the-evolution-of-the-marketing-technologist:-how-martech-roles-have-changed-during-the-last-5-years

Five years ago, marketing technologist roles were, arguably, in their infancy. At the risk of being nostalgic, it was a simpler time for our industry: the martech landscape was comprised of a mere 1,000 solutions and nobody had even heard of Cambridge Analytica. Adobe hadn’t bought Magento or Marketo and LinkedIn hadn’t yet joined the Microsoft family.

Fast forward to today, as we approach our seventh annual MarTech Conference, that martech landscape now has over 7,000 solutions, with new product launches and integrations happening daily. As the martech taxonomy continues to expand, so do the roles charged with implementing and managing our martech stacks. Marketing technologists are no longer considered “the outsider” among the broader marketing organization, but instead play a key role within the marketing organization. Martech is now marketing and marketing technologists are, simply, marketers.

“The field of marketing technologists has expanded enormously over the past five years,” said Scott Brinker, MarTech Conference chair and the voice behind ChiefMartec.com. He accounts the exponential growth to the massive adoption of martech that is happening across organizations of all sizes. “Gartner recently stated 26% of enterprise marketing budgets are being allocated toward martech,” said Brinker, “You need talented people to implement and harness all that technology, and there’s a lot of room for specialization.”

Specialization is a key factor when considering the marketing technologist role — the more specialized marketing technology solutions become, the more talent is needed to take full advantage of the available platforms and solutions. But when looking at the growing list of marketing technologist titles across the ever-widening martech landscape, it is crucial we understand as an industry which roles are the primary drivers of marketing technology and its place within the marketing organization. Of course, there are the leaders — the chief marketing technologists and other C-level executives driving the martech ship — but how have roles evolved since we first started separating marketing technology from the IT department?

Marketing technologist roles: v2.0

Five years ago, Brinker came up with a list of six primary marketing technologist roles. The roles, or “archetypes” as Brinker labeled them, were based on a survey he and former SapientNitro CTO Sheldon Monteiro conducted via Chiefmartec.com readers and attendees at the inaugural MarTech Conference in Boston. After a recent conversation with Marketing Land’s VP of Content, Henry Powderly, Brinker decided it was time to revisit the roles he had defined more than five years ago.

“Coming back to the concept of marketing technologist archetypes five years later, the split between ‘marketing focus’ and ‘technology focus’ didn’t resonate as much because technology has become much more deeply infused into the marketing organization overall,” said Brinker, ” I decided to step back and try a fresh approach to identifying the dimensions on which different marketing technologist roles focus.”

In the latest version of Brinker’s marketing technologist archetypes, the list has been narrowed from six to four roles: Operations Orchestrator, Brand/Demand Builder, Analytics Architect and Marketing Maker.

Scott Brinker’s Marketing Technologist Archetypes

One of the things that stood out to Brinker when revisiting his original marketing technologist archetypes, was the lack of marketing operations roles.

“Marketing operations has grown tremendously as a discipline over the past five years as a real hotbed of marketing technologist talent,” said Brinker. The explosive growth happening within marketing operations can be attributed to the fact that, as a function, it is what “keeps the trains running” for marketing technology teams, according to Brinker.

The four primary marketing technologist roles

As the number of martech solutions continues to grow — martech roles have become more systematic in the ways they are connected. Brinker recalls, during the original concept of the martech archetypes, he felt somewhat lost when trying to connect the roles. In Brinker’s latest iteration, the four quadrants separating the martech roles are independent of each other, but it’s clear how the roles are connected now.

The Brand/Demand Builder is the usually the marketer using martech to conduct their work, implementing different platforms to run and manage marketing campaigns. Brinker says the vast majority of marketing technologists fall into this category.

The Operations Orchestrator is responsible for implementing and managing martech systems. They are the “maestros” according to Brinker, the ones who support all the other martech roles and are often given a “marketing operations” or “CRM/MAP admin” title.

Brinker defines the Analytics Architect as “modellers” who focus on the structure and infrastructure of data collected by the marketing organization. Usually known within the team as the “marketing analyst,” “data scientist” or “data engineer,” the analytics architects are rarely found at smaller companies, and instead, are part of martech teams within larger enterprises with the resources to dive into the data.

