The idea for this post came up the day I interviewed with the CEO of a well known agency in NYC back in 2012. From the privacy of his office, he went on and on about the fact that he didn’t care about titles and that his agency had a flat structure because they all sat together in the same room. What should have sounded well to me in theory actually had the opposite effect, I couldn’t believe how ironic the situation was and that somehow got stuck in my memory.

Since then I’ve had countless conversations about titles at work and with friends over the years. It’s a topic we all deal with when we join a company, or when we hope to get promoted, and even when we manage someone’s promotion or structure a team from scratch. We deal with this subject often and still somehow there is a fair amount of lack of clarity and secrecy around it.

Here are some general facts I believe are true and I hope can help those in the process of changing jobs, recruiters and hiring managers.

Titles Matter.

Let’s start with the basics; a title articulates what your job is about, the seniority and your responsibilities. Titles are ultimately translated into $$$ in your bank account so hell yeah they matter.

The only people that I’ve heard say the opposite are those in a position of power or those trying to benefit from their absence or lack of clarity. Be suspicious of managers and recruiters that describe a company or agency structure as flat. There is no such thing as “flat” when you get more than 5 people in a room and, if there is, it sounds like a hot mess to me anyway.

Titles can empower but also hinder your progress.

Some people see titles as permission to extend their influence to other areas of the work. While this is true, it’s not really a requirement. In fact the best people you can work with are those that care beyond their responsibilities about what others are doing to influence a given project.

It sounds cliche but in most cases, as long as you are not changing your discipline and you have the right maturity, you don’t need a promotion to behave and perform like the title you think you deserve. Pretend you have it and enjoy the confidence boost.

However if all you are looking for is a promotion to start caring about a given aspect of the job, it’s possible that your title is hindering your success. Don’t let your title stop you from going above and beyond a given task.

Titles mean different things at different companies.

Title parity between companies is hard. Tech companies have good parameters to manage people jumping from one to another but agencies are a different beast. For example an agency Design Director leads visual designers and work alongside a UX Director but In-house Design Directors often lead the whole design department and report to a studio manager.

Agencies tend to inflate titles and established product companies tend to simplify them. It’s not strange to see an ECD or VP at an agency transition to a product company as a UX Manager. The opposite is true as well for small startups vs big agencies. I’ve met Chief Design Officers at startups that manage a design department of 3 people and Chief Design Officers at agencies representing teams of hundreds. It’s a mess. Job titles need to be understood in context so make sure that’s extremely clear if you are exploring new opportunities.

Ultimately you will define the flavor of your title.

No two ADs are alike. Same thing with designers, creative directors and any other title you can think of. You have the opportunity to define what your own flavor of a title is with your day-to-day tasks and your natural inclination to pay more attention to one aspect of it vs another.

At some point titles don’t matter.

They don’t. I know, what a twist! 🤯

I find it normal to fixate on titles at a specific point in someone’s career and then totally let it go at a later stage. At the end of the day what matters is that you feel happy with the responsibilities and compensation of your job. It’s not unusual for managers to eventually step down and get closer to the work.

There are tons of biz models out there that allow for experienced people to be hands on instead of feeling like they have to keep their VP or CxO level title.

Ultimately the ladder is not that long so it’s better to enjoy what you do and keep getting good at it than worry too much about where you think you should be at this point in life.

End.

Thanks for reading my ramblings. If you want more check out my medium profile or some of the work and talks at guglieri.com.

The Power of Titles was originally published in Design Words on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Full reading experience posted here: guglieri.com/tools

Are the tools you use limiting your creativity or empowering you to develop new ideas?

Nobody likes to hear that their creative freedom is being limited but it’s unquestionable that our tools, in some way or another, have a role in how we express our ideas.

Take for instance Sketch. Sketch and XD came out to improve the most lacking aspects of the design process when photoshop was king (i.e. performance, templates, artboards, file sizes, specs creation, shared symbols, collaboration and prototyping). They deliberately disregarded the photo retouch aspect of photoshop and focused on UI and basic tools for vector illustration. How has that affected the industry’s output? Certain things that were extremely easy to do in photoshop, like adjusting hues, transforming or compositing images and text together are not that easy anymore as you have to jump from one app to another. No big deal right? Yet by favoring one workflow vs another, Sketch is somehow influencing creators as it promotes certain actions vs others.

Let’s look at it from the other side, let’s talk about Photoshop. To be honest, it’s hard to tell what Photoshop is for anymore but maybe that’s where its charm resides. In comparison with other tools, if you are using photoshop to design a mobile app or a website you have a whole range of effects available and compositing tools and illustration capabilities not available to you in Sketch. In the past I’ve created websites and concepts for games almost as if I was painting them.

For instance one of my personal challenges when designing the 2012 Google Ramayana website was stay away from gradients, dropshadows and any other effects I couldn’t do just using brushes.

Another quick example is this pitch that I put together for a game for the NBC Show “The Voice” around the same time. Drawing this comp in sketch would have been challenging…but also for what it’s worth, doing it in photoshop didn’t make the job of any developer easier either.

