redford wanted to be a painter.”

Whilst Design Disasters is somewhat consoling, you get the message pretty early on: Failure can be positive, failure can have a silver lining, failure is part of iterative design process, failure is part of life. Yet this feels somewhat unsatisfying too. There is little to take away from this about how to deal with the really negative side of failure, how damaging the sense of failure can be, especially within a team and how failure can genuinely be an awful thing with absolutely no silver lining.

There are also precious few images from the authors illustrating their failures. The ever-ballsy Sagmeister being the only one to cough up a truly shameful piece of artwork. It is perhaps predictable that this should be the case, but weakened the strength of the fail tonic for me. Still, it is an easy read and a light at the end of the tunnel of failure if you have just had your project canned.

DRB Rating: 3/5  

You can buy Design Disasters: Great Designers, Fabulous Failure, and Lessons Learned from Amazon (US|CA|UK|DE) or The Designer’s Review of Books store.

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Review by David Little

Theresa Neil’s and Bill Scott’s Designing Web Interfaces (Amazon: US|CA|UK|DE) catalogues and describes seventy five design patterns – solutions to common problems – for building rich interactions on the Web. Not a book about visual design or particular technologies but rather about the whys and hows of interaction design for the Web; or maybe more simply, standards for Web interaction:

This book is about interaction design: specifically, interaction design on the Web… It is a distillation of practices, patterns and principles for creating a rich experience unique to the Web … The Web comes with its own context. It is not the desktop.

Scott and Neil have built their library of patterns on the back of many years’ experience; both as user experience specialists at Sabre, Scott’s involvement with the Yahoo! Design Pattern Library and Netflix and Neil’s work as a interface design consultant.

In just under three hundred pages the patterns are demonstrated and explained in terms of higher-level design principles. Although many of these principles relate to those long-established in the field of Human-Computer Interaction (HCI), readers need no background in it or interaction design to understand them. Any HCI jargon (e.g. “affordance”) is clearly explained and used only to aid understanding of a principle or pattern.

The book centres on six principles: “Make it direct”, “Keep it lightweight”, “Stay on the page”, “Provide an invitation”, “Use transitions” and “React immediately”. The principles are further broken down into a series of more specific examples which in turn contain a number of patterns. 

Many of these patterns will be familiar to those who use the Web on a regular basis, although one might be sometimes hard-pushed to describe them with snappy titles as in the book, e.g. “detail overlay”, “affordance invitation” or “multi-field inline edit”. Unsurprisingly, all patterns come with their own challenges and possibilities of abuse which can lead to ”anti-patterns”, to use Scott and Neil’s term.

Each pattern is described in some detail, alongside colour screenshots (also available online via the book’s Flickr stream). These are followed by discussions of the considerations of using the technique and tips and summary lists of best practices. Even interaction styles which may seem on the surface reasonably straightforward are surprisingly complex when considered in-depth. For instance, the chapter on “Drag and drop” calculates that there are ninety “interesting moments” or states at which interaction is possible, ranging from what happens on page load, mouse hover to dragging to a valid or invalid target, or accepting or rejecting the drop. 

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Of course, if just one thing has been demonstrated in the Web’s history, it’s that if something terrible can be done, it certainly will be. The book’s anti-patterns demonstrate how to get interaction wrong, from classic examples such as “mystery meat” navigation where icons provide no obvious clues as to their functions, through to “mouse traps” where overlays get accidentally triggered, obscuring content and infuriating users, and my favourites, “needless fanfare” where interface elements are announced with pointless and pretentious animations and “animation gone wild” which speaks for itself (see the Nasa website for a bewildering example of this); as Neil and Scott state,

The primary purpose of transitions is to communicate, and no amount of graphic trickery will make a noisy interface compelling.

Whilst the book is detailed, well laid-out and written in a clear, engaging and often witty style, it suffers a little from its organisation. It is certainly useful to describe design principles; after all these stay more constant than particular interaction styles. But grouping the patterns by principle makes the book a little difficult to navigate. Although in essence a reference work, it is difficult to dip in and out of. Instead the reader will benefit more from reading chapters in their entirety and many principles and patterns cross-reference others. 

I found the index more useful than the table of contents, although even that was not without its problems. For instance, the word “form” is not referenced, although patterns relating to forms are present throughout the book. Designers will also need to learn the vocabulary of interaction styles: knowing that a horizontally scrolling image gallery is called a carousel and the difference between an overlay and an inlay will certainly help in tracking down a particular pattern.

Its own Information architecture aside, the book is well designed: clearly aimed more at designers than a typical O’Reilly tech title, it features colour coding of principles, clear typography and many colour images. Some of the images are a little small and, as they try to demonstrate transitional effects, occasionally confusing. However, the book’s Flickr stream provides access to larger images and videos of transitions. 

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The book is also supported by its own website which allows for more interactive browsing of the patterns, alongside an actively maintained blog with entries by the book’s authors on further patterns and anti-patterns.

Hinted at, but not discussed in any depth in the book is the fact that all of the patterns rely on the use of technologies such as Javascript, Flash or Silverlight, all of which come with an accessibility overhead. Also, whether an interaction style is truly relevant to your website will only be revealed by testing it with your site’s users.

Designing Web Interfaces provides clarification on key Web interaction styles and their context. Pretty much indispensable for anyone involved in designing or developing websites, it is of course not a guarantee of success if used on its own.

DRB Rating: 4/5  

Designing Web Interfaces is published by O’Reilly Media. You can also find it on Amazon (US|CA|UK|DE) or in The Designer’s Review of Books store.

About the author

David Little is a Web user interface designer and developer, based in London. He blogs about Web UI matters and other more random topics at Littled.net, and occasionally tweets at @djlittle.

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