Sometimes I wonder if the design industry — and particularly the digital space — has over-complicated things. There are all these flavours of design practice: service design, customer experience design, user experience design, content design, product design. They probably have more commonalities than differences and the fact that we need to explain them to each other is worrying!

And this list grows and morphs year after year. In the last few years we’ve seen the advent of the product designer within digital teams. More recently I’ve seen a growth designer pop up. That’s surely not the last new discipline beating…

How do design leaders stay ahead of the curve, while simultaneously managing their teams? We chat to Dan Powell of EngineeringUK about how harnessing the power of design thinking has benefitted their business.

Here at Clearleft, we’ve long held the belief that applying design thinking has a business-changing impact, from efficiencies to a new-found skill-set that can be passed on and beyond the initial scope of work, fundamentally changing the way the whole company tackles challenges. We call this the project legacy.

It also heralds a new era of collaboration, shifting the goal-posts of what a client-agency relationship should be. When in-house design maturity is flourishing, agencies have to bring more than design thinking and exercises to the table. They have to demonstrate long-term ROI and support deep-rooted cultural change within the organisation.

…

We’re all remote workers now. But is this just a brief blip or is it the shape of things to come? That was the question that dominated our fifth design leadership panel.

The panel was moderated by Clearleft co-founder Jeremy Keith and featured a fantastic line-up of panellists:

• Emma Boulton, Director of Design Research at Babylon Health
• Holly Habstritt Gaal, Design Director at Duck Duck Go
• Jean Laleuf, Executive Director of UX and Product Management at J.P. Morgan Chase
• Lola Oyelayo-Pearson, Director of UX at Shopify

The topic of discussion was the future, but Jeremy began by asking about the…

This June we brought together 18 speakers from the world over with 1000 attendees, for five days of incredible content, entertainment and a good number of impromptu pet photos for SofaConf.

SofaConf was our first foray into online events and we were delighted by the positive feedback we had from attendees and speakers. Amidst all the challenges 2020 has presented to our communities it felt great to be able to bring folks together and share amazing content from industry leaders directly from their living rooms to ours…

We’re now able to publically share all the talk videos and live…

Sharing your progress with others is so important when trying to build momentum around a design project.

By Katie Wishlade

The close rapport you build up with the core project team is absolutely fundamental to this, but it’s critical to never underestimate the importance of keeping the wider stakeholder group informed and on board. On a recent project with a large corporate, I was reminded of the power of sending a weekly postcard. This can simply be circulated to stakeholders as a more approachable and shareable version of a status update.

The first postcard can be sent before the project…

Breakpoint-based type sizing has always felt a bit arbitrary to me. It seems like equal parts guesswork and compromise, where the better we want it to work, the more stuff we need to design.

It strikes me as inelegant and inefficient.

By James Gilyead

Over the past few years I’ve been lucky enough to work with some very smart designers and developers who have helped me hone my thoughts and ideas into a more tangible approach to fluid responsive design — particularly with regard to typography.

Although every project has different requirements, type size variation on a phone is usually…

Lex Roman is a Product and Growth Designer based in Los Angeles. She runs her own independent growth design practice taking on projects, workshops and coaching.

She works with teams to align business and customer value so growth is human-centric. Past work includes InVision, The Black Tux, Burner, Toyota, Nissan, Prosper, Joyable and Macys.com.

Lex is speaking on the Interaction Day during SofaConf, before we see him there we caught up with him on the sofa.

There are three common paths into Design Management. Either you start at the bottom and work your way up, you take on a stretch project that elevates you above your peers, or you hit a glass ceiling and are forced to jump ship.