The Marketing Maker, located in the bottom right quadrant, is the builder of custom apps and digital experiences. They have titles like “web developer” and “marketing engineer” and are usually part of the teams working with code. Although, with the latest crop of no-code and low-code martech solutions, Marketing Makers don’t necessarily have to be the expert coders they once were.

The martech leaders

What’s not listed within these four quadrants are the leaders who oversee the entire martech organization — the executives defining strategy and aligning marketing technology goals with the overall marketing and business objectives. Brinker has devised a fifth archetype — The Manager — to fit this role, an executive who essentially oversees the breadth of the marketing technology and operation teams.

Some businesses have added this leadership role to the C-suite, hiring chief marketing technology officers to work alongside their chief marketing officer. But lately, we’ve seen a trend with major brands dropping the CMO role for chief digital officers and chief customer officers — both of which often oversee the marketing technology function. (Sheldon Monteiro, who helped Brinker come up with the original marketing technologist roles in 2014 is now a chief product officer at Publicis Sapient.) Other organizations have opted to onboard vice presidents or directors of marketing technology and marketing operations who report to the CMO.

How the archetypes align with each other

Brinker believes everything in marketing should ultimately be centered around the customer. “That said, there is a lot of marketing technologist type work that serves internal stakeholders in the service of building a great customer-centric business. It’s the ‘back-stage’ workflows, processes, analytics, infrastructure, systems, etc. that enable customer-facing activities in marketing to be more successful,” said Brinker.

With this in mind, he arranged the four marketing technologist roles along an X and Y axis. The Y-axis, which moves from process orientation to technology orientation, separates processes like workflows and customer journeys from technology capabilities such as data engineering and coding. The X-axis stems from the question: Does the role primarily serve internal stake holders or customers?

“There’s a ton of marketing technologist work that touches customers directly on the ‘front-stage’ of the business,” said Brinker, “Personalized campaigns, web and mobile apps, chatbots, conversion optimization — the X-axis in this framework looks across that spectrum of internal orientation to external orientation activities because, while they are deeply entwined, they are different kinds of activities that apply different skills.”

Brinker acknowledges the four archetypes attached to each of the quadrants are not always completely separate roles, and that nearly every marketing technologist connects across all of the quadrants to some degree. The newly defined roles are meant to show how marketing technologists, in general, lean toward distinctly different areas within the martech organization.

A work in progress

The martech industry is pushing forward at a tremendous speed. As stated earlier, the marketing technology landscape is more than seven-times the size it was in 2014, with new solutions — and integrations — being launched daily. The first half of 2019 saw 246 mergers and acquisitions, a steep rise from the 162 deals that happened during the same time period in 2018.

Exponential growth is the nature of technology and martech is no different — every new iteration of a martech solution aims to improve upon itself, resulting in an accelerated rate of progress. And with every new evolution cycle, the marketing technologists tasked with managing it all will have to evolve as well. There is no “final” list of primary marketing technologist roles — as the industry changes so will the players.

As Brinker so eloquently puts it when looking at how these roles will continue to evolve, “Everyone has a horizon that keeps pushing the industry forward.”



About The Author

Amy Gesenhues is a senior editor for Third Door Media, covering the latest news and updates for Marketing Land, Search Engine Land and MarTech Today. From 2009 to 2012, she was an award-winning syndicated columnist for a number of daily newspapers from New York to Texas. With more than ten years of marketing management experience, she has contributed to a variety of traditional and online publications, including MarketingProfs, SoftwareCEO, and Sales and Marketing Management Magazine. Read more of Amy’s articles.



anatomy-of-a-logo:-the-star-wars-logo-evolution


star wars logo

This is referencing a super detailed blog post by Alex Jay, that covers every variation of the Star Wars emblem, badge, lettering, and logos.

I had no idea so many variations were used prior to the famous final logo designed by Suzi Rice.

I’m not going to expand or even attempt to belittle Alex’s post, except to very briefly summarise the key stages in the Star Wars logo design evolution.

For the full detailed commentary, with lots of photos visit Alex’s post a breathtaking examination of the Star Wars branding:

Anatomy of a Logo: The Star Wars

My plan is that I’m going to pick one image from Alex’s post that is representative of each the logos iteration. This post is brief, but hopefully shows you a quick look at how the logo evolved.

Logo #1: Film’s pre-production decal

Anatomy of a Logo: The Star Wars Logo Evolution by Alex Jay

During the film’s pre-production, a decal (above) was produced. In the first Official Star Wars Fan Club newsletter, reprinted in the Star Wars Scrapbook (Chronicle Books, 1991), there was an explanation about the decal by Ralph McQuarrie, who did the art.

