Colin Harman

Who is Mark Boulton?
Mark Boulton is a graphic designer living in South Wales with his wife and two daughters.

He currently runs a small design studio, Mark Boulton Design, where he works with clients such as ESPN, Warner Bros, BBC, British Energy and Drupal. In the past, he has worked for the BBC and Agency.com designing wonderful experiences for all manner of clients and people across the world. He is also co-founder of small publishing imprint, Five Simple Steps, where they publish practical design books for the web community.

Mark has gifted the typographic community with an abbreviated but insightful series of writings about how to better one’s typographic prowess. They’re from a while back, but quite worth the read if you ever spend time setting type in any form, whether for print or web. It has definitely enhanced the framework I use to set type. I’d say more, but I would rather you spend the time reading the articles.

So without any further rambling I present the “Simple Steps…” series:

• Part 1: Measure the Measure
• Part 2: Hanging Punctuation
• Part 3: Ligatures
• Part 4: Typographic Hierarchy – size
• Part 5: Typographic Hierarchy – weight

Getting clarity is tough. At times it’s quite a battle. Having to navigate the murky waters of the creative process riddled with dozens of opinions, personal preferences, and mis-information can cause your motivation and zeal toward the chance of creating something new to capsize under the lack of clear direction. There is little more discouraging than realizing all that could be done, yet having no clear direction as to which path to take.

Clarity is crucial. But can we realistically expect clients to know exactly what they want? If they knew exactly what they wanted, why wouldn’t they just make it themselves? I’m not saying designers have all the answers, but one thing we most definitely should be armed with is great questions. After all, it’s tough to find great answers when you’re not asking great questions. Figure out what you really need to know, then discover the answers together with the client. This is normal in many other fields, but for whatever reason that reality gets skewed in the design world.

A typical client coming to you and proceeding to tell you exactly what they want their design project to look like would be like an everyman telling a surgeon exactly how they would like their liver transplant done. It doesn’t work that way. In the same way that people go to doctors for professional surgery backed by years of schooling, mentoring, training, and experience to help them solve a difficult problem that is beyond their ability, so should people entrust designers. It would be absurd for you to go to a friend’s step-son for a critical surgery simply because he has a scalpal, yet it’s widely accepted to do just that when the same step-kid has a pirated copy of Photoshop.

Now hear me out, I’ll say again designers do not have all the answers, but designers do want you to have the best solution possible for your needs. However, designers can’t know all your needs unless we grill you with questions. Contrary to common practice, they shouldn’t just be questions for the client to tell what he or she wants, but more to show what tough question they are trying to answer. Often they’re trying to answer their own question then telling you to make their answer, when really they should present their question (problem) so the best answer can be discovered together.

Often the answer they bring is something like “We need a new website so people will buy more of our [insert product/service name here].” When really it would make more sense for them to come and say something like “We’d like to boost our sales/traffic/clients. Looking at our company how could we best do this in the world of [web/print/ads/billboards/e-mail/etc]?”

At this point the designer needs to be ready not to give answers, but to ask more questions. Great questions. Questions that help him discover what the company/client is all about. How they think, what they do, what they don’t do, what they’re good at, what they’re bad at, why they want more sales, and throughout this process attempt to have a better understanding of “the question/problem” than the client. Maybe they don’t need a direct mail coupon campaign, instead they need an e-mail campaign because their clients are not in the demographic that often gets mail (teens). Maybe they need well-designed billboard ads around town to raise their awareness rather than another 1″×2″ ad in the local PennySaver. Maybe their customer service stinks, and no matter how many new clients they happen to bring in, they’ll eventually lose every one of them. Maybe they don’t even need a website redesign, they just need more memorable branding. There has to be strategy, there are no quick fixes.

However, none of these [more appropriate] solutions would ever be uncovered without the asking of the right questions, extra questions, maybe even too many questions. This will save you innumerable hours of redesign, scrapped projects, and frustration when you seek to know as much as possible about where you’re going before you even push a single pixel.

Go above and beyond. Clarity is not easy. It’s not your client’s job to bring all the answers, that’s a part of why they’re bringing in a creative designer. Make them glad they did.

Learn who you are working for, with, and alongside of to unearth not just another good solution, but a great, clear, and concise solution that meets and succeeds their actual need. Directional clarity is often unearthed by first asking great questions rather than trying to just provide an answer.

Let’s talk about Shampoo & Conditioner.

Is it just me or does everyone else grab the conditioner bottle first by accident 99.99% of the time? Could they not design these bottles even the slightest bit different? Writing shampoo or conditioner in 3pt script font does not constitute a variation I can decipher while I am in the steamy, dimly lit privacy of my shower environment.

I have a feeling the people at SoapyHead Industries are sitting in their big gushy office chairs laughing at all of us trying to use their products while they take breaks from counting their stacks of money. Do these people do usage testing on this stuff?

First of all, the bottles have no edges, so it’s akin to trying to grasp an ever-changing, soaking wet, formless bucking-bronco like amoeba that is gravitionally drawn not just to the center of the Earth, but to the earth just below my toes. Secondly, since presumably you are in the shower attempting to cleanse your filthy self, your hands are wet and you can’t get enough friction to open the dried-soap encrusted cap from your semi-successful shower from the day (week?) before. As you struggle to liberate the suds-inducing liquid from behind it’s now steel-welded, molecularly fused seal, you start to question your own ability to overcome the simple problems life has before you. No one yearns to scuffle with an inanimate object like this while in an already naked and vulnerable state.

It causes you start asking yourself if having clean hair is really that important, and you begin to think maybe you can get by with just using body wash in your hair again like that time your luggage went missing on your last trip to Phoenix. You begin to question the very definition of clean. “Well, clean is relative, I mean what is clean really. I didn’t think my hair was even that dirty.”

Do you see what you put us through product designers (or lack thereof) of shampoo and conditioner? Help us out, please. I beg you. You win, now can you please help us not feel like dummies each time we interact with your products?

End rant.

I wish I could do that. I wish I had the time for that. If I had more time, I would love to chase me dreams. If I didn’t have to work all the time, I could really get something done. If I just had more time in the day I could do that. I would love to do that, but just everything else is in the way. Blah blah.

Shutup.

I hate to be harsh, but let’s be real; no one has enough time. For many of us a time the easiest scapegoat to the question of why we don’t do something. So because I’m OCD and cannot help myself, I did the math:

That’s 72. Seven. Two. We have seventy-two hours to do whatever want. Anything. Most people choose to eat, drink, be merry, watch television, “relax”, or some other meaningless entity with the majority of that time. Yet those same people decide they don’t have enough time to do what they love. Now, I realize that many of you have families, that you feel you don’t get enough time with, often spending time with children is very important, but it’s still not an “excuse”, it should be a priority.

It’s become increasingly difficult for us to really buckle down and do something that matters with the time we have because our attention has become very valuable. And because our attention is valuable, there is an ever flowing river of things that desire to have your attention, and often we’re such suckers, we give it to them. Advertisers realize how valuable our attention is, which is why they saturate us with commercials between the best parts of our favorite shows. Facebook doesn’t take your money, but it isn’t free. Fantasy Football exists only to subject people to more advertising while people aren’t watching real football. It’s why we endure 10 seconds of a lame add before a youtube video with a ton of hits.

Nothing is free. Sure there are things that don’t cost us any money, but in a lot of ways our attention is more valuable than money. Apps can be free but “add supported” by the selling of your attention. Broadcast television is free, because they sell your attention to advertisers. We’ve become so immune to it that we almost don’t realize it.

The Internet hasn’t helped, because it’s given us an infinite amount of ways to distract ourselves from what we desire to be doing. In fact, as much as I hate to admit it, you reading this right now is probably distracting you from doing what you wish you were doing (sorry about that). However, with incredible tools like the Internet comes a new responsibility and discipline to stay focused. Many are not aware of how they are wasting their lives doing nothing, but those few who see how much of their 72 hours are being stolen from them are quite aware.

When you come to the realization that everything (literally everything) wants to keep you from doing what really matters, you have an amazing opportunity to learn something about yourself. Take a step back and learn what you actually want to be doing and ask yourself why you aren’t (or haven’t been) doing it. Learn what distracts you most, avoid it. Then work your way backwards from there. A disciplined life is invaluable to those who have a passion inside. But passion is only a potential unless it is acted upon.

What are you doing with your 4,320 minutes that are yours each week? Now ask yourself what you could, should, or want to be doing? It’s not work if it’s your passion, it’s just the means to a goal, and that’s the best use of time that there is. Fight the resistance, if you don’t it always wins.

Do something you love. Do something that matters. Our time is finite, make the time you have count and give it a purpose.