Notes from the Future Desk: April

Invision

Presentation and setting up a client’s expectations are things they don’t really teach you in school, but are probably the most important part of the design process. You can have an award-winning idea, but if you can’t sell it, the world will never see it. This week we set up a presentation to the client by telling them the range of emotions they might feel during the workshop: confusion, excitement to contribute, frustration with team members, etc. Once they knew what to expect out of our journey, they were able to more comfortably position their input. Which led to a fantastic outcome.

At VIA, we use a few tools to help everyone stay on the same page creatively. The most important of these are Brand Guidelines, Creative Brief, and for digital projects, UX Brief. All three of these documents add a bit of time to the front end of a project, but save immense amounts of time when you’re deep in it. However, these documents have to have meaning or they are useless. Make them meaningful and refer to them often.

Piggy-backing on Kelly’s theme of prototyping, this month I did a little digging to try and discover an ideal tool for prototyping … Which yielded mixed results.

I got in a verbal fight that nearly turned into a physical altercation one time with an