The tools we use influence our craft so much in some cases that you can actually tell if a design was done in Photoshop vs Sketch. I’m not saying that you couldn’t create exactly the same design in both tools but by using one vs another you are able to access certain features more easily than others. For instance when you see certain textures, patterns, or compositions it’s only fair to guess it was created in a tool like Photoshop.

This is not a discussion limited to Photoshop and Sketch either. Other apps are making moves now from different angles. Adobe XD comes with basic prototyping capabilities, Invision is making the reverse move now by trying to get into Design and Framer went from a hardcore prototyping tool to a design tool. Everybody wants a piece of this pie and they all have their angle that without a doubt will influence designers in developing new concepts. Will we be able to tell if something was designed in Invision vs Framer? (pills buttons everywhere?).

How can we get out of that box?

The tools we have are always evolving but not necessarily at the speed or in the direction we need them too. If let’s say, I’m working on the future of an OS and need to come up with a new approach to UI design… will Sketch’s “background blur + noise effect” be my solution? Will “bevel and emboss” in Photoshop help me achieve something new? Is that as far as I should aim? Probably not. The reality of our tools is that they are mostly reactive to the external demand instead of proactive and forward thinking. For example, designers were excited about smoother rounded corners when Apple came up with them. Therefore you can now create them via a checkbox on Sketch. After all, the tail that follows innovation is always longer than its head.

What’s my approach?

I sadly don’t have a silver bullet but I will share with you what I have been trying to do and at what degree it has been working out for me.

Farewell dear you. Detach yourself from the tool you are using. If it helps, use a new tool that makes things a bit more difficult and forces you to avoid easy go-to effects.

Oh Not Again! Be aware of your own tricks. If you find yourself about to make yet another pill shaped button stop right there, you have done that before, your client may not want to be another one in the lot, give them something new.

Sketch it up! Use your digital tools for executing, not for coming up with a concept. I always try to stretch the initial sketching phase of a project to avoid feeling limited or being influenced by a specific tool set. By brainstorming and discussing ideas in an abstract manner you may avoid falling back on your old ways.

While it’s hard to detach yourself from the tools we use everyday, it’s important to remember that our tools are ultimately worth nothing without our personal touch.

When evaluating what tools are best for your needs remember your ideas should ultimately dictate the tools required to execute them, the opposite will always lead to mediocre results.

Thanks for reading.

Claudio

The Tools of Creativity was originally published in Design Words on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

We live surrounded by messages and we consume them everyday in private and public spaces. Communication streams hit us everywhere from the brands of the clothing we wear to signs on the street, instructions on the oven, traffic lights, etc. Anywhere the eye can see it’s likely to see an ad or intentional message. MDI estimates a normal American consumes around 4,000 to 5,000 ads a day but that doesn’t even count all the other visual clues and indicators we see and seek with a purpose (i.e directions, bathroom signs, exit signs, etc.).

In this abundance of messages we have learned to navigate through them and we have almost become numb to their effects. Just like users tend to ignore banners online we ignore street signs if we know where we’re going or we ignore traffic lights if we are not driving. All these messages visually clutter our environment by targeting everybody when in reality they are only relevant to some of them. With the arrival and spread of Virtual Reality, Augmented Reality and Mixed Reality a few things can be expected to change.

At the risk of describing a dystopian future I believe traditional communication platforms will be the first to feel the burn with the arrival of these new devices and that they will soon affect the design of private and public spaces as we know them.

How — Information depth in Mixed Reality

To disrupt everyday communication platforms and therefore our living spaces, Mixed Reality and Augmented Reality devices will need to follow a series of principles and perceptive rules so users can immediately assimilate how they work and see its value. Just like with any other new device the golden rule will be familiarity plus progressive enhancement. Find a hook and little by little it will become a habit. To achieve this I believe Mixed Reality devices will operate at three different levels of our reality.

1. Anchored to your view

Your most personal space ever that won’t ever be occupied by anything other than what the user decides (maybe notifications / alerts).

2. Anchored to objects to reveal contextual info.

Objects will trigger their own interfaces depending on the user and their intent. For example the interior of a car will be different if you are the person driving it or sitting in the passenger seat.

3. Anchored to physical spaces to reveal extra info.

Street signs, landmarks and any other physical representation will potentially be enriched by MR and AR.

From context to intent — A mindset change

Since the users are the platform themselves physical spaces will no longer need to be designed around static platforms and the contextual clues that normally feed UX studies will become irrelevant. Context (demographic information, time of day, location, etc) will no longer be the only source of information used to define UX.

A given space can have distinct meanings to different people. When designing spaces different types of use are prioritized and that is translated into its design. Take an airport for example, its primary goal is to get people through a series of planned steps (checking to boarding) and its spatial design and signage is articulated accordingly.

However the goal of a given space is not always that clear and its type of use isn’t either. What’s relevant to you if you are in the middle of a street? Everybody around you shares the same geographical context but depending on their purpose their attention will be focused on different aspects. Are you looking for a subway station or are you waiting to cross a crosswalk? Different purposes will seek different signals.

