7 Principles of Great Designers, Team Members, and Hires

Last week I had the privilege of speaking to UX students at Brigham Young University and Utah Valley University. Below are 7 principles I shared in my remarks and answers to questions.

Great relationships

• Great design won’t ship without great relationships. When candidates ask “what matters most to you as a design leader” my answer is consistently relationships. Design is the minimum bar (see below). Relationships are the highest bar in my judgment.
• Be pleasant to work with! Some of the most successful designers I’ve worked with in my career weren’t the best designers in their class, but rather experts at cultivating strong relationships within their team and beyond.

Mastery of typography

• I’ve been asked the “best book” question many times in my career. Specific to the field of design, my response has been and may forever be Robert Bringhurst’s The Elements of Typographic Style. It would be impossible to number the times I’ve leveraged principles in this “bible of typography”. Equally impossible to number the times I’ve leveraged it in my writing.
• Nearly all interfaces, at their core, are type. One of the best examples of this is the now-defunct Seed Conference website by Coudal Partners. Almost entirely type.
• Great typography and great hierarchy go hand-in-hand.

Mastery of hierarchy

• Visual hierarchy is the underpinning of all visual communication. Without it, design has no value. It will always be one of the toughest. things. to master. I’ve seen it challenge even the most seasoned designers.
• In visual hierarchy the only thing more important than consistency is inconsistency. Relationships between elements should be meaningfully similar AND dissimilar. (See this diagram.)
• “I don’t paint things. I only paint the difference between things.” –Henri Matisse

Problem solving & definition

• The strongest designers I’ve had the pleasure of working with are highly skilled solvers + definers.
• One of the great fallacies of problem solving is that problem defining must always come first. In reality problem definition and problem solution happen in conjunction more often than in succession.
• Problem definition becomes clearer as we begin solving the problem, refine the problem further, solve the problem further, repeat. The process is circular, not linear.

Strong opinions, loosely held

• A loose grip on your opinion means you’re invested in allowing peers to change your mind, and a strongly presented opinion means you’re invested in changing theirs.
• Reserve the strong-opinion-tightly-held card for more important situations. Play this card too often and soon nobody wants you at the card table.

Design is the minimum

• With students I shared this principle specific to being hired, but it also applies to current team members: good design is the minimum bar. It facilitates a conversation. Everything above the bar—critical thinking, strategy & vision, relationships, etc—is what leads to a successful hire (or successful product outcome).

Strong rationale

Great design is championed by great narratives—storytelling, research, data, personal anecdotes, and so on.

Pictured: Some of the students I spoke with at Brigham Young University.