Logo #2: Corporate Letterhead Version

star wars logo letterhead

The decal designed by Ralph McQuarrie was dropped, and a new version was used for the coporate letterhead, which was designed by Joe Johnston.

Notice that the figure & sun illustration, from Ralphs first decal, was still used with the new lettering designed by Joe, for the letterhead.

Below: Banner with the revised logo with a super young Mark Hamill at the 1976 San Diego Comic Con.

Anatomy of a Logo: The Star Wars Logo Evolution by Alex Jay

Logo #3: Book Cover art using Helvetica

star wars logo in Helvetica

Yes it’s true! Helvetica even made it into a Star Wars logo.

In December 1976, a novelization of Lucas’s screenplay, ghost-written by Alan Dean Foster, was published by Ballantine Books. The cover art was by McQuarrie and the cover fonts are from the Helvetica family.

Logo #4: Vanishing Point Logo

vanishing point star wars logo

The 4th variation of the Star Wars logo was designed by Dan Perri, which was meant to be used for the opening sequence, but it was not used.

Instead, it was used for various print posters and advertisements.

This is where we start to see the more familiar look of the modern day Star Wars logo, but it took 2 more designers to end up with the final Star Wars logo.

Logo #5: The New Star Wars Logo

Star-Wars-logo-designed-by-Suzy-Rice

This is where we get to the more familiar version of the Star Wars logo, and this version was designed by Suzi Race.

George Lucas turned to Suzi to design the logo, which is documented in the Star Wars Poster Book (Chronicle Books, 2005):

“…Though the poster contained no painted imagery, it did introduce a new logo to the campaign, one that had been designed originally for the cover of a Fox brochure sent to theater owners….Suzy Rice, who had just been hired as an art director, remembers the job well. She recalls that the design directive given by Lucas was that the logo should look “very fascist.”

“I’d been reading a book the night before the meeting with George Lucas,” she says, “a book about German type design and the historical origins of some of the popular typefaces used today—how they developed into what we see and use in the present.” After Lucas described the kind of visual element he was seeking, “I returned to the office and used what I reckoned to be the most ‘fascist’ typeface I could think of: Helvetica Black.”

Inspired by the typeface, Rice developed a hand-drawn logo that translated well to the poster campaign, and ultimately to the movie itself. “I did have the screen in mind when I drew the logo originally,” explains Rice, who “stacked and squared” the words to better fit the brochure cover. It was an aesthetic choice that has lasted nearly three decades.

The now-familiar “S” ligature extensions that Rice drew were modified a bit after Lucas “remarked that it read like ‘Tar Wars,’” says Rice. “He asked me to make some revisions on the leading and concluding ‘S’.

Logo #6: The New Star Wars Logo Revised

Anatomy of a Logo: The Star Wars Logo Evolution by Alex Jay

Although Suzi Race is credited for designing the Star Wars logo, it did take a few tweaks from Joe Johnston to create the final final version of the Star Wars logo.

The most noticeable change being to the W, along with some other lettering tweaks.

Suzi’s version top, and Joe’s version bottom:

Anatomy of a Logo: The Star Wars Logo Evolution by Alex Jay

The End

So there we sort of have it.

I’ve literally condensed down Alex jay’s comprehensive breakdown into just a few images, but you really must visit Alex’s thorough post to see all many images and explanations for each of the versions.

But today is the day I first realised that Helvetica was used, in a very small part, as a Star Wars logo.

Anatomy of a Logo: The Star Wars Logo Evolution by Alex Jay



Meta

Written by: Graham Smith: The Logo Smith



1st Posted: 2020/01/06 & Post Updated: 2020/01/06



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the-evolution-of-material-design’s-text-fields

How user research reshaped the design of Google’s open-source text fields

Susanna Zaraysky

New Material Text Field

New Material Text Field

Designed by David Allin Reese

This article was co-written with Michael Gilbert, Senior User Experience Researcher on the Material Design team.

You might not always notice, but Material Design is constantly evolving and iterating based on research. We recently received an inquiry about why the style of Material text fields changed in 2017, and we’re taking this opportunity to share a behind-the-scenes glimpse into our research process. Here’s the story of how data improved Google’s text fields.