With the introduction and mainstream adoption of MR devices the current paradigm is likely to experience a structural change. As soon as the individual people become the platform, physical spaces will no longer need to display lots of messages for different uses. Instead, users will shape their space according to their current intent, independent from their geographical context. Walking in the street will be a different experience if you are trying to find a restaurant or if are trying to catch a Pokemon.

Private spaces are also designed based on contextual assumptions. Apartments for example are organized according to the most common living patterns (sleep, rest, leisure, dine). Most living rooms for instance are organized around entertainment- last century it was the radio and more recently it’s been the television.

Cars are probably the best example of contextually designed physical layout due to their limited space and capabilities (mi4 car interaction with map). Traditionally there are up to 3 main roles in a car, the driver, the passenger, and the cargo. The driver needs focus and has total control, the passenger shares some controls with the driver (complementary to the driving experience) like maps, music and heating and AC and the passengers in the back seats have no control whatsoever and only sometimes have their own individual entertainment sets.

Cars dashboard and interior experiences are defined by their physical limitations. Now let’s imagine how AR/MR devices could help ease the cognitive load of driving a car. How would a car look if we could define controls and indicators based on your intent? I bet it would be less cluttered and more focused since it wouldn’t need to show every single control at all times. Also voice activated UI will alleviate the cognitive load of presenting every single choice all at once.

By looking at the user intent each space can become what the user requires at a given time with no room for interpretation or messaging hierarchy needed. Intent is ultimately the most accurate description of the user needs and the physical world should be the canvas users look at to meet those needs (instead of their phones).

Why might this happen?

1.Economic Reasons

The internet made real targeted marketing possible and created better ways to target relevant users with more personal and behaviour based messages. It created digital spaces and introduced new financial models (CPC) helping advertisers getting the most roi out of their budget.

Advertising, for better or worse, will play as big of a role with MR devices as it has done with the internet over the years. With the arrival and popularization of MR, digital spaces will finally break out their physical constraints and find a place out in our world. Media companies will jump at the opportunity to finally being able to talk to the right users in the right places.

2.The Final step to Owning the ecosystem.

Big tech companies are trying to engage customers throughout their most common living scenarios. I.e. Apple has Carplay, Homekit and has pushed for Apple TV since 2007. Google on the other side has Android TV, Android Car and NEST. In the quest for being present throughout the user’s life, tech giants have put their efforts into creating as many devices as necessary to reach the user wherever he’s at, (home, transportation, on the go, exercising). The flexibility and portability of MR devices will render all those devices obsolete making it easier for these companies to be omnipresent.

3.The burden of owning multiple physical platforms

For the most part users update many devices at home once in awhile. A new TV, faster phone, and more powerful computers are just examples. Marketing tells customers they are major breakthroughs in innovation with each new iteration but reality says their evolution is closer to sales cycles than it is to true innovation. While planned obsolescence is not going to go away, a MR device could unify many of the devices we use throughout our day therefore simplifying the device ecosystem we are part of.

Collateral effects on society

If we entertain the idea of communication platforms becoming obsolete, how would that affect us anyway? Back in 1964 Marshall McLuhan suggested that not only the content being delivered by the media affected society but that the medium in which that content was delivered and its characteristics were also affecting society. The internet is a good example of this theory. The mere existence of the medium and its characteristics (immediate transmission and consumption of information anywhere in plenty of affordable devices that allow consumption and creation), is far more important to define the current society than the messages transmitted through it.

With that in mind, if we are able to detach the medium from its physical stationary platforms and liberate public and private spaces of the burden of hosting these devices (tvs, computers, billboards, etc.), what effect would that have in our society? How would “restructuring our living spaces” impact the definition of our society and its members?

Personal shared spaces and privacy

Considering experiences are better enjoyed when shared with others the adoption of MR/AR would also redefine how social events are experienced in a group. A physical shared space in a group would not be fully shared since each individual would be able to define the space based on their personality, intent and needs. How much of that digital entity is shared among users vs what other parts are strictly private would be up to each person.

As we expand our digital profile to our physical reality those levels of privacy would define what other users know about us and also what 3rd parties could use to better target their messages to us. If you find yourself on the hunt for Thai food in the middle of the city and as part of your profile you indicated you’re allergic to nuts the results displayed in your field of view should be defined by your needs.

A clutter free world

One of the most exciting prospects of this future scenario is the idea of removing persistent callouts from the urban layout. What would a city without billboards look like? What could be defined as an essential part of our cities if we could redefine them without the burden of indicators, marketing callouts, traffic signals and any other unnecessary message now present?

Advertising was first introduced to the Times Square area in the early 1920s. Since then Times Square has become almost a pilgrimage destination for tourist visiting NYC from all over the world. What once was considered advertising today has become part of the culture and identity of the city. When MR/AR devices become mainstream, will we consider Times Square a vintage reminiscence of a past time?

What will happen when people are able to individually recreate visual experiences equally as impressive or without the need of a physical set up?

And specifically when looking at private spaces…

What would your living room look like without a TV?

References

The Untold Story of Magic Leap, the World’s Most Secretive Startup.

Anywhere the Eye Can See, It’s Likely to See an Ad.

