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Designing for Vision

An artist is not paid for his labor but for his vision.

JAMES MCNEILL WHISTLER

BEFORE WE CLOSE OUT THE BOOK, I want to emphasize how important design is to organizational and product development. Most of us consider ourselves designers of the things that our company produces: web designers, interface designers, or product designers. But in our roles, we shape the vision and perception of the entire organization with our work. We are more than just designers of things; we are designers of the business. In a very real way, we are business designers. I am amazed at the power we designers have to shape the organization, and yet how few designers actually realize or use this power to its fullest extent. The fact is, design has the power to change the future, to influence people, and to benefit you and your career. Our fate is in our own hands when we understand that we can inspire people with our creativity. Imagining the future can earn your team praise, get the attention of stakeholders, and give you a shot at actually making something meaningful.

We need to recognize that we have the power to imagine the future, the ability to create something that didn’t exist before, and the ideas to inspire the entire organization. We can use these tools for good, for the betterment of the product, and the satisfaction of our own work. Learning to talk about our designs extends beyond the conference room; it begins with purposeful habits of practicing creativity and staying inspired. Few other jobs have the same ability to create excitement around something that doesn’t exist, and so for this final chapter, I’d like to go on a journey of discovering just how powerful it can be when we design for vision.

Recognizing Our Power

You have more power than you realize. Designers have the skills and ability to cast a vision for a preferred future—a future that doesn’t exist yet and won’t exist without our help. Our role should not be to just iterate and moderately improve an interface, but to create an awareness of incredible new possibilities. We have the power to influence the future with expressions of our ideas that make the future seem real, attainable, and exciting.

You see, most people can’t do what we do. They don’t think visually, and, even if they did, they lack the skills to put pen to paper and sketch out something that looks like what’s in their head. This makes us special; we have unique skills that most other people around us don’t. We can choose to use them in a way that will benefit our organization and our own careers.

Our value as designers is not just locked up in the day-to-day mechanics of pumping out new wireframes, theming an app, or brainstorming ideas. Sure, those things are valuable and that’s probably the main reason why we have a job, but it’s not the only way (or the most important way) that we are valuable. We create more value when we help other people see the future; when we take ideas born out of a simple conversation and provide the context or skin it needs to feel real.

This power is the reason we keep photos and video of special moments: because the visual representation of those moments suspends our memories of those events. We are transported into those moments again and again when we look at them. Naturally, we want to share those moments with other people so that they too can experience what we did. We post on social media and relive them over and over. Those images, those visuals, are as much a part of the experience to us as the experience itself.

IMAGES MAKE THE UNREAL REAL

When you build a house, you start with an empty plot of land and it’s difficult to visualize how you will live there, but after you see the drawings of what it will look like, you grow excited and anxious. When you see your baby on an ultrasound for the first time, tears well up inside you because it hits home that this is really happening. Things that exist only in our mind become something completely different when they’re expressed visually.

We can make these images

A friend wants to start a new business, but the website you create for her is what will really make it feel like a legitimate enterprise. Your boss jotted down some ideas at lunch, but you can take those ideas to the next level. In the middle of the night, you had a crazy idea and you can flesh it out to show to other people. We have what it takes to create the images that make the unreal real. Most people can’t do that.

Right or wrong, sometimes the visual of a product alone sets our expectations about it: making promises about functionality, telling us how we’ll be better with the product in our lives, and asking us to try it. Attractive visual design has become the hallmark of good products. In fact, we might be influenced more by the way a thing looks than the way it actually works. That’s how much power design has. When we see something that’s well designed, we might think the product itself is great before we’ve even tried it. The point is that our designs have the effect of making people believe in what we’ve created, even if it only exists on paper. That gives us a lot of power when it comes to our designs. We can use this power for good, to move our teams and projects forward into a preferred future, and to create a new reality that didn’t exist before.

The reason this is important to communicating to stakeholders about design is because we have the power to inspire people with our work. Expressing a vision for what the future could look like to stakeholders gives us the opportunity to earn their trust, demonstrate commitment, and get them genuinely excited about what we’re doing. It’s a huge deposit in the bank account of trust. Often, these inspirational designs will help our team move forward because our stