Design Consistency, Craft, Efficiency, and Cat Memes

Design is both fun and hard. In the midst of the daily grind, it can be hard to focus on a long term goal and vision to stay in this career path and not get burnout.

How do we do projects at Tallwave in a way that helps us keep our sanity? As someone who’s been doing this for well over 10 years now, I want to be able to pass along things I’ve learned along the way that help. Hopefully you’ll pick up something that will help or think “I’m not the only one that does that, I’m not crazy."

Transcript

1. Design Con- sistency, Craft, Efficiency, and
 Cat Memes
2. I’m really tired
3. But, I want 
 to make really 
 good things
4. Design—fun, but also very hard Not enough time Not enough budget Client’s sister’s cousin’s brother’s boyfriend thinks’s it’s silly Nobody agrees on anything
6. Perspective Tallwave is an Agency I’m a Design Team Lead at Tallwave
7. Business jargon!
8. —Johnny Appleseed “Do you have bandwidth to wireframe that user story?”
10. MAKE 23 ANNOTATED WIRES BY TOMORROW
 AND ATTEND 13 MEETINGS, THERE’S PLENTY OF TIME BANDWIDTH UNICORN SAYS
13. Your PM is your BFF
14. Internal Initiatives
15. Design Process
16. Projects Kickoffs – Internal & External Design Studios Design Sprints (Map out goals end to end) Regular meetings–but not too many (╯°□°)╯︵ ┻━┻ Be flexible
17. Design Studio Work on a specific problem Everyone works individually for 30–45m Everyone shares their ideas Then, everyone works on it again!
18. iPevo Point 2+ InVision Boards
19. Recommended reading Lean UX: Designing Great Products with Agile Teams By Jeff Gothelf and Josh Seiden
20. Tools and Craft
21. Tools have always been expensive.
22. Free and cheap stuff I use Building responsive grids 2 Main color tools Accessibility
25. LOL
30. Designer rant This is something I think about a lot It’s something I’m guilty of as well It’s going to take all of us to fix this
31. Please stop using Lorem Ipsum
32. Type is content, not graphix
33. Use real text Use real text to set body text If you don’t have content, use the classics I have a soft spot for Charles Dickens Set a maximum line length for everything
39. When to break the rules with grids You must know the technology you’re designing for When you know the rules
40. Recommended reading The Elements of Typographic Style By Robert Bringhurst
41. Sip and ColorHexa
44. Accessibility
46. Sketch+Abstract Version Control for Designers Distributed Design (Blame!) (Real) Iteration Feedback within Version Control (Historical context) Libraries within Projects
49. If we have time Let’s live on the edge a little bit
51. Abstract gotcha’s Save, Commit, Merge Have a Lead Agree on a workflow
52. Peace out, people Twitter: @paulvantuyl Email: paul.vantuyl@tallwave.com tallwave.com pvt.design