Graphic Design

If you want the recruiters to pay attention  to what you're doing to your work, you need them to be interested. And to get them interested, you need some *visuals*; that's the whole thing. And this is all because we really need to sell ourselves. Now, the world is really crowded; there are a lot of designers out there; there's a lot of competition, and we need to stand out from that competition because otherwise people are simply just going to browse through our portfolio or our resume very quickly and just get over it because they have a lot of those to go through.

This year, I went through over 250 case studies on Twitter with junior designers sharing their case  studies and also sharing their problems. And many of them had the problem of having a portfolio with a couple of case studies and those case studies were very thorough because they finished some courses, they finished some classes or some university classes, and they had pretty big case studies; they had pretty much everything – you know – like if you were checking off a list: Personas, check;

Empathy maps, check – like, everything was there. But they all had this problem of almost never getting any replies. And they weren't really understanding what's the problem there. Like, it's really checking all the boxes – there's a lot of content there; it shows thorough research; it shows data; it shows tables, graphs, charts, everything. So, what is the problem? The problem that we notice is that a typical case study is really, really academic,

which means that it's pretty much  boring – so, that's like the whole thing. It's really, really long, and it's really filled with a lot of content. And those people, those recruiters have *limited time* to assess those case studies. So, they go through a lot of those case studies by just quickly scrolling through. And if there is nothing that catches their eye in there, it's really, really bad because they have seen probably similar things in the dozens the same day. And that results in the TL;DR effect,

which basically means 'Too Long; Didn't Read', and this is something that really is happening. Even the people who are tasked to evaluate case studies don't really read all of them. So, you can help your luck by a concept that I call the *UI Sandwich* which basically means – *keep the whole case study*. You don't really need to remove anything. It can be super long if you want. But *add a very, very pretty visual on the top* like a key visual.

And one tip is to *always rotate it a little bit diagonally*. That's why probably you've seen this on Dribbble quite a lot – that people rotate their screens a little bit. But the thing is that this key visual  is very image-heavy. It shows a couple of screens; it shows some additional decorative elements, and this kind of brings the engagement way, way up, and this keeps that person interested  in finding out more of what you did in the project. So, that UI kind of primes them to actually read the rest of the case study.

And then once they get to the end of it, you *add another visual*, just not the same one, because some people actually started doing it this way. So, add a different one,  and it still has to be a larger visual to have like a nice sandwich of all  the TL;DR stuff between the nice-looking visuals. And that has proven to actually work because those people that had problems with their case studies reported seeing that they are now getting  responses

– they are now getting interviews.

How do we convince a company to  change from making products to doing services? They're going to need different kinds of  people. They're going to need a different manufacturing process. They'll need to have a big section that maintains and upgrades the things that they are selling. They'll need to have service people. That's one problem.

Second problem – it might cost a lot more money to change the way we make things so we don't take the materials and make them so nice and wonderful and thin and mix them together to be a good feel. No, we might have to make our equipment slightly thicker. You know, if we had a slightly thicker phone, we could make it easy to repair the battery. Just open it up and put in a new battery. Is that a big price to pay? Not necessarily.

In fact, people often complain about the relatively short life of the battery in a mobile – it may not even last the whole day. Well, if the mobile was slightly thicker, we  could put in a slightly bigger battery   and the phone would last longer; the battery would last longer every day. Why don't we do that? Well, because we put aesthetics over usability. Well, we're going to have to change that model too. Now, some companies may complain that, yes,

they will say what you're trying to propose is very good but it will cost us more money to make the change, and it would cost us more money – we have to charge more money for our products or our services, and that makes it uncompetitive. And they're right. So, if you are a designer  and you just say, "What we are doing in the company is bad for the environment; we should change," you can't go to your superior executives and say, "Hey, Executives, what we're  doing is bad for the economy,

bad for the world. We have to change the way we're doing things!" They're not going to be happy to hear that, not if you tell them it's going to cost more money; it may completely change their line of business. So, we have to therefore understand the nature of business before we make this change. We have to say, "Here is a proposal that will help us make this change in a way that actually keeps us still alive, robust, performing as a company; if you like,

we have to take the principles of sustainability and robustness and resilience and apply it to the very company that we work in so it can have these properties and do good for the world." But that means you have to speak the language of business. Now, design has a very important philosophy in it which means: *Understand the people you are designing for. Speak their language. Make sure it fits their needs.* Well, if you work in a company,

one of the people you're designing for is  the executives of the company because you're designing for the company in order for the company to *succeed*, because if a company can't succeed, if a company can no longer produce stuff that is useful or inexpensive enough for people, it goes out of business and then you're out of a job; so, it doesn't do any good to recommend something that makes the company fail.

But in order to understand that, you have to understand how a business works. So, *design has to change*. For the first time, you have to understand the politics of a company, the business model of a company; you have to understand the world; you have to understand the impact your products have upon the ecosystem of the world and the complex socio-technical system. Remember that word – the *complex socio-technical system* in which the company is involved. So, designers, you have an important role to play.

In order to play that role, you're going to  have to change the way that you behave.