The ability to effectively articulate design decisions is critical to the success of a project, because the most articulate person often wins. This practical book provides principles, tactics, and actionable methods for talking about designs with executives, managers, developers, marketers, and other stakeholders who have influence over the project with the goal of winning them over and creating the best user experience.

    Prepare for your next job interview."Redesign the NYC metrocard system. Design a dashboard for a general practitioner. Redesign an ATM".Learn how to solve and present exercises like these, that top startups use to interview designers for product design and UI/UX roles. Today top companies are looking for business-minded designers who are not just focused on visuals. With this book you can practice this kind of mindset, prepare for job interview, learn how to interview other designers and find concepts for projects for your portfolio. What will you learn from this book:- Prepare for the design interview — prepare for the design exercise and learn more about how tech companies hire product designers.- Improve your portfolio — use product challenges to showcase in your porfolio instead of unsolicited visual redesigns.- Step up your design career — practice your product design skills to become a better designer and prepare for your next career move.- Interview designers — learn how to interview designers to evaluate their skills in the most efficient and scalable way.What’s inside?- A 7-step framework for solving product design exercises- 30+ examples of exercises similar to exercises used by Google, Facebook, Amazon etc.- 5 full solutions for product design exercises- 5 short interviews with design leaders that worked at Apple, Google, Pinterest, IDEO etc.

    Whether you want to cross over into user experience or you're a seasoned practitioner trying to drag your organization forward, this book gives you tools and insight for doing more with less.

    How to be a graphic designer without losing your soul addresses the concerns of young designers who want to earn a living by doing expressive and meaningful work, and who want to avoid becoming hired drones working on soulless projects. Written by a designer for designers, it combines practical advice with philosophical guidance to help young professionals embark on their careers. How should designers manage the creative process? What's the first step in the successful interpretation of a brief? How do you generate ideas when everything just seems blank? How to be a graphic designer offers clear, concise guidance for these questions, along with focused, no-nonsense strategies for setting up, running, and promoting a studio, finding work, and collaborating with clients.The book also includes inspiring interviews with ten leading designers, including Rudy VanderLans (Emigre), John Warwicker (Tomato), Neville Brody (Research Studios), and Andy Cruz (House Industries). All told, How to be a graphic designer covers just about every aspect of the profession, and stands as an indispensable guide for any young designer.

    Thank you for your feedback and patience.From Andrew Warner:I first interviewed Paul Graham after I heard something shocking from Alexis Ohanian, a founder whose company was funded by Graham's Y Combinator. Alexis came to Mixergy to tell the story of how he launched and sold Reddit.If you're a founder, you know the kind of problems that founders have, right? Figuring out what product to create, how to build it, how to get users to try it, etc.Well Alexis didn't seem to have those problems, or at least they weren't as challenging for him as they were for most of the other 600 entrepreneurs I interviewed on Mixergy.Why? Because Paul Graham helped him launch his business.How did Graham make Reddit's launch easier and more successful than other companies' founding? How did he do the same for hundreds of other startups? And, more importantly, what can you learn from his experiences to grow your business?The book you're holding has those answers.Use what you're about to learn to build your successful startup. After you do, I hope you'll let me interview you so other founders can learn from your experience, the way you're about to benefit from Graham's.About Hyperink, the publisher:Hyperink is the easiest way for anyone to publish a beautiful, high-quality book.We work closely with subject matter experts to create each eBook. We cover topics ranging from higher education to job recruiting, from Android apps marketing to barefoot running.If you have interesting knowledge that people are willing to pay for, especially if you've already produced content on the topic, please reach out to us! There's no writing required and it's a unique opportunity to build your own brand and earn royalties.

      We have been spoon-fed the notion that creativity is the province of genius -- of those favored, brilliant few whose moments of insight arrive in unpredictable flashes of divine inspiration.  And if we are not a genius, we might as well pack it in and give up. Either we have that gift, or we don’t.  But Allen shows that simply isn’t true.  Recent research has shown that there is a predictable science behind achieving commercial success in any creative endeavor, from writing a popular novel to starting up a successful company to creating an effective marketing campaign.    As the world’s most creative people have discovered, we are enticed by the novel and the familiar. By understanding the mechanics of what Gannett calls “the creative curve” – the point of optimal tension between the novel and the familiar – everyone can better engineer mainstream success.    In a thoroughly entertaining book that describes the stories and insights of everyone from the Broadway team behind Dear Evan Hansen, to the founder of Reddit, from the Chief Content Officer of Netflix to Michelin star chefs, Gannett reveals the four laws of creative success and identifies the common patterns behind their achievement.

    Mountains of print have been written about culture. Loonshots identifies the small shifts in structure that control this transition, the same way that temperature controls the change from water to ice.Using examples that range from the spread of fires in forests to the hunt for terrorists online, and stories of thieves and geniuses and kings, Bahcall shows how this new kind of science helps us understand the behavior of companies and the fate of empires. Loonshots distills these insights into lessons for creatives, entrepreneurs, and visionaries everywhere.