Text fields with normal with hint text, hover, press, focus, normal with input text, error, and disabled states

Text fields with normal with hint text, hover, press, focus, normal with input text, error, and disabled states

Text fields before the 2017 redesign

Why did the text fields need a makeover?

A text field is one of the most common ways for users to enter and edit text in forms and dialogs. However, some users didn’t know that they could interact with and click on the text field. It looked like an empty box. The line affordance under the old text fields was not clear to some users. The line was confused with a divider. The label and input were confused with body text, especially in dense compositions.

Multi-line input text with unclear line affordance

Multi-line input text with unclear line affordance

Unclear line affordance in old text fields

Material Design’s goal was to determine how to improve the text field to make it more distinguishable, easier to read, and more understandable — with a more clear touch target. We wanted users to be able to fill out a form correctly and quickly.

Research

To improve the usability of text fields and to determine which text field variables to alter, our researchers and designers conducted two studies between November 2016 and February 2017, with actual users.

Study One had three tests, plus a preference ranking. There were 158 participants ( 45 pilot participants).

sample filled and empty text fields

sample filled and empty text fields

Participants were asked to find a specific text field, such as “Item L.” They also clicked on both filled and empty text fields.

The goal of this first study was straightforward — we wanted to compare the design of the original text field with three distinct alternatives. In presenting users with this range of options, having them click through simple, complex, and even realistic task-based forms, we were aiming to get a sense of the styles of design that worked best, rather than aiming to find any single best individual text field.

For each of the possible text fields, and for each form type that we had designed, the team timed how long it took participants to find and click the proper text field. To make sure that participants couldn’t learn and predict where text field alternatives might show up during the test, we randomized the order in which we presented those text fields.

At the end of Study One, participants ranked the possible four text field alternatives in order of their visual preference.

Study Two had two tests, plus a preference ranking.There were 400 participants.

Where Study One aimed to determine a broad direction for design to focus, Study Two was intended to zero in on what, exactly, the new Material text field should look like. For this study, instead of looking at 4 individual text field prototypes, we built a custom tool that would allow us to test the individual characteristics of text field design. For instance, with this tool we were able to vary between text field “box style”, label location, contrast, and border styles. In all, we looked at 7 text field characteristics, with over 140 possible text fields that could result from combinations of those characteristics.

Text fields label in the below, embedded and above locations

Text fields label in the below, embedded and above locations

Example illustration for the “Label Location” text field characteristic

After the timed tests, participants ranked their preferred text field style. The participants answered 20 questions.

To determine which text field variations were preferred and the most effective, the researcher and designer team found ways to map user behavior to these three factors:

  1. Identifiability: The number of correct versus incorrect clicks
  2. Find-ability / scan-ability: The time it took a participant to find and click on a requested element
  3. Preference: Participants rank-ordered each text field variation

There wasn’t a maximum time for any of the tasks, participants could ask for help over email if possible (but none did). The team collected data about what participants clicked on via heatmaps.

Main findings

Text field with rounded corner, label inside, box, lines and strokes and semi-transparent fill

Text field with rounded corner, label inside, box, lines and strokes and semi-transparent fill

The new text field has: a text field box, semi-transparent fill, proper color contrast, rounded corners, and a label inside. Designed by David Allin Reese

The results of the two studies showed that these elements of text fields were of most value:

  • Enclosed text fields with a rectangular (box) shape performed better than those with a line affordance
  • The text field box should be represented with a semi-transparent fill and a bottom line or with a fully transparent fill and an opaque stroke.
  • Color contrast of the text field’s lines or strokes met the minimum 3:1 contrast ratios with the background
  • Label text should be placed within the bounds of the text field box
  • Text fields should have rounded corners

Conclusions:

Text field before the makeover

Text field after makeover

And there you have it. Redesigning the text fields involved around 600 participants, two designers, and one researcher. Today, these new text fields appear across Google products from account sign-in pages to Google forms. Given the approach described above, we were able to do more than simply tackle usability issues of the previous text fields one by one. We were able to test an entire range of possible text fields, to identify the specific design characteristics that performed well or performed poorly, and to provide our designers not just with a single best text field, but a set of options — each of which we could show to be more beautiful, and more usable than the original.



The Prolific Evolution Of The 3M Logo Design, 1978 (above)

We start this logo evolution of the 3M logo with the most recent which was introduced back in 1978.  Possible winner of logo with the most logo updates?

