Great products don’t spring from great designers like Athena from the skull of Zeus; instead, they were usually the result of a lot of trial and error, missteps and blind alleys, and hard work and deep thinking. There’s no secret sauce. Great designers aren’t those with the most natural talent, or the smartest, or can draw the best. Great designers are those who’ve designed great products, period. And the only way to design those is the hard way. And while you might have a vision of how the product should be right from the start, it takes a lot of work to get it right. You have to explore. You have to prototype. You have to test. You have to see it live. You have to see someone using it. Only then do you get a refined design. No one gets it right the first time. - Dan Saffer

This article is also published on Medium.

The act of sharing is one of generosity. Put something out there with the best medium you could have, internet. With almost everyone nowadays have internet anytime anywhere on their palm, It will helps you to publish and engage audience anytime, anywhere, right when you need.

“The Internet is a copy machine,” writes author Kevin Kelly. “Once anything can be copied is brought into contact with internet, it will be copied, and those copies never leave,”

You ideally want to have something you post on the internet, wether it’s your work, documentation of your work, a picture of yourself, your trip, or whatever you want to post online, to be copied from one screen to another, to every corner of the world with the viral power of this copy machine called internet. So don’t post things you’re not ready for everyone in the world to see.

Post as though...

by Daniel Burka / Design Partner, Google Ventures

Shipping great design work is a struggle. You can have expert-level knowledge of Photoshop, color theory, copywriting, grid systems, and branding — and still consistently ship crap products. Things happen: colleagues meddle with your work, interfaces get implemented poorly, compromises cut to the bone, and great ideas fall to the cutting room floor.

Unfortunately, there are few resources available to help designers develop soft skills like working with a team and building credibility. Here are a handful of techniques that I find useful.

Know your own team

Identify decision-makers

Big organizations (annoyingly) call these people stakeholders; in small teams the decision-makers might include the company’s founders or the engineers who build UI. Consciously identify these people and get to know them. What makes them tick? What makes...

Mobile is here to stay, with its own set of rules and constraints. At the same time, it’s a rapidly evolving platform, with new technologies and capabilities being added by the quarter. We can’t design for mobile like we used to do for posters and Web pages. So what toolkit and mindset does a mobile designer need to thrive?

Challenges and Constraints

Every medium has its limitations. Even mobile—one of the richest canvases a designer can dream of—still has particularities that need to be addressed:

Device fragmentation

There are countless smartphone and tablet models out there, each one with a different screen size, pixel density, and physical input (not to mention screen orientations). This means we can’t just pre-assume an iPhone 5 screen-size and design tightly to it. In mobile Web, responsive design allows us to plan for variations and make the design adjust to different screens...

Otherwise I won’t grow

Sugar-coating never helped anyone, it only prolonged the inevitable.

The only road to change is through the trenches of truth — objective, hard-to-handle feedback.

I was blessed that both of my parents were incredibly empathetic, they made me stay humble, and still help me to this day. But they’re not afraid to give it to me straight.
One thing their empathy taught me was how to objectively understand the information I consumed, and take it for what it was, feedback.

“There is no failure, only feedback”

If I was messing around and I got hurt, I understood that I shouldn’t be angry that I got hurt, I should have been more careful while messing around. If I missed a game-winning shot in Basketball, I wouldn’t be mad as if I was entitled to the win, I would reflect on what I did wrong and out-do myself the next time I had the opportunity.

This made me a...

Look at the current Chrome experiment of hiding the full url address. Many people are upset, even angry, that Google is even thinking about burying such an important part of the Web behind an interface element. I’m sure there are also many people who don’t care about it at all, and likely even more who don’t know what the url even is. One could say that Google is simply making decisions based on the needs of their user base, but this isn’t quite true. The truth is that Google can choose to listen to any one of its users, and ultimately who it chooses to listen to — i.e. what design decision they will take — will be dictated not by some objective algorithm, but by the values of the people working on the project, the values of the developers, designers, managers and leaders. Design isn’t merely a case of researching market demand and implementing a solution to meet it — it is about...

A young CEO storms through his start-up, a tiny Godzilla, crushing the feelings of his staff like so many Japanese paper maché buildings. He rubs his forehead in meetings and loudly ponders why no one is as smart as he is. No ideas are to be considered for the product unless he initiated them. He is trying his damnedest to be just like his recently departed hero — Mr. Steve Jobs.

Even Steve Jobs wasn’t Steve Jobs initially. He only outed himself as a giant jerk after he had a company that could afford to have a huge turnover, and he had a pile of minions that hero-worshiped him no matter what he did. He was an abusive husband to an entire company. But at least he had a track record of success. If you do not have his history, maybe consider being nice to your staff. And even if you do, consider this a cautionary tale. The best thing you can do for your product is to have your staff tell...

We are already in a golden era of software product design. Software engineering advancement allow us to create new products faster than ever, so we rely on design to differentiate products and make them useful, understandable, and worth loving.

What is design? It’s something confusing, so complex. We can talk about form, function, style, substance, utility, colors, clarity, brand, copy — it’s all design. I like how John Maeda put it in his recent Accelerators interview: “The word “design” is poorly designed.”

I’ve spent the last 3 years working with some startups and agencies. sometimes hired for working remotely and with different timezones. This has given me the chance for me to go deeper to understand design. It seems to be useful for entrepreneurs, engineers, and almost everyone else. I hope it’s useful for you, too.

Let’s start with a definition

Design is the process of figuring...

This article was originally written and published by Branden Kowitz at The Wall Street Journal and GV Library.

“How can my company become great at design?” Founders ask me this question more than any other. They’re often considering hiring a hotshot designer or expensive design agency. And while those might help, neither will bake design deep into how the company operates. Founders need a way to make great design become automatic, and there’s only one way I’ve found to do that reliably: invest time in listening to your customers.

I’m glad that the startup community has been focusing on design lately. Design is a powerful and often overlooked way to solve problems. But without the right fuel, design is worthless. When designers don’t know which problems to solve, we spin our wheels. We make products prettier when we could be solving customer’s needs and generating real value. So any...