Design Principles for Reducing Cognitive Load

The Medium is the Message. MARSHALL McCLUHAN

This Space Available.

HYPER-REALITY from Keiichi Matsuda

Sight by Robot Genius

Hacker Noon is how hackers start their afternoons. We’re a part of the @AMI family. We are now accepting submissions and happy to discuss advertising & sponsorship opportunities.

If you enjoyed this story, we recommend reading our latest tech stories and trending tech stories. Until next time, don’t take the realities of the world for granted!

The 🌏 is your canvas was originally published in HackerNoon.com on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Interviewing for a job is normally stressful and thrilling. You are being tested and you know it. As much as you prepare for it the outcome can be unpredictable. You could be asked something unexpected, you don’t know the person you are dealing with or what their current mood is. It’s both a professional transaction and a personality test.

I have had terrible and great interviews in the past. The more people I’ve interviewed the better I have gotten at being interviewed myself. I want to share six personal stories from both sides of the table, as a candidate and as an interviewer. I have failed pretty hard in some of them but even then there are things to be learned and I hope you find them useful or at the very least entertaining.

For the sake of privacy and respect for others I won’t mention names or provide any more context than necessary to illustrate the different situations.

1. Talking the talk

It was early in the morning and the streets of North London were empty. A few days back I had printed the map with the exact location of the studio I was going to be interviewing at but the area wasn’t really that detailed and the address was a warehouse type building without a clear entrance. I had a cheap flip phone I had bought only a few weeks earlier when I first arrived to the UK so before risking being late I decided to give my interviewer a call and let him know I couldn’t find the main door.

That’s when it all started…

It was 2008 and I had just moved to London. While I had managed to survive and found a place to stay (a tiny bedroom in Morden) my English and communication skills were not ready for prime time and certainly not ready for jumping casually on calls with strangers. Some things you have to learn the hard way and this was one of them. As soon as a male voice picked up the phone I panicked, I explained that I couldn’t find the main door and he quickly proceeded to explain where it was. While the voice on the other side of the line kept repeating the same name over and over my brain was blocked trying to decipher his accent…what the heck was he saying? That was the rocky start to an interview that I obviously didn’t ace.

This is the story of an interview I failed to succeed at on the most fundamental level-communication. It was a short interview and they never called me back.

2. Impersonating people

A while ago I got to interview a designer as part of the interview rounds at work. One detail that passed unnoticed to everybody else was the fact that the top project on the portfolio wasn’t really the interviewee’s hands-on work but it was made to look like it. This piece of work was one of the best looking ones and I happened to know the designer that originally created it so I decided to dig a little deeper.

I reached out to my friend who had done the work and asked if there was such a connection. I was sadly informed that that wasn’t my interviewee’s own work and that the involvement was purely a light oversight. In an effort to have a healthy conversation about it I decided to come forward during the in-person interview and brought it up. I mentioned my connection and I asked the candidate if that was his/her work and what role he/she played in it. The answer didn’t really match the facts that I was given and that felt clear for both parties without a word about it.

The interview suddenly got awkward.

After that unpleasant moment we moved on and talked about many other things. At the end that questionable piece of work wasn’t the reason the process didn’t move forward. However it did set a precedent and a breach of trust for me when considering this person as a potential colleague.

Not truthfully defining your role in a project or featuring some other people’s work as your own is plain wrong, misleading and it doesn’t help anybody- not the interviewee or the interviewer. When big projects come out of an agency is pretty common to find a bunch of designers with the same or similar comps on their portfolios (remember nike.com?). However it’s important to highlight what your role was in it or what part you were responsible for.

In this story the candidate failed to talk about the work truthfully and even though that wasn’t the final deal breaker it didn’t help the overall picture.

3. Trash talk

We all get it. The reason why people look for a new job is because they are unhappy at their current place. That’s clear and pretty much all that needs to be said when looking for new opportunities.

I have been on both sides of the table in this regard. Years ago I interviewed at this amazing agency in NYC and when meeting with the CEO he made a slightly inappropriate comment trying to dig up some dirt from my company back then. I was kind of shocked and did not engage in that conversation. I was probed a bit more so I had to put my foot down and I starting mentioning all the good things that had me working there. I was clearly looking to move on but not at the expense of trashing my current place. I believe that was the right decision.

On the other side I have interviewed lots of unhappy people. In one specific case a designer crossed the line when talking about his current experience and went a bit overboard with it. I didn’t notice it at first but when everybody on the team had the opportunity to talk and share their opinions, the fact that the candidate was bitter about his current position and that he shared too many insights came up as a concern. If he had done it with his current employer what would stop him from doing the very same thing with us?

In this story the interviewee failed to appear professional and to properly read the room. Complaints leave a bitter after taste in people’s mouths and that became clear when everyone that had talked to the candidate had the opportunity to put their thoughts together.

Communication skills, professional attitude and being trustworthy are just many of the important traits everybody should embody when being interviewed. However it’s a two-way street and sometimes even the best candidates are challenged by poor interviewers. I might write some more stories about that in the future but for now take this cheat sheet as a set of suggestions before your next interview as a candidate or as an interviewer.

