Design with Service in Mind
Knowing the current generation of designers, we see that most of us have either been educated by different institutions or are self-taught. In many cases, graphic designers still need to understand several design categories.
Such as how to work with typography, colours, grid structures, hierarchy, shapes, and layouts on various digital and printed platforms. Even knowing these principles does not help you with your design development, not only from the visual level (because all design styles change) but on all levels of creativity. I challenge today’s designers to see the world through a different lens. It is beneficial not only to ask about your academic studies or self-taught studies of graphic design but also to learn about new experiences and services that can be incorporated into your practice of high visual concepts.
A year ago, I was given a chance to influence my design processes with Service and Civic design principles. I have worked with two studios (SuperDeep Studios and Service Design Studio), driving the understanding of service design and what good service design principles can work for you as a designer. However, it also helped me understand and implement service principles within the design. Here are a few statements that can completely change how you work with clients.
From all sides, tell the story. Creating workshops that deal with not only the visual assets of telling the client’s story but also the community values they share and the challenges they face on a micro and macro scale, as well as ensuring that the visual assets being shown align and justify their position.
It is being approachable inside and outside the community. Another reason you want to learn more about service design practices is that sometimes we need to catch up on who will be affected by the branding. So, whenever I revisit a brand’s identity, it doesn’t stay in ‘clean, white space land’ but has specific characteristics of a human connection within the visual marks. It could be colours that could be seen by color-blind people or shapes that were approachable to local consumers. We want to ensure that it’s approachable and accessible to everyone.
Give people the space and time to reflect on the process. There is no one-size-fits-all approach to designing for a client’s needs. Ask the client what the positioning on reflective factors of who will use it is? How fast does this project need to change to fit the new users’ needs? And how involved must the product be for the project to be effective in a small or large community? Hence, the implementation part of this stage needs to be more accessible to the user and the client. Sometimes, it would be helpful to have more people within the organization implement the visual style and show up in whatever future visual assets we have created for them.
With these few service design principles, you can help reapproach how you create and build better relationships with your client. This will help you find the roots of the issues they are trying to solve in different visual touchpoints of their organization.
You can learn more about this topic from a design project I worked on with the Service Design Studio and Hunter College here.