The evolution of the 3M logo looks like a successful exercise in yo-yo backwards-forwards brand logo design. We zip from round contained logo designs (1938) to plain typographic designs (1937), oval contained designs (1952) and frilly leave edged designs (1954).

From this linear display it really does look a little random.

Some of the logos are clearly alternative lock-ups rather than different logo designs which I presume are the ones labeled: I, II, III & IV, as well providing alternative designs for other 3M sub brands? Need to research this more closely.

What’s interesting is to see how close they got to the current logo design back in 1937 & 1952 with a typographic solution.

Some of the middle era designs are just rather odd when you compare to designs previously used as well as the actual technical accuracy of them.

And what the hell happened in 1961?

The Prolific Evolution Of The 3M Logo Design, 1906-2012

Evolution 3M Logo Design 1978

Evolution of the 3M Logo – 1978

Evolution 3M Logo 1961 III

Evolution of the 3M Logo – 1961 II

Evolution 3M Logo 1961 I

Evolution of the 3M Logo – 1961 I

Evolution of the 3M Logo – 1960 II

Evolution of the 3M Logo – 1960 I

Evolution of the 3M Logo – 1958

Evolution of the 3M Logo – 1957

Evolution of the 3M Logo – 1956

Evolution of the 3M Logo - 1955 II

Evolution of the 3M Logo – 1955  II

Evolution of the 3M Logo - 1955 I

Evolution of the 3M Logo – 1955 I

Evolution of the 3M Logo - 1954 IV

Evolution of the 3M Logo Design – 1954 IV

Evolution of the 3M Logo - 1954 III

Evolution of the 3M Logo Design – 1954 III

Evolution of the 3M Logo Design - 1954 II

Evolution of the 3M Logo – 1954 II

Evolution of the 3M Logo Design - 1954 I

Evolution of the 3M Logo – 1954 I

Evolution of the 3M Logo Design - 1953

Evolution of the 3M Logo – 1953

Evolution of the 3M Logo - 1952 IV

Evolution of the 3M Logo – 1952 IV

Evolution of the 3M Logo - 1952 III

Evolution of the 3M Logo – 1952 III

Evolution of the 3M Logo Design - 1952 II

Evolution of the 3M Logo – 1952 II

Evolution of the 3M Logo Design - 1952 I

Evolution of the 3M Logo – 1952 I

Evolution of the 3M Logo Design - 1951

Evolution of the 3M Logo – 1951

Evolution of the 3M Logo Design - 1950

Evolution of the 3M Logo – 1950

Evolution of the 3M Logo Design - 1948

Evolution of the 3M Logo Design – 1948

Evolution of the 3M Logo Design - 1944 II

Evolution of the 3M Logo – 1944 II

Evolution of the 3M Logo Design - 1944 I

Evolution of the 3M Logo – 1944 I

Evolution of the 3M Logo Design - 1942

Evolution of the 3M Logo – 1942

Evolution of the 3M Logo Design - 1938

Evolution of the 3M Logo – 1938

Evolution of the 3M Logo Design - 1937

Evolution of the 3M Logo – 1937

Evolution of the 3M Logo Design - 1926 II

Evolution of the 3M Logo – 1926 II

Evolution of the 3M Logo Design - 1926 I

Evolution of the 3M Logo – 1926 I

Evolution of the 3M Logo Design - 1906

Evolution of the 3M Logo – 1906

Found on Retronaut who provided this selection of 3M logos: Evolution of the 3M Logo

You might also like the Evolution Of The Batman Logo 1941-2007 by Rodrigo Rojas




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Logo & Brand Identity Design by Freelance Logo Designer The Logo Smith.

If you like the Logo & Brand Identity Design work I have done in my Portfolio, and The Gallery and Monomarks, and are looking to hire yourself a Highly Talented, and Super Experienced (27 Years), Freelance Logo & Brand Identity Designer, then look no further. Visit Hire Me, and fill in the Design Brief, or just Contact me.

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stack-evolution:-cancel-those-credit-cards-and-put-a-process-in-place

Over the last five to 10 years, companies have been spending more and more on technology to acquire, engage and retain customers. Increased pressure to achieve revenue and customer lifetime value objectives, a noisy marketing environment, and proliferation of new marketing technology tools, has created a perfect climate for technology experimentation, adoption and spending. In many cases, everyone in the organization – through the power of a credit card – has become a technology purchaser. Without discipline and strategy, this leads to excessive spending, duplicate purchases, redundant functionality and limited technology utilization.

