Jon Hicks
Jon Hicks was born on October 28, 1972, inn Leamington Spa and is an English designer who owns his own studio, Hicksdesign. He would be best known for rendering the Firefox logo into its final and most recent form. At age 16 he left school to study Technical Illustration for two years, followed by a Wildlife illustration course. Before setting up his studio, Hicks worked as a designer for the Coventry City Council. It was in 2002 he set up Hicksdesign which became a partnership in 2007 and a limited company the following year as it became more well known.
Hicks would be best known for his work on the Mozilla Firefox and Mozilla Thunderbird logos. He is also credited with work on the logos for Miro, mahalo.com and MailChimp. Hicks created a popular diagram of the CSS Box Model and was the founder of the widely used trick to counter the ‘IE whitespace bug’.
Looking closer at HicksDesign…
HicksDesign is the partnership between Jon and Leigh Hicks. The company works with clients all over the world from the studio in Oxfordshire, since its formation in 2002. While they work mainly digitally and prefer to call themselves graphic designers, they enjoy making physical work with ink, paint and clay.
Some of the services provided by HicksDesign include web and product design where they start the process with wire framing and prototyping which then leads to a final coded design. Another service is looking into brand identity which can be a single logo mark right to a full branding system. Hicks looks to refine and update previous existing logos to help increase the effectiveness. Iconography is a speciality of HicksDesign, working with major brands like Skype, Spotify and Dyson, where the key is to reduce an idea to the simplest form.
“Reductive design. Visual communication without the fluff.”
Examples of work…
PreventEpidemics.org– Hicksdesign worked with the global health initiative, Resolve to Save Lives, where Hicks redeveloped the website so that it was inline with the current climate, focusing on the global COVID-19 pandemic.
Resolve to Save Lives map- working with Resolve to Save Lives again, hicks developed a map to highlight the number of global projects that they were carrying out.
Motorsport iconography- Hicksdesign was drafted to create unified set for a major motorsports broadcaster. Basing the icons off of the brand typeface to keep unity, Hicks developed an icon system for the on screen information graphics.
Spotify iconography- perhaps one of the most well-known work completed by Hicksdesign, Hicks was contacted by the Lead Communications Designer at Spotify to create a new icon set for the music subscription services to coincide with the major redesign of the brand.
Jakob Nielsen
Jakob Nielsen was born on October 5, 1957 and is a Danish web usability consultant, human-computer interaction researcher and co-founder if the Nielsen Norman Group. Nielsen has been names the ‘guru of web page usability’ by the New York Times and the ‘king of usability’ by Internet Magazine. Nielsen has a Ph.D in human-computer interaction from the Technical University of Denmark. During the period between 1994 to 1998, he was hired to be a Sun Microsystems Distinguished Engineer, where his role was to make the heavy-duty enterprise software easier to use.
The terms coined by the New York Times and Internet Magazine come from how Nielsen established the “discount usability engineering” movement. This resulted in improvements to user interfaces which were cheap and fast. As well as this, he has invented multiple usability methods including heuristic evaluation; the process where experts use rules of thumb to measure the usability of user interfaces in independent walkthroughs and then report any issues. This is key to the development process, as the only was to see any faults is by trying the product out itself.
Looking at The Nielsen Norman Group…
The group which has been practicing, researching and teaching for over 20 years, is made up of people whose insights have defined the field of user experience. The group came about after Dan Norman, who first coined the term ‘user experience’ while working at Apple, and Jakob Nielsen, publisher of Usability Engineering, joined forces. At the group they research, write and teach about UX while others orchestrate events and support clients. Some roles include user experience specialist, director of research and insights architect. They have clients in wide ranging fields including in the academic industry with the Universities of Colorado, Florida and Arkansas. In the financial sector, they work alongside Allstate, American Express, Deloitte and PayPal, and with many well know online services such as Broadway.com, Club Penguin, eBay and Hertz.
https://www.interaction-design.org/literature/topics/heuristic-evaluation
https://www.nngroup.com/people/jakob-nielsen/
Tim Brown
Tim Brown was born on June 24, 1962 and is an industrial designer. Brown is currently the char of the company IDEO.com. It is a non-profit design studio who design products and services alongside organisations that are committed to creating a more just and inclusive world. He would speak regularly about the values of utilising the combination of design thinking, creative leadership and innovation to business leader and designers all over the world.
Brown is very accomplished, having earned numerous design awards and has had his work exhibited in museums all over the world including the Axis Gallery in Tokyo, the Design Museum in London and the Museum of Modern Art in New York. He takes special interest in combining technology with the arts, which is very current with how technology is now a part of everyday life, adding a modern touch to artwork. Another aspect of Brown’s style is how he focuses on how design can be used as a way to promote the well-being of people living in emerging economies. Design to Brown is not just to view and look at, but to also spread and encourage important messages. As a result, he is a leading voice on the value of having design thinking in business and society. Brown has contributed to some standard-setting innovations with his involvement with IDEO, including the first mouse for Apple, the Palm V and Bank of America’s ‘Keep the Change’ service. 