I read a number of articles every day, but often find myself forgetting what I read and not putting the ideas in the articles into practice. To remedy that I’m going to start an experiment where I’ll take a more considered approach to the articles I read and purposely highlight what I thought was most interesting and possibly comment why I thought so.
This isn’t meant for anyone other than myself so some posts might seem a bit rambling, disorganized, incoherent, or short.
José Torre recently became a leader of a small design team and shared some interesting thoughts on what he found made his life easier.
Doing that will help people understand where they’re heading and what they should be doing to get there. Imagine that you’re on a boat with several people rowing, if they don’t know where you’re heading, you might end up moving in circles and getting nowhere. With a goal, even if it is a bit fuzzy, you’ll get people rowing in the right direction, and if the original goal is fuzzy, it’s important that as you move towards it, that it starts to become more and more clear.> When you define your goal, it’s good to be realistic on a short term but visionary on a the long run. People need to know what they should be doing now but they also need to understand what’s the ultimate dream, so they can take that into consideration.
When you define your goal, it’s good to be realistic on a short term but visionary on a the long run. People need to know what they should be doing now but they also need to understand what’s the ultimate dream, so they can take that into consideration.
We have a small 3-person team that is creating a design system and I struggle to define the scope of how far out I should communicate an ideal vision. It’s definitely something I’d like to get better at.
I think it’s very important to keep that spark that made someone become a designer alive, and encourage them to go wild sometimes. That crazy idea that your team came up with may never see the light of day because it’s too expensive to build or too dreamy, but maybe, just maybe it will be the thing that inspires an engineer to build something that can be somewhere in between, which ends up being a better experience for your user and something more inspiring for the design team to build upon.
The other reason why I think it’s important to dream is because I really believe that the moment you let all the constraints pull you down it’s the moment you stop innovating.
My web development experience sometimes hampers my design mind and I can slip into more realistic solutions to problems because I understand how they’ll be coded. This is a good reminder to start dreaming larger, especially on those complex problems.