Fake design

Twenty years ago, when I started my design career, I did a lot of fake things.

I still clearly remember when I developed my own covers for CDs of famous groups, created a fake e-commerce site with my friends, recreated famous logos in the graphic editor "Corel Draw", reworked a popular website just to see what I would He did it differently and created fake logos for non-existent products that did not exist yet.
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You can say: "What a waste of time for unpaid work."
I would answer: "God, you do not understand the subtleties of designing for the real world."

But all these fake works have proven to be extremely important for my career.

Fake design allowed me to go through thousands of iterations . When I was about seventeen, I literally created a hundred album covers in a year. I bought a pack of cheap CD cases and repacked my CD collection with my own design.

I did not earn a penny, did not receive criticism, but, damn it, I got a lot of practice, understanding Photoshop 5, trying to arrange it like I had never done before, otherwise I used a photo and tried to get decent results on a crappy color inkjet printer. The last ten covers were much better than the first ten.

Fake design allowed me to try the job for which I did not have enough qualifications . When my friends and I opened our design agency in 1999, we were all about 20 years old, and we had never created an e-commerce platform before — then it was all new and frightening. Who would trust a handful of children to create a secure payment system?

Hell, we ourselves did not understand whether we trust ourselves. Therefore, they created a fake with the name "Coffee cartel". We "sold" coffee mugs with funny slogans, grains and coffee makers. Everything worked, but only we processed credit cards for a cent and in fact did not create any products. We learned a lot about design for commercial sites, and also acquired technical skills.

Fake design allowed me to make myself a portfolio bypassing the chicken-egg problem. This site of the "Coffee Cartel" hung on our page in the portfolio section for over a year. As a result of this work, we got a real customer and built a complex e-commerce and warehouse management system for a large Canadian retailer.

Fake design allowed me to learn the subtleties of product design . Back in 2003, I created a fake redesign of Verizon Wireless. I thought their site sucked and was convinced that I could greatly improve it in a couple of days, just to prove to myself that I can.

It turned out that the company's employees were much better versed in design than I thought. It was surprisingly hard to create text input that would suggest the user enter all 10 digits of their phone number.

I began to guess that this stupid 300x250 banner ad on the page was just for internal marketing pressure. Therefore, I, having declared all these difficulties, in the end came up with a design that seemed only better by 20%, and not 200%, as I dared to suppose.

This 20% improvement was entirely based on my own conclusions (there was no user research, statistics, and qualitative analysis), but it was a great experience.

If you are thinking of doing fake design, what should you pay attention to?

• Do not be lazy and do unpaid work for other people - this is called “an order that is executed in order to receive paid orders in the future,” and it is quite risky . There are several exceptions to this rule (see below), but usually people who ask you to carry out such orders are assholes.
• Try not to neglect complexity. Design work in the real world is usually quite complex. If you are designing a fake schedule, use realistic data. If you're redesigning a site like my Verizon Wireless, then you don't just need to magically remove the ad unit.
  
  If you are creating an attractive login fake screen, do not forget to add the ability to recover lost passwords and usernames.
• Write real content. Lorem ipsum for wimps.
• The gold standard is actually used to test your work. Real designers often measure their work, exposing it to real users. My Verizon Wireless project could be more powerful if I tested it on potential customers with one-on-one research .
  
  That is how great design schools, such as “Tradecraft”, teach students to redesign on their own initiative: designing> checking with clients> again designing.
• Design to learn, not get praise. Other designers are rarely your real audience. It does not matter if ten thousand designers will appreciate your work, if it is difficult for customers to use it.

So go and pretend until everything becomes a reality, my friends. Hell, I'm still doing it to learn new things, and I'm not going to stop.

PS: You can also get experience by doing “free” work. Do not confuse with unpaid work . Some get a bunch of experience doing free work for people they respect, or just as a fun side-by-side project.



For example, back in 2004, my friends and I volunteered with Mozilla, which at that time was called Phoenix, and then was renamed Firefox.

Mozilla is an open source project, and we thought it would be great to voluntarily work on the design of the project in the same way that the engineers worked on the code.

Note that Mozilla did not force us to do this, we worked through the love of the project and voluntarily devoted our time to it. As a team, we learned a lot and strengthened trust (and reputation) to do more of this kind of work. And we had a lot of fun .

John Hicks wrote an excellent article where he explained the whole project and described the contribution of each of us.

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The translation was carried out with the support of the company EDISON Software , which professionally develops accounting systems for enterprises, for example, accounting of production and sales of typographic products and accounting of pool visits .