A. Checklist for Candidates

1. Do your homework. Research who you are going to talk to. Obvious right? Still you wouldn’t believe how many people jump into interviews without doing the legwork.

2. Be your best self. Don’t pretend to be someone else or put other people’s work in your portfolio.

3. Talk about what you love to do and what you do best.

4. Keep it professional. Watch your language.

5. Don’t trash talk your previous or current jobs. You want to leave and that’s ok but don’t make yourself look like someone untrustworthy. Your interviewer might think you’ll behave the same way in the future.

6. Feel the room out to determine how to behave. Adapt to the energy of the room but don’t stop being yourself.

B. Checklist for Interviewers

1. Do your homework. Check the candidate’s background and make sure you are bringing him/her to the office because you like what you’ve seen.

2. Make your guest feel comfortable. Be a great host. It’s important to create an environment where candidates feel free and safe to be themselves.

3. Portray accurately what working at your organization is going to be like. I like to describe the first month of work at the company when I interview somebody so their expectations, for better or worse, are right.

4. Tap into his/her passions. What’s your candidate’s favorite part of the job. Why do they do this for a living? Get to know where their heart is.

5. Have an agenda but break it if the conversation leads you in another direction. An interview shouldn’t feel like a questionnaire. Drive your candidate through your questions but take a detour if his/her passions invite you to.

6. Let them talk and make sure you answer their questions.

7. And finally don’t be an ass. Don’t lie, put them on the spot, or ask stupid questions. Remember to treat your candidate as you would like to be treated.

Thanks for reading,

Claudio.

How to interview for a design job was originally published in Design Words on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Most of the best designers I know tend to hate what they do. Believing you are not producing your best work is a common sentiment across creative folks. Each person deals with it in a different way and eventually that is what pushes every one of us to create better work.

Having gone through this experience many times as a designer I have developed my own strategy to overcome it and move on.

I have come to accept that first iterations are rough, normally not good and sometimes they flat out suck. Being critical with your own work is what will make you improve it so moving on quickly from that first sucky phase will always take you forward.

Hover to read side note →

With that said I don’t ditch that work right away. I like to keep it around and often times I found the core creative concept was already in the initial sketches besides the overall design being off. Sometimes your most naive and blue sky approach to a problem has elements that can be useful later on.

Feeling that your work is not as good as it should be is a positive thing, it requires strong criteria and the ability to distance yourself from your own craft. Being able to critic your own work is one of my favorites qualities in designers and I believe is an essential part of all good creatives from design interns to Executive Creative Directors. You never stop learning so acknowledging that is a good starting point. Knowing where your work stands and evaluating the quality of your outcomes will keep your feet on the ground.

However, realizing that your work sucks is not enough, is it? Now that I know that, what‘s next? I recommend you read:

What makes you special →

Thanks for reading,

Claudio

—

Twitter. Claudio Guglieri
Website. Guglieri.com

Don’t freeze Up — How to deal with your inner self critique. was originally published in Design Words on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

As a designer and occasional manager of other designers I’m exposed to design work all day every day. I see other people’s work both online and at the office and often times I have to articulate my feedback around it and find constructive ways to improve what’s in front of me. At the same time I also interview people almost every week, and every once in awhile I get an email from either a student or a designer starting their career asking me for feedback or recommendations about how to move forward.

So far I’ve realized there is one common question I tend to bring up when talking about people’s portfolios. It’s the same question I’ve asked myself in the past and every time I have felt stagnant and wanted to move my own career forward.

What makes your work unique?

It’s a tough question. In graphic design, like in any other industry I suppose, people go through phases when they start. For us designers I believe there is a phase of mimicking. Designers quickly create their own heroes, they follow them to talks, follow their work, read their articles and feel inspired by their style. This phase never really ends though your heroes will change over time.

The Mimicking phase is important because it will give you a better perspective of the industry and will help you initially to improve your execution skills. However it’s important to know when to stop. Mimicking others won’t make your work any more unique or special and won’t really bring any attention to what matters- you. When I look back at my previous work over the years I still can identify the parts of it where I was trying to be someone else by getting “overly inspired” and the parts that I came up with out of my own experience that helped me define what I do today. I personally only feel proud about the latter.

With all these considerations in mind I believe I have identified two pointers to guide me along the way. Take them for what they are worth and I hope it can help you too.

Looking for inspiration beyond the mainstream sources.

If you want to come up with something truly unique you need to get inspired beyond other people’s pixels and projects. Most of the time the best sources are those we can relate back to our life instead of those coming from the same discipline.

Let’s pretend you have been commissioned to come up with a new system and a new look and feel for a new mobile OS. An assignment like this one calls for a really unique approach but if your go-to place for inspiration is Dribbble or Behance you’ll end up looking at fairly similar ideas, all of them probably coming from the same industry. What if instead you look into sources that respond to a common nature but have a really different execution? For instance you could look into different matters like biological organization patterns, modes of surfacing and consuming content within traditional newspapers and even obvious stuff like gravity or spatial relationships?

I’ve come to realize that when my work is inspired by my own needs, interests and surroundings it’s unlikely to be just like somebody else’s work or current trends.