With technology now consuming 29% of the marketing budget, companies are putting the brakes on independent purchasing and tasking marketing with establishing a formal technology evaluation and purchasing process that ensures that the ROI for technology purchases is aligned with business performance and objectives. 

I’m surprised at how recent this process development is for many companies and thought it would be interesting to pull together a group of marketing operations leaders who have been tasked with developing a purchasing process to discuss how they approached this activity, and to learn what’s worked, what hasn’t, and what the challenges were along the way. We’ll be diving into this during our Martech panel, Avoiding Random Acts of Martech on Sept. 18, but here’s a sneak peek at some of the issues they’ve had to grapple with.

Stakeholders

Who are the stakeholders, and what are their responsibilities? How many are too many? How do you avoid being bogged down by naysayers? How do you stop bureaucracy creeping into the system?

One or more processes

Is it possible to create a single process that supports the evaluation and purchasing of an expensive, complex product such as a marketing automation platform and is at the same time flexible enough to handle a $9.99 subscription for a product with limited features?

Distributed versus centralized purchasing

What’s the best organizational approach to technology purchasing – distributed or centralized? What are the advantages and disadvantages of each? I’d vote for distributed purchasing with centralized oversight – it will be interesting to hear what my panelists think.

Best of breed versus single solution versus platform ecosystem

I happen to believe that the best approach to purchasing technology is a combination of best of breed, single solution and platform ecosystem but many organizations are hamstrung by opposing ideological beliefs. How do you work through a fundamental issue such as this?  

Closing the gate after everyone has bolted

It would be nice to start with a clean slate and build a new process on top of that; the reality is that for most of us we are jumping into an environment that has been operating without a process for years. Where do you start? Is it necessary to go back and rationalize all the purchase decisions that have been made to move forward, or do you focus on the future? 

Priority management

It used to be that the number of products that could be purchased was gated by how many the IT department could install in any given period. Today, most products don’t require IT support, so how do you handle competing requests for new products? Is there a limit to the number of new products that can be integrated into the stack in any given year? Is it necessary to retire one product to bring in another? 

Keeping everyone heading in the right direction

Several marketing operations executives have told me that it is an ongoing challenge to keep everyone moving in the right direction and adhering to a process. I’ve heard it described as herding cats or playing an eternal game of Whack-a-Mole. How do you keep everyone engaged in the process? How do you avoid renegade purchasing?

I’m sure there will be a lively discussion among our panelists with input from the audience. These are the nuts-and-bolts issues that are so important to developing and executing a coherent strategy.

I am looking forward to seeing everyone on the 18th!

More about the MarTech Conference


Opinions expressed in this article are those of the guest author and not necessarily Marketing Land. Staff authors are listed here.



About The Author

CabinetM, a marketing technology management platform that helps marketing teams manage the technology they have and find the technology they need. A long-time technology marketer, Anita has led marketing teams from company inception to IPO and acquisition. She is the author of the Attack Your Stack and Merge Your Stacks workbooks that have been written to assist marketing teams in building and managing their technology stacks, a monthly columnist for CMS Wire, speaks frequently about marketing technology, and has been recognized as one of 50 Women You Need to Know in MarTech.




the-evolution-of-visual-design-and-tech?s-designer-renaissance

With a background in visual design, I got my start as an interaction designer working on software that allowed users to professionally print and produce their work via a digital workflow. Most of this was not web-based. This was software running on the OS, the “thick client.” The visual scope of what a designer could do was limited because there already was a design framework established for each operating system. Mac, Windows, and Linux all had their own behaviors and design language. What worked for the lickable glossiness of OSX Aqua may not work for the warm tans and rigid profile of Windows NT or dimensionality of Vista or cool flat grays of Linux. They each had their own styles, behaviors, standards and even user cultures to respect.

Training your eyes to ask why

For a visual designer, the illustrative craft was exhibited in application and toolbar icons, splash screens and the side panels of installation wizards. The principles of visual design were applied to the structuring of content and controls, the affordance of those controls and understanding when to use those controls. The exciting new layer to all this was asking why. Sure, there is no visual hierarchy and the row of controls are not aligned but why are they here in the first place? Is there a more efficient way to access a feature? Do we even need this feature?

