Issue 007: #OpenToWork, Post-Covid Architecture, Dunder Mifflin

While unemployment insurance claims in the United States came in at 1.31 million last Thursday, a four-month low, there are still 33 million people out of work. Recently LinkedIn debuted a feature where prospective employees can add an #OpenToWork photo frame on their profile image to help recruiters spot open candidates more quickly. Business Insider has a primer on how to best use LinkedIn’s new photo frame.

While seemingly improbable, landing a job during a pandemic is possible. JayDee Lok has some practical advice.

Finally, if you’re invited to participate in a whiteboard challenge as part of your interview process, Lily Anna shares how she aces them.

First and foremost, whiteboarding is showing how you communicate, taking the client with you throughout the process. You are asking questions, writing, thinking, and talking out loud.

Sticking To It (automattic.design)

Jeffrey Zeldman writes, “Never stop trying to do great work. Never get demoralized. Never stop caring.” He references his time spent in ad agencies earlier in his career, and how older creatives never quite got demoralized. I’ve always felt that working in agencies can be the best thing for a designer (or art director, copywriter, any commercial creative). The layers of hierarchy in an agency is akin to running the gauntlet, where you’re forced to hone your work and thicken your skin.

Dystopia of No Authenticity with Ian Humphris, Nokamo (brandingmag.com)

For a deep dive into branding, this interview with Ian Humphris is brilliant and intelligent.

A brand is simply a mechanism by which to create value.…A brand’s success must be determined by its ability to build a sustainable balance sheet. Marketing is the ‘governor’ of brands, the owner. A master and puppet relationship. Marketing creates and destroys them.

From Gut to Plan: The Thoughtful Execution Framework (spotify.design)

I’m a big fan of process because you can repeat what you’ve done successfully before, and teach others to do the same. Annina Koskinen from Spotify details a process they call Thoughtful Execution.

To change the mindset of jumping too quickly into one solution, we realized that we should remind our teams of the necessary steps in a thoughtful product development process. And that presenting those steps in a tree structure would encourage them to follow the steps in order. We wanted to lead them to go wide in problem identification and hypothesis creation before zooming into a single solution. We named it the Thoughtful Execution tree.

How the Coronavirus Will Reshape Architecture (newyorker.com)

Kyle Chayka explores how Covid-19 will affect the future of residential and office architecture and the design of public spaces.

In recent months, we have arrived at a new juncture of disease and architecture, where fear of contamination again controls what kinds of spaces we want to be in. As tuberculosis shaped modernism, so covid-19 and our collective experience of staying inside for months on end will influence architecture’s near future.

How Can Designers Responsibly Use Science Fiction as Inspiration? (eyeondesign.aiga.org)

Our inspiration can come from anywhere. But when we’re looking for new ideas, they can often come from the pages and images of sci-fi. Liz Stinson:

The idea for the Amazon Kindle, for example, was reportedly ripped from the pages of The Diamond Age by Neal Stephenson, in which the author describes an interactive “super book” with pages that morph and change. In his book, The One Device, author Brian Merchant recounts how Apple designer Bas Ording took direct inspiration from Minority Report when designing the iPhone’s UI: “You know that Exposé feature?” Ording recalls, “I was staring at my screen with a whole pile of windows, and I’m like, ‘I wish I could somehow, just like they do in the movie, go through in between those windows and somehow get through all your stuff.’ That became the Exposé thing, but it was inspired by Minority Report.”

Brazilian designer João Matheus de Barros decided to celebrate the 15-year anniversary of The Office by giving Dunder Mifflin a facelift. The little Easter eggs kill me. Paper beats rock.