Know when to stop the inspiration cycle.

Inspiration is like sugar, a little bit will give you a kick but if you ingest too much you’ll feel sick and unmotivated. There is a threshold I’ve realized I should not exceed when looking for inspiration. The times I do, I have experienced a creative block which somehow took me back to the mimicking phase of imitating somebody else. Just like with sugar there is a sweet spot that will kickstart your brain into creating something unique maybe based on something you have seen but if you cross the line you may end up feeling unable to be creative.

With that said it’s simply the beauty of the moment we live in.

Inspiration is a great tool but it shouldn’t shadow the experiences and uniqueness that makes you who you are. Your style and unique approach will always end up being the result of your experiences and the parts of your work you enjoy doing the most.

Keep rocking and thanks for reading.

Claudio

What makes you special was originally published in Design Words on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

After a lot of thinking last year I decided to go freelance. As part of an agency I had developed my own vision about how an agency should work, what the internal culture and responsibilities towards clients should be and I found myself more and more invested in my side projects. I’ve always considered side projects a creative escape so the more they took over my life the more I realized I wasn’t satisfied with my day to day workflow and how I was taught to approach problems. It was time to try something new.

After talking to some freelancers I decided to make the move. Freelancing seemed like a natural step so I started at it by changing all that I never felt comfortable with while working at an agency.

I became a producer, manager, designer, and consultant.

I became the person that sends a recap email after each meeting and the person that chases payments a month after issuing an invoice. I felt committed, scared and excited, but mostly alive.

Pros and cons of freelancing

After 9 months in the world of freelance there are some things I feel I can share, some of them were immediate results from freelancing while others I came to realize over time. I hope this helps you decide if you ever find yourself in the same situation.

Let’s start with the good stuff:

Drastic cut of overhead. Pretty soon I realized there was no overhead anymore. All the unnecessary layers of hierarchy over a simple assignment were gone. I have been fortunate to have only worked with decision makers since I went solo.

Management of expectations. I remembered what it was to high five a client before starting a project and after finishing it. I decided I will never fail to do this again. The satisfaction of having done good work is immense.

Running the extra mile. When a relationship is fair and benefits both sides running the extra mile is more than a pleasure. As a freelancer it was my decision to do so. I did some extra work outside of the scope for some clients just because I was able to and I really enjoyed working for them.

Experimenting and learning. Being able to manage my own time normally gave me some room for exploration. I learned to use Framer and Sketch by doing so for my clients for free before they even asked for it. Once they saw the result they were fine adding future explorations to the scope of the project.

However it hasn’t been all bells and whistles. As a freelancer I’ve also faced lots of new challenges and some that I had only encountered as part of a group before. Here are some of them:

NDAs and not being able to show your work. As a freelancer I needed to stay current and do so by exposing my work publicly. However due to NDAs and the nature of the projects I worked on wasn’t able to show work from many of the projects I worked on and therefore went radio silence for months.

Getting the right projects. There are many reasons why I’ve said no to a project. Besides costs, some factors told me I wasn’t the right fit and I had to be honest about that because nobody likes to have their time wasted. Did it fit my line of work? Were the expectations realistic? Was the budget enough? Was I so busy already that that would jeopardize the quality of my work?

Home is where I can connect to WIFI.

I got used to being able to work from many places as a freelancer. I actually enjoyed working on-site and getting to see different work environments but I also missed working with some people longer.

No man is an island.

While I was able to bring capable colleagues to some projects there was always an individual sense of responsibility. I wanted to invest in people and feel part of a gang again.

While freelancing has been a great experience for me it might not be for everybody. It’s a trade off, and while it can lead to a more lucrative salary (or sometimes not!) you might be losing out on a great experience and professional development at a company or agency, which is especially important at the early stages of your career when you are building a portfolio of your own. I have definitely missed that bit.

As for me 2015 has been a blast and 2016 is looking even more exciting. Things are changing (they always are) and great opportunities surface all the time. One of my goals for this year is to keep my site more up to date and write consistently. More posts coming soon ;)

Yours truly,

Claudio

Check my work at guglieri.com
More updates on @claudioguglieri

A Love Letter to Freelancing was originally published in Design Words on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

This is the first of a three post series which explores the connection between the cinematic language used by filmmakers and the interactive language used by web creators in UI design and development.

In this series you will learn some important techniques used in cinematography and how it can be applied to the interactive playground.

Cinematic Continuity in User Interface Design

The majority of films and audiovisual productions are composed according to a set of rules developed in the early 1920s in the United States which create the impression of continuity by editing together discontinuous viewpoints.

This set of rules, known as the Continuity Editing Rules, allowed filmmakers to shoot scenes “cutting for continuity”, and emphasized smooth transitions between shots in which space and time were unobtrusively condensed.

Cutting for Continuity maintains continuous action and self-consistent detail in the various scenes of a movie or broadcast.

Continuity is at the very core of filmmaking and visual storytelling; by maintaining continuity throughout the scene, the rough cuts that the scene is composed of is perceived as one single cut, which makes it easier to follow the story.

