Issue 23

WELCOME

This issue of Being Designerly features articles on rethinking design education, design for good, and some words of encouragement for young designers.

Read about being curious about strangers, types of creative leadership, IDEO making design and their organization more inclusive. See how many brands you can guess from the 50 states, and read about highway fonts.

FEATURE

Don Norman wants to rethink design education

At 85, the legendary designer and author of The Design of Everyday Things is on a mission to rethink out-of-touch design schools. Just don’t call it a swan song.

Collaboration, critical thinking - designerly behaviors and habits

How Can You as a Lone Designer Start Improving the World?

UX Design pioneer Don Norman talks about designing for good...

“If you want to work on the major societal issues, those are very difficult. There's no easy step to doing that. But it's one of the most important things that designers can do.” — Don Norman

Dear young designer

Words of wisdom for designers by Tobias van Schneider

CURIOSITY

Talking to strangers

So many of us have been raised to see strangers as dangerous and scary. What would happen if we instead saw them as potential sources of comfort and belonging?

VISUAL

Can you identify each US state's biggest brand from these redesigned logos?

This could keep you guessing all day.

Penn State History Lesson: The Drama Behind The 'New' Highway Sign Font | Onward State

Ever stopped to think about the big, white typeface on highway signs?

Researches at the Pennsylvania Transportation Institute (PTI), a unit of Penn State’s College of Engineering, did, and helped develop and test the typeface Clearview in the late 1990s and early 2000s, which eventually appeared on highway signs all around the country.

This is an interesting read about highway sign typography

UX

Archetypes for creative leadership – Airbnb Design

The Airbnb UX team wanted to demonstrate that there’s no one path to or model of leadership. They arrived at a set of 6 archetypes that describe behaviors people might lean toward or identify in themselves that they could then cultivate with the support of their manager. While these archetypes were created for UX writing in particular, this archetypal model has something to offer other large-scale creative organizations, too.

INCLUSIVE

IDEO’s Chief Marketing Officer on the Future of the Design Industry

Detria Williamson, who took on the chief marketing officer role at IDEO this spring, talks about making design—and the design company’s workforce—more inclusive.

NEWS

Apple’s iOS 15 Reversal Shows It’s Now Actually Listening to Users

Apple isn’t particularly known for listening to consumers when making design decisions, and that is, well, by design. For iOS 15’s release this year, Apple planned to make some of the biggest changes ever to the design of the Safari web browser on the iPhone. The fundamental shift: moving the address bar from the top of the screen to the bottom, erasing nearly 15 years of muscle memory.

This past week, after mounting complains from users, Apple reversed course, making the new design an option in the Settings app. With that change, Apple will offer users two distinct interfaces for a core app, a rarity in the iOS world.

UNTIL NEXT TIME

I hope you enjoyed this issue of Being Designerly, featuring articles articles on rethinking design education, design for good, and some words of encouragement for young designers.

Did the article on talking to strangers encourage you to do so? Did you figure out your creative leadership style? How many of the top brands in each state could you guess?

If you think someone would benefit from Being Designerly, please forward it to them.

I'm looking for feedback, of the brutally honest kind, so this can improve over time. You can reach me at lycerejo (at) gmail.com - thank you!