The big switch for me as a designer was no longer just thinking about how things looked but about how users felt. This was the entrance to understanding the reality and purpose of a digital product. How users, including customers, feel about your product (which for software is the brand) is directly related to how the interface looks and behaves.

Who are we designing for?

I learned about Cooper because it was the only place that was creating a process for how you design for humans, and they already knew visual design was key to that process. This was before the world fully understood that user-centered design was transformative.

The founder of Cooper, Alan Cooper wrote the books on interaction design that were being consumed by product managers and students taking classes on the subject. Degrees in human computer interaction are common now, and design thinking is a popular concept, seeded by the original design tools centered around people (like personas and scenarios) that Alan invented. 

When visual design met business

Being a designer at a tech company pre-iPhone was strange and rare unless you were in marketing or advertising. So being the first designers for our clients while learning how their business worked (or didn’t) through the lens of their customers and users was powerful. Design was making businesses relevant by forging a better relationship between their services and technology and the humans who experienced them.

Discussions of visual design can make many people uncomfortable; it’s a language that isn’t often deemed worthwhile to learn. There wasn’t trust in the value visual design brings to business or if it could be considered real work. It has taken a while for visual design to gain a voice. 

The world tilts towards the light of the screen

In today’s visually immersive media culture, in which we consume ever more information through the digital products we use, people have become more visually sophisticated. The efficiency of visual communication manifests in emoji, GIFs, and memes.

Apple changed the world radically by bringing design into the spotlight as a differentiator. Clients would tell me, “We want to be the iPod of medical software.” Visual designers showed the world they could make more than pretty pictures, and it wasn’t necessary, appropriate, or fair to expect engineers to take that work on. Apple also introduced a new canvas for visual designers and an ecosystem for a new kind of app development. 

Visual designers are building out the visual language that supports and informs a fully-fledged design system.

The improved experience of software created with the aid of a visual designer became strikingly apparent. Enterprise tools were craving some VisD love, but it was the explosion of mobile that really opened up opportunities for visual designers to help create five-star apps with longevity and brand loyalty.

A matter of visual literacy

Want to boost your organization’s visual literacy? Communicate why everyday products and services are successful. Use the principles of art and design to explain why a product looks and feels the way it does.

Communicating the difference between product and marketing is also important. For mobile startups, the design of the product is the brand, so it’s important to understand why there’s a difference between the two. Visual design for product is meant to support interaction and experience – it’s not there to market the product.

New challenges in the widespread appreciation of visual design

A visual designer’s responsibility is to get into why something is working or not working and move away from subjectivity, communicating clearly. 

The more attuned we are to something the more likely it will be copied. Enter homogeneity and the current flat aesthetic of visual design. To have personality we need illustration, motion, sound, a real focus on voice and tone and a visual strategy that maps it all out. 

It’s hard for companies to take risks in how they present themselves visually, and I don’t see a lot of companies taking risks to stand out. I see a lot of rebrands, and they all feel the same. 

Discernment for the future

Beyond a single touchpoint, visual designers are building out the visual language that supports and informs a fully-fledged design system. Such systems are intentionally built and designed to blueprint the uniqueness of a brand and its products. The breadth and depth of visual design that was once relegated to the operating system can know be seen in UX and visual design-forward companies with robust visual systems, like Airbnb, Atlassian, Lyft and Mailchimp. 

We are in a designer’s market, and technology is experiencing a designer renaissance.

If visual design becomes automated or homogenous onscreen, it’s the experiences outside of that screen that will differentiate, and with that visual designers are well equipped to address this because their eyes and their senses are trained to notice the fine details of creating and communicating an experience. They’re attuned to the fidelity of a micro-interaction and also understand when something becomes a moment. That sensitivity to nuance that was brought to the screen offers unlimited opportunities offscreen.

The final pixel

Today, we are in a designer’s market, and technology is experiencing a designer renaissance. We seem to have learned the most measurable value of all: what differentiates one experience from another is simply achieving one’s goal. Whether the goal is work- or leisure-related, it’s about accomplishing what you’re working toward. Visual design is more than icing; though without the icing, a cupcake is just a dry muffin. And nobody wants your dry muffin. 

custom illustration showing two muffins and one cupcake with sprinkles

For more Journal articles on this topic, read “Three unexpected benefits of learning the core elements of visual design” and “Beyond the pixel: Measuring visual designers’ strategic value.”

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