According to Blain Brown there are four primary categories of continuity:

• Continuity of CONTENT. Everything visible in the scene needs to remain there from shot to shot.
• Continuity of MOVEMENT. Everything moving in the scene needs to carry its movement from one cut to the next.
• Continuity of POSITION. All the objects in the scene need to keep their position throughout cuts.
• Continuity of TIME. The time of shooting, meaning the illumination, needs to be consistent throughout the scene.

Content, movement, position and time, are the four key factors our brain pays attention to when connecting cuts to perceive a scene.

While I’m not going to pretend that web designers are story tellers like filmmakers are, we do however share a range of of similarities; one of them is that we both have a similar audience. An audience which is easily bored and full of preconceived notions. Another similarity that we share is that both mediums need to be partially understood in order to become either, engaging, informative and or entertaining later on.

If we wish to retain the attention of the public we have to maintain
unbroken connection with each preceding shot

Alfred Capus, 1908

Continuity and UI Design

Continuity plays a key role in UI Design as it helps user’s understanding of the system they are using. When users understand the environment and its potential, the UI can then aim to be either informative, entertaining, functional, or all three at the same time.

Continuity is especially challenging in UI Design by comparison with filmmaking as there is no such thing as a linear timeline. On the contrary, in an interactive environment the user builds his own timeline while interacting with the system. Therefore continuity needs to work like glue by keeping all the pieces together and consistent throughout the experience.

The most important rule of continuity in filmmaking is the 180 Degree Line Rule where the camera remains on one side of the action to keep the actors on the same side of the screen and the screen direction is always fixed along the scene.

Now because the use of render cameras is not a common functionality with regular websites (except 3D environments), our screen direction is always fixed. Therefore our actors are always on the same side of the screen and it’s our task to make sure that they animate in and out following a logic users can follow.

A good example of this is provided by Apple in their iOS Human Interface Guidelines when explaining animation best practices. Apple’s recommendation is to strive for realism and credibility since people can feel disoriented when they experience movement that doesn’t make sense or appears to defy physical laws. For instance if tapping on an email from a list moves the list to the left revealing the full email coming from the right , when tapping “back” the animation should be reverse and bring the list of emails back from the left to the right.

How can we use continuity to our advantage when designing UIs?

While animation and motion tests have become essential when illustrating transitions or interactions on mobile devices (with big players like Google or Apple), there is still a lack of motion practices when designing websites for desktop browsers. Sadly enough, most sites are still just a collection of disconnected sections grouped together by a global navigation.

I do categorize websites and interactive experiences, regardless of their platform, in two kinds depending on their use of continuity.

I. “Cutting to continuity” Experiences

Websites that have several sections connected through a global navigation fall into this category. When browsing them the user jumps from section to section without a clear physical correlation between the different sections. The only connection between them is their similar aesthetics and content treatment.

Cutting to continuity sites are dominant online and work within a standard “click to load” mechanic.

II. ”Single take” Experiences

Just as in an Alfonso Cuarón movie there is no need to emulate continuity when there are no cuts. Think about sites where all the sections are naturally connected in a framework and there is no such thing as a “click to load” mechanic but rather a “click to reveal” mechanic instead. Mobile Apps are especially good at this and so are interactive installations.

Animation is rooted in these experiences and makes all the physical laws tangible by bringing in sections and components with a given logic.

Single take experiences feel like a solid system. Website Frameworks in this category are for example paginated scroll with side content or layouts with content overlays.

Know the rules well, so you can break them effectively.

Continuity in UI Design is achieved through logical order and animation. Where Apple’s animation guidelines calls for realism and credibility by not defying physical laws, Google plays a whole different game.

Google Material design and more specifically Android Lollipop offers a take on continuity that ignores physical laws as we understand them traditionally. Material design is somewhat rooted in physicality but it adds a layer of magic on top. I.e. Buttons can transform into new interfaces when interacting with them.

By creating brand new components Google has created a continuity language that doesn’t rely on physical laws like Apple, but instead relies on a consistent and hierarchical constant mutation of the user interface.

Google follows the four basic pillars of continuity by keeping a key element in the screen while transitioning from one section to another. For instance, when clicking on an album from a grid, the transition’s key element is the element the user just interacted with, that’s where their eyes are looking at, and what drives the animation.

Can you mention an example of continuity besides Apple and Google’s models?

While not many of us have the power to come up with a whole set of rules that will affect a whole Mobile OS or a Web Ecosystem, we do have the power to create interfaces that will improve people’s lives.

Continuity comes in handy when designing new frameworks from the ground up to ensure we can maintain an unbroken connection between sections and therefore retain the user’s attention and gain their understanding.

End of Part 1.

This is the first of a three post series. Follow the upcoming articles here @Claudioguglieri and see the references for this article below to learn more:

The History of Cutting — The Birth of Cinema and Continuity Editing

Apple iOS Human Interface Guidelines

Google Material Design

How Google uses motion design to make tangible tech.

BORDWELL, THOMPSON & STAIGER, 1985.

BROWN, Blain. Cinematography: Theory and Practice: Image Making for Cinematographers and Directors.

