Lessons
Why Design Matters
05:50 2Design Vs. Aesthetic
06:27 3Impact Of Design
07:01 4The Design Process: Understand Your Audience
09:17 5The Design Process: Understand Your Content
05:21 6Design Principle: Alignment, Grids, And Spacing
05:47 7Design Principles: Contrast
02:55 8Design Principles: Repetition
03:20Design Principle: Hierarchy & Proximity
05:37 10Principle Scale And Balance
02:48 11Design Principles: Typography
04:29 12Design Principles: White Space
01:11 13Design Principles: Color
06:09 14Design Principles: Graphics, Icons, And Photos
02:51 15Design Principles: Layouts And Focal Points
01:53 16Design Principles: Color-Blind Accessibility In Design
01:41Lesson Info
Impact Of Design
It's more than just that first impact, that first initial gut reaction, whether or not people take action. We also should understand the economic impact of design. So maybe you work at a company or you own your own company and when you invest in design it really does pay off. I think around to 10 or 15 years ago, this group of people created this thing called the Design Management Institute for the purposes of understanding and studying the impact of design on business. And how did they do this? It sounds kind of weird. How do you measure something that's a little ambiguous. So they put together an index, a collection of companies, that they wanted to follow over the course of many years, to understand what their performance is, their financial performance. So they put together this index with 16 companies and there was specific criteria, I think there was six criteria, I'm not gonna tell you them all but some of them were that they had to operate with design across the whole organizat...
ion, like had to be a big value for them. They also had to have senior design people on their management team. They had to have shown that they had financially invested in their design within their company. And so the Design Management Institute studied and followed these 16 companies and what they found, is over a 10 year period, companies that were in this index of the 16 companies outperformed the S&P by 228%, which is a lot of money. I don't know how much money, but a lot. And so in one of the workbooks that are available for this course I have a reading list where you can go and read further about these if it's interesting to you. But just to visualize that, we have 228% out performance, which you can't argue with those numbers. Design really does pay off but it's not just about making things pretty, it's about making it functional as well using a lot of the principles that we're going to cover. So you can't argue. Design is profitable. So if you are in a company where maybe people push back and say we don't wanna invest in design or let's only spend half of that budget 'cause we wanna save money, you're probably going to spend that money later on. You have to think of design as an investment not an expense. So we don't need the word designer in our job titles in order to be a designer and use the power of design. What we need to learn is all of these principles and you're probably thinking, "But I'm not a designer. "I can't draw worth anything. I'm not good at colors. "I don't like fonts," all these things and that's okay because by the end of this you're going to see a lot of these principles that you can apply to whatever you're doing and the decisions you're making every day can really truly start to impact what people are thinking, what they believe and what they are doing with whatever you are giving them. Your resume, your spreadsheet, your website, your app. Whatever it is. Even things like trade show booths. I don't know if you do trade shows, resumes, business cards, packaging, another big thing. And the how of design will keep changing, and by that I mean, next year there will probably be some new design tool, maybe use Photoshop, in a year you'll be using something else so we don't want to get hung up on trying to master the software 'cause the software will change and I think the benefit is to spend more time learning the transferable principles that you can use no matter what software you are working in. And the good news, though, if you are thinking "I don't know how to use these software," like you feel like that is an obstacle to you, using design in your role, here's the thing. The great resources out there give you a starting point right now. So, if you're intimidated by things like Photoshop you can go and buy pre-made templates by very talented designers, but the thing is, now that I told you to have a starting point, the starting point is not enough because it is very possible to take a starting point, take a beautiful template that someone made, or that is a template in Keynote or something like that, and still end up with a terrible thing at the end when you are done. I have a few templates I sell and I see people who email me and say, "Hey, I used your template. "Can you check out this thing I made?" And I look at it and I think, "How did this thing you just sent me "result from this template that you started with?" Like, the before and after sometimes blows my mind. And then I think, "Did I do something wrong?" But I see this happen in other people's businesses as well. Other people who have templates and resources and things and it's very easy if you don't apply these principles of design you can still ruin your starting point, ruin your template. But if you do use these principles then you can definitely create something that's awesome. So great design is about understanding people and the content, and we're gonna talk a lot about the content, and knowing how to present all this in the most sensible way. And when you understand this you can really leverage the power of design to truly create something awesome and hopefully impact people and maybe impact the bottom line of your business. So quickly, I wanna talk about how our brains process information. We spoke a little bit earlier about how much visual content we consume today, thanks to video, Instagram, photos. Just having this small device on our hand and just the physical size of it, it's not conducive to doing a lot of reading. I'm sure we do all read on it, but if you think about most of the content that you consume, truly consume, a lot of it is more visual in nature. So I was kind of trying to find awesome statistics around this and it kind of sent me in a giant goose chase, but I think anecdotally it's safe to say that it's much easier for our brains to process and recall visual information.
Class Materials
Bonus Materials with Purchase