Poor & glamour in making a design

Have you ever had a real zeal to design something fabulous and usable? I bet you had but the daily routine might have destructed you from being innovative.

Admir Kurman
4 min readSep 17, 2018

As a designer, you will always be inspired by stories of people living ordinary life around the world. Whether it is a rural guy who is struggling with his livestock in the mountainous area or a girl who is studying hard in the city to build her career and get empowered. All these things one day shall bring you to design whatever project and ease the life of people around.

Find a moment to think about a few simple things before you step forth in doing your project.

In the making, the best thing to remember that design should be easy and operative. Don’t forget about functionality.

If a social project assigned to work with communities, think how it can operate rapidly and on time when those who implement it shall navigate within a work plan and project document easily to respond the needs of the communities, beneficiaries, and partners.

When it comes to a branding, have a look at windows of the fore-side of UCA in Epsom.

UCA has placed its logo on the windows of the building. From one hand it is responding to a marketing demand, from another side the windows are functional and trendy looking.

Not operative and not functional label will not be usable and trendy.

It is good to emphasize here that when you design a project, remember it should be user-centered. This means that as a creative thinker you probably might reflect on the needs of users and answer the question — why should they need it and what makes it meaningful?

After you addressed its operability, human-centered approach and meaningfulness, it is a moment of a glamorous make-up. Think of how your brand will look like. How it should be catchy to attract and grab the attention — glittering and nice looking and at the same time have a simplicity.

It might be a cliche to discuss this but again let’s look at Apple. How simple, functional and stylish its products look and how shiny and bright they are. Its all about the authentic look.

Bear in mind, guys, that your design should be unique. If it is unique and looks simple, just for the record, it will become innovative, which is a touchstone question of any design and project.

You may want to note that while designing, better not to go far beyond in visualizing all of your thoughts in one tiny project. Remember we told about human and user-centered and friendly approach? Yes, overloading with information will make the project a heavy and hulking product difficult to perceive and digest.

However, if there is a vital need to have the necessary data or various ideas in your design, you may always use visuals that can substitute texts and numbers.

One more reminder for you whilst you’ll be creating your masterpiece is that you may want to engage and interact with your users or audience. It is good that if they can work with your design by clicking and pressing angles on the screen or googling a super-technical terminology used in your project document. This is vivid and engaging but remember — this is the extra action for them. They want to learn quick, on-go or get whatever else necessary because this project addresses their needs. Try not to give your customers extra job to get the full design.

The last but not the least is that you, as an artist always have an opportunity to be environmentalist and gender sensitive. Keep in your design an idea of a life cycle, recycle and disposal of any project parts when it will become obsolete, it may turn into another new brand fancy staff. Being gender sensitive means that you will always keep in mind that how your design shall empower women and girls because they are a good investment in the economy of any country. Google for statistics if you want more about this impact.

What would you include else from your part?

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Admir Kurman

Friendly life form. Organic Intelligence. I write in English and Russian.