THOMPSON & BORDWELL, 1994 Film History.

Barbarian Group. Samsung Center Stage

Cinematic Continuity on UI Design was originally published in Design Words on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Dealing with New on Ui Design

NEW can be hard to explain,
NEW can be messy,
NEW makes people uneasy,
NEW doesn’t mean better, but it surely should be trying.

New ideas are hard to grasp. If I were to explain how beautiful a long scroll site with a bunch of shoes floating around and moving as we scroll down at different speeds you probably would not be excited about it.

We know OLD,
OLD works and feels right.
OLD is what you expect.
There is nothing wrong about OLD,
There is nothing great about OLD.

Old UI ideas are safe and comfortable. Old UI Ideas see the management of User expectations as their strongest ally.

The illusion of new is “OLD with a twist”.

The illusion of new is “what you were expecting” enhanced by a superficial NEW. The enhancement is not essential for the understanding of the UI component but it improves the experience.
The illusion of new sometimes borrows “User expectations” from a different medium, just like Google’s Material design used physical relationships between real objects to define and explain a digital UI framework.

The illusion of new gets closer to NEW but keeps enough OLD so users can still relate to it.

The illusion of new strives to be comfortable while trying to improve OLD.

The illusion of new strives to reach the “Aha! moment”. That’s the user understanding of a new, unexpected, but still familiar payback to their input on an User Interface.

The illusion of new is hard to get to but it’s the fastest way to NEW.

END

Thanks for getting this far : ) Check upcoming articles and other design updates here at @Claudioguglieri .

The comfort of old design and the illusion of new was originally published in Design Words on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

I finally got to see the movie Her by Spike Jonze. After a couple of months of dodging spoilers and random articles online I watched this movie with no previous knowledge whatsoever other than the trailer facts; Joaquin Phoenix (JP) is a lonely guy that has some sort of crush on a female voice.

** Spoiler Alert

The movie is set in a not so distant future where people have pretty amazing smartphones and single earbuds with microphones they use to talk with their smartphones by using Siri-like commands like “read email”, “delete”, “next”, etc. The information is served both on a screen or by the earbuds so they can listen to their emails, news, music, etc.

In the first minutes of the movie you’ll see how JP downloads this new OS that, according to the commercial, feels like a real human being.

**end

And that new OS is what’s this post is all about:

Dealing with a computer that feels human.

Computers, smartphones and similar devices are really complex machines with simple purposes for the general public (communication, storage and access). To lower the complexity of these machines we use metaphors that help us understanding how they work by associating their complex structures to well known objects in the physical world. Examples of these metaphors are inboxes, folders, lists, desktops and windows among many others.

The issue with these metaphors is that they have been brought to the digital ecosystem because of their virtues but they have also brought their conceptual problems.

Example. The desktop metaphor is great to understand your workspace. However workspaces get messy as you use them in the real world. They will get full of notes, documents, papers, tools, random objects, etc as you work with them. Your natural messiness will slow down your productivity both in the physical world and in a digital environment unless you clean it up. While this seems natural when dealing with physical objects, why would you consciously keep your digital desktop clean to be more efficient?

Digital metaphors have been developed up to a point where they still require too many conscious actions from the user.

The need for a sense of control

If you think about Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, the base line that wraps up the whole concept is the human need for a sense of control. We need to be certain that our needs are going to be met from bottom to top. When we deal with computers this is translated into organizational actions. For instance, the need for having a cleaned desktop, organized folders and an inbox with zero unread emails. We have applied the need for a sense of control to the digital world like a heavy and unnecessary legacy.

Imagine we were to remove all the barriers in between two people that send each other a message. During the communication process they would mentally judge the other person and categorize the importance of the message depending on many factors. They could even forget the message if it’s considered irrelevant.

The need for a sense of control, organization, and categorization is inherent in all of us human beings but their processes normally run in our subconscious.

And that’s what’s magical about the movie HER. In the first 10 minutes, as soon as the Siri-like voice breaks in as a human-like voice, Joaquin Phoenix has to automatically change his voice commands. You won’t hear him again saying things like “Delete email”, “Read next”, “archive this or that”, “Read my feeds”… Suddenly that doesn’t matter, the computer feels like a human and we deal with it like we do with our own kind.

The magic between JP and his computer is that they communicate with each other as you would do in a normal conversation. In this context all the categorization and organizational transactions that normally take place in the relationship between man and machine disappear.

Their common spoken language becomes the new interface (the point where two systems connect to communicate with each other) and all the previous organizational conscious actions now take place in JP’s subconscious.

The closest examples we can find nowadays of this kind of relationship / interaction with computers are voice activated devices. We are really far from the reality pictured in HER but at least now you can say “Call my brother!” instead of unlocking your phone, accessing contacts, selecting favorites, scanning a list and finally tapping on your brother’s profile and then phone number. Not bad, huh?

“I believe if we reduce the time between intention and action, it causes a major change in what you can do, period,”
Thad Starner

Imagine if we could deal with machines by removing all the unnecessary actions that take us apart from our purposes.

END

Filling the gap between intention and actions. was originally published in Design Words on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.