Fake designs yield real results

Twenty years ago, when I started my design career, I made a lot of fake stuff. I can still clearly remember when I designed my own CD covers for albums by famous bands, created a fake e-commerce site with my friends, recreated famous logos in Corel Draw, redesigned a popular website just to see what I would do differently, and designed fake logos for fake products that didn’t exist yet. You might say, “What a waste of time on unpaid work!” You could say “Gosh, you didn’t understand the intricacies of designing for the real world!” But, all of this fake design work was critical to my career.

Fake design work let me get in thousands of reps. When I was about seventeen, I literally designed a hundred album covers in one year. I bought a stack of cheap jewel cases and repackaged my CD collection in my own designs. I didn’t make a penny, I didn’t get critique from anyone, but I sure as hell got a lot of practice digging into Photoshop 5, trying typography in ways I’d never done, using photography in ways I’d never considered, and trying to get decent results on a crappy color inkjet printer. The final ten album covers were leagues better than the first ten.

Fake design let me try work that I wasn’t qualified for. When my friends and I started a design agency in 1999, many of us were in our late teens and we had never built an e-commerce platform before — this was all scary brand new tech back then. Who was going to trust a bunch of kids to build a secure payments system? Heck, we didn’t know if we trusted ourselves to build one. So, we made a fake one called Coffee Cartel. We “sold” coffee mugs with funny slogans, beans, and coffee makers. It all worked, except we only processed credit cards for a penny and we didn’t actually make any products. We learned a ton about designing for e-commerce and also acquired technical prowess.

Fake design let me build a portfolio in a chicken-and-egg situation. That Coffee Cartel website was in our studio’s portfolio page for over a year. On the back of that work, we landed a real e-commerce client and built a sophisticated e-commerce system and inventory management system for a large Canadian retailer.

Fake design let me learn the intricacies of product design. Back in about 2003, I created a fake redesign of Verizon Wireless. I thought their website was crap and I was convinced I could bang out a big improvement in a day or two, just to prove to myself that I could. Turns out those big company suits were better at design than I thought. Creating a text input that suggested the user enter their full 10 digit phone number was surprisingly hard. I started to guess that the stupid 300x250 advertising banner jammed into the page was likely a release valve for internal marketing pressure. So, I embraced those constraints and ended up coming up with a design that seemed about 20% better, not the 200% better that I’d arrogantly predicted. That 20% improvement was totally based on my own judgement (no user studies, no quant, no qual) but it was an excellent learning experience.

If you’re thinking of doing fake design work, what should you watch out for?

• Don’t be a sucker and do unpaid work for other people — it’s called spec work, not fake work, and there are a lot of risks to doing work on spec. There a handful of exceptions to this rule (see below) but generally people who ask you to do spec work are assholes.
• Try not to gloss over complexity. Design work in the real world is pretty hard. If you design a fake graph, put in realistic data. If you fake redesign a site, like my Verizon Wireless redesign, don’t just magically remove an ad unit. If you create a sexy fake login screen, don’t forget to include a way to recover lost passwords or usernames.
• Write real copy. Lorem ipsum is for amateurs.
• The gold standard is to actually test your design work. Real designers often measure their work by putting it in front of real users. My Verizon project would have been way stronger if I had tested it with some potential customers in 1-on-1 user studies. This is how some great design schools like Tradecraft teach students to conduct unsolicited redesigns: design > test with customers > design again.
• Design to learn, not to get accolades. Other designers are rarely your real audience. It doesn’t matter if ten thousand designers applaud your work if your customers find your designs hard to use.

Go out there and fake it til you make it, my friends. Hell, I still fake it to learn new stuff and I’m not quitting anytime soon.

PS: You can also build your experience by doing “free” work. Not to be confused with spec work, some of us got a ton of experience by doing free work for groups we respected or as fun side projects.

For instance, way back in 2004, my friends and I volunteered to work with Mozilla on the branding of Phoenix as it was being renamed Firefox. Mozilla is an open-source project and we thought it would be cool to volunteer design work just like engineers were contributing code to the project. Note that Mozilla didn’t coerce us into doing it, we did it for the love of the project, and we consciously volunteered our time. We learned so much as a team and built confidence (and reputation) to do more work like it. And we had a lot of fun. Jon Hicks wrote a great article explaining the project and how we each contributed.

PPS: Thanks to Ariel Waldman, Dann Petty, Helen Tran, Kristy Tillman, Tim Van Damme, and many others for furthering the discussion on these issues.