    You’ll learn…• How a noise reduction headset at 35,000 feet led to the creation of Pepsi’s new trademarked signature sound.• How a worn down sneaker discovered in the home of an 11-year-old German boy led to LEGO’s incredible turnaround.• How a magnet found on a fridge in Siberia resulted in a U.S. supermarket revolution.• How a toy stuffed bear in a girl’s bedroom helped revolutionize a fashion retailer’s 1,000 stores in 20 different countries.• How an ordinary bracelet helped Jenny Craig increase customer loyalty by 159% in less than a year.• How the ergonomic layout of a car dashboard led to the redesign of the Roomba vacuum.

    The Apollo moon landing of 1961 was one of those events—the invention of the Apple personal computer was another. In this book, John Sculley—former CEO of both Pepsi and Apple—claims we are in an era that is giving birth to numerous groundbreaking events and inventions—moonshots—that will change the way we live and work for generations to come. The time is ripe, according to Sculley, for a new breed of innovative entrepreneurs to build businesses across industries that will bring in billions of dollars—while changing people’s lives for the better. And in this book, he’ll show you how to do it. Moonshot! lays out a roadmap for building a truly transformative business, beginning with a can’t-fail concept and drawing on clear examples from companies who’ve done innovation right.

    And it’s still short, profusely illustrated…and best of all–fun to read.If you’ve read it before, you’ll rediscover what made Don’t Make Me Think so essential to Web designers and developers around the world. If you’ve never read it, you’ll see why so many people have said it should be required reading for anyone working on Web sites.

    But how did they decide on what was good for the rest of us? What did they get right and where have they let us down? And what can we learn from the way these experts think that can help us in how we make decisions in our own lives?In How Design Makes The World, bestselling author and designer Scott Berkun takes readers on a journey exploring how designers of all kinds, from software engineers, to urban planners, have succeeded and failed us. By examining daily experiences like going to work, shopping for food, or even just using social media on their phones, readers will learn to see the world in a new and powerful way. They'll ask better questions of the things they buy, use, and make, and discover how easy it is to use ideas from great designers to improve their everyday lives.

    But for every groundbreaking business that started this way, a thousand others have stalled or failed. Why? What’s the secret to success? What do Khan Academy, the GoPro camera, the Dyson vacuum cleaner and Kickstarter have in common? After years of consulting with hundreds of innovators, creatives, entrepreneurs and business leaders to help them tell the stories of their ideas, I have discovered something: every business that flies starts not with the best idea, the biggest budget or better marketing, but with the story of someone who wants to do something—and can’t. We don’t change the world by starting with our brilliant ideas, our dreams; we change the world by helping others to live their dreams. The story of ideas that fly is the story of the people who embrace them, love them, adopt them, care about them and share them. Successful ideas are the ones that become meaningful to others—helping them to see what’s possible for them. Our ideas fly when we show others their wings.

    We want them to buy something, read more, or take action of some kind. Designing without understanding what makes people act the way they do is like exploring a new city without a map: results will be haphazard, confusing, and inefficient. This book combines real science and research with practical examples to deliver a guide every designer needs. With it you'll be able to design more intuitive and engaging work for print, websites, applications, and products that matches the way people think, work, and play.Learn to increase the effectiveness, conversion rates, and usability of your own design projects by finding the answers to questions such as: What grabs and holds attention on a page or screen?What makes memories stick?What is more important, peripheral or central vision?How can you predict the types of errors that people will make?What is the limit to someone's social circle?How do you motivate people to continue on to (the next step?What line length for text is best?Are some fonts better than others? These are just a few of the questions that the book answers in its deep-dive exploration of what makes people tick.

    May examines the elusive element behind so many innovative breakthroughs in fields ranging from physics and marketing to design and popular culture. Combining unusual simplicity and surprising power, elegance is characterized by four key elements—seduction, subtraction, symmetry, and sustainability. In a compelling, story-driven narrative that sheds light on the need for elegance in design, engineering, art, urban planning, sports, and work, May offers surprising evidence that what’s “not there” often trumps what is.In the bestselling tradition of The Tipping Point, Made to Stick, and The Black Swan, In Pursuit of Elegance will change the way you think about the world.

    But why is experience so important? Because the very people you're hoping to reach are now far too elusive, thanks to empowering and always-on social technologies. At the center of everything is the need for people to share experiences, including your products and services. X outlines the importance of user experience for executives to appreciate and also experience themselves. Through rich visualization and a balance of pragmatic and inspirational text, "X" artfully motivates readers to rethink business models, products and services, marketing, and customer and employee relationships with desired experiences in mind.It is designed to galvanize a new movement that aligns the tenets of user experience with the vision of innovative leadership to improve business performance engagement and relationships for a new generation of consumerism.Walks you through a "day in the life" of your connected consumer to see how shared experiences play a role in decision makingIntroduces the roles necessary to shape and steer meaningful and shareable experiencesShares new models to design experiences that rival those created by the best in the business Shows how to measure the impact of experiences and how experiences influence decisions and affect the bottom lineDiscover how user experiences provide opportunities to organizations of all shapes and sizes and learn how to create remarkable and shareable experiences.