Blog posts filed under “design”

An essay on the risks of designing using design patterns.

The article I wrote for 24ways on how to typeset the right rag on the web.

A write-up of work for Al Jazeera between 2010 and 2013 working on a redesign of their digital design language.

I've had a few people ask me recently about how we work at Mark Boulton Design. And, the truth be told, it slightly differs from project to project, from client to client. But the main point is that we work in an iterative way with prototypes at the heart of our work every step of the way.

A post in which I describe the cyclical way of the web design industry to keep trying to define itself and what it does.

How and when we do collaborative moodboards with clients at Mark Boulton Design.

Number one in a series of posts called ‘My Handbook’

In which I disagree with my previous articles

How we can create design SDKs to ensure our design work is progressed in the right way with other designers

An article about how to design a portfolio and my experience of applying advice from one of the first Art Directors I worked with.

On Marginal Degredation and how tiny, little deviations from a product design, or brand, can have a massive, cumulative effect.

How to go about creating, launching and managing a design system in a place that makes it hard to do so.

What do design systems and Postel’s law have in common?

How I define design principles and specifically for EMBL.

A post in which I outline my little method for getting people to think before asking.

A few weeks ago I presented at

After 24 years of using Adobe design software products – starting with Photoshop 2, today, I've finally cut the chord and cancelled my subscription to Creative Cloud.

In 1984 my uncle's mother died. She lived in a tiny bungalow at the end of a small street with a long garden leading on to a golf course. It was always raining in 1984. On this day it was drizzling with heavy grey skies. The trees at the end of the garden complaining as much as the adults in the house sorting through a lifetime of stuff.

Design teams in large organisations are scaling faster every year. These are organisations that have heavily invested in design as a differentiator and in doing so are struggling to provide the best management structure and processes to help brilliant designers to do amazing work. My growing fear is that this is at the expense of the work, but also of the health and wellbeing of swathes of designers.

Yesterday, I was pondering on how discussion frameworks can help streamline all sorts of things within design. Discussion guides help keep user research focussed and the results comparable. Kickoff meeting agenda guides can accelerate projects and are designed to uncover project difficulties before you start. The Five Whys is designed to really get to the heart of a problem and help the receiver to work through a potential solution in answering. Diamond discussions is a discussion framework to help you get from A to B to solve problems faster.

I fixed my RSS feeds! Hurray! To be honest I didn't know they were broken until a couple of friends let me quietly know. The surprising thing was the amount of users I'd be neglecting and the amount of subsequent bandwidth this website used since fixing them!

How does your design system turn the brand dial up or down in a diverse organisation?

I talk about design tasks and why they are a terrible idea, how organisations can do better, and how designers might approach interviewing in a slightly different way.