In class we were instructed to do Pocket Profiles which involved researching, different designers that were mentioned during lectures and writing a brief summary about them.
Tim Brown –
Tim Brown is a web designer and typographer. He is currently the head of typography at Adobe which means he helps users to obtain and use different fonts.
Brown has written a book called Flexible Typesetting, about how to make websites and apps look better, and how the web has changed typography. Brown also attends conferences about about how to practice, and how good typography is good for business, he also speaks at these conferences.
Vic Bell –
Vic Bell is an illustrator, iconographer and brand designer. Bell works as a senior illustrator for Gitlab (similar to Github, it is a Git repository hosting service) but also has a passion project called Bear (which is similar to a notes app where you can write down information and stay organized). Bell has worked with a range of different brands and corporations such as Scratch, Blink, Burberry and Uber. Her most recent project was working with Teamwork and creating entire illustration styles for them
Pattern Studios –
Pattern Studios are a company that are passionate about human-centred design. They create the interfaces between people and technology, this could be web interfaces, software, services or applications. They have a list of eight design principles that they follow, which are –
- start with customer insights.
- build a business.
- waste not, want not.
- think big. start small. learn fast.
- design in context, not in isolation.
- design with data.
- do the hard work to make it simple.
- be consistent, not uniform.
Universal Everything –
Universal Everything is a collective of digital artists and experience designers. On their website you can view different digital art, apps, designs etc. that they have created. They appear to be very creative and they seem to think outside of the box in a cool imaginative way.
Wolfgang Weingart –
Wolfgang Weingart is a graphic designer and typographer that is often credited to be the founder of New Wave. Weingart used the International Typographic Style in order to help create the New Wave. He was quoted saying “I took ‘Swiss Typography’ as my starting point, but then I blew it apart, never forcing any style upon my students. I never intended to create a ‘style’. It just happened that the students picked up—and misinterpreted—a so-called ‘Weingart style’ and spread it around.”
We were told about Abstract: The Art of Design series. The series allows you to have an insight into the minds of some of the most creative and innovative designers in a variety of disciplines and it shows you how design is also a part impacts every aspect of life. I really enjoyed watching Abstract as it made me view things in a different way. I thought about things that I had not even considered before.
Season Two – Ian Splatter: Digital Product Design
What I learned from the episode:-
Humanity views the world visually and we have a transformational experience on our phones. Design is everywhere but sometimes we don’t notice, everything we use is designed in some way.
When Ian Splatter was working for Instagram to redesign the logo and app he asked for three months where his team could work in peace and silence in a darkened room, where they could go through various possibilities and ideas and could better everything that they were working on. Splatter would get his team to draw the Instagram logo from memory within 10 seconds at the start of each meeting. This helped reveal a lot to them as they started to see peoples designs and also noticed similarities between the sketches the main similarity being that almost everyone 
remembered the rainbow dash at the top of the old Instagram logo. This eventually led them to the current design that is used today. As well as simplifying the logo Splatter also simplified the actual app and features by stripping everything down and taking away the colours used within the app. This change made peoples photos the centre of the user experience, When the redesign first launched, everyone hated the logo and update, Instagram received a lot of backlash from everyone but now its iconic to their brand and personally I can not see it any other way.
They refer to their designers “product designers” as designing is not just about the user experience but it can also be about the product strategy which is something that the designers also have to consider. The designers have to think about how things connect, move and flow.
Redesign is very important to get right and it usually requires a lot of testing. When done bad it can cost a business, an example of this is when Snapchat updated their app and it ended up costing them $1 billion. Redesigns needs to be embraced by the community, it needs to be liked by the people more than what came before it.