Simulation Design: A Way to Improve Your Design

When I started my design career 20 years ago, I did a lot of simulated designs. I still vividly remember when I was designing my own CD album covers, I created a mock e-commerce site with my friends, remade a famous logo in Corel Draw, and redesigned a popular website , just to see what tricks I can come up with and make fake trademarks for fake goods that don't exist. You might say, "It's a waste of time for unpaid work!" You might also say, "Gosh, you don't understand how intricate it is to design for the real world!" But all these fake designs Work is critical to my career.

Simulation design has given me many agency opportunities. When I was 17, I designed 100 album covers in a year. I bought a bunch of cheap jewelry cases to hold my redesigned CDs. I didn't make a dime, and I didn't incur any criticism, but I definitely dug into a lot of what Photoshop 5 has to offer, and tried typography that I hadn't tried before, photography that I hadn't considered before. , still thinking of a crappy printer to make a decent result. The last ten album covers that went through my hands were much better than the first ten.

Designing for simulation allows me to get jobs that I would otherwise have been unable to get my hands on. When my friends and I started our first design company in 1999, many of us were teenagers and had never had any prior experience building an e-commerce platform—it was completely new at the time thing. Who would trust a payment system built by a bunch of kids? Heck, we don't even know if we can build a secure payment system ourselves. So, we made a Xibei called a "coffee cartel". We "sell" coffee mugs, beans, and pots with funny slogans on them. Didn't expect everything to work, except we didn't actually have any product. But we learned a lot about e-commerce design and technology.

Designing for simulation was an opportunity for me. That coffee cartel's website has been on that page of our studio portfolio for over a year. Behind that fake cartel, we found real e-commerce customers and built a complete e-commerce system and inventory management system for a large Canadian retailer.

Designing for simulation has taught me the intricacies of product design. Back in 2003, I redesigned Verizon Wireless. IMHO, I feel like their website design is horribly bad, and I feel like I can make a lot of progress in a day or two, all while just proving that I can. Turns out those big companies have simpler designs than I thought. It's actually quite difficult to create a text input that makes users enter their full 10-digit phone number. I'm starting to speculate that the company's pages are full of stupid looking 300x250 banners, most likely due to internal marketing pressure. So, I embraced these limitations and ended up with a design that was about 20% more effective, instead of the 200% I had initially arrogantly predicted. That but the 20% improvement is purely b2b data based on my own judgment and no user research, but it was a good learning experience.

If you want to do this kind of "fake" design work like me, what should you pay attention to?

• Don't be silly and don't work for free - this type of work is called private work, not fake work, which has a lot of risks. People who ask you to do personal work are generally assholes, but there are a few exceptions (see below).

• Try to be as complete and credible as possible. Designing jobs in the real world is quite difficult. If you design a fake chart, enter real data. If you redesign a website, like I did with Verizon Wireless, don't just remove an ad unit. If you design a fake login screen, don't forget to add a "recover password" or "recover username" method.

• Do it well. Lorem ipsum is for children to play at home.

• Practical testing of your designs is the most frustrating thing to do. Real designers often do it by presenting their work in front of real users. If I tested some potential customers in a one-on-one user study, I think that Verizon program would be even better. This is how some great design schools - like Tradecraft - tell their students how to design: design, test, design, and over and over again.

• You design to learn, not to excel. As a designer, your real audience is actually very small. 10,000 designers applauding your work doesn't matter if your client finds that your design doesn't work at all.

So ah, friends, get your hands on some simulation stuff until you make it. Heck, you can believe I'm still doing this to learn something new, and to tell you the truth, I'll keep doing it.

PS: You can also gain experience by working for people "for free". But not to be confused with doing private work, some of us gain a lot of experience by doing free work for groups or interesting projects we respect.

For example, in 2004, my friends and I volunteered with Mozilla to do a little bit of work on Phoenix's rebranding to Firefox. Mozilla is an open source project, and we think this volunteer design job is pretty cool, like an engineer writing code for a project. You should note that Mozilla didn't force us to do this, we did it mainly out of love for the project, and we volunteered. We've learned a lot as a team and built the confidence (and reputation) to do more work in the future. Of course, we also had a lot of fun. Jon Hicks wrote a pretty good article explaining the project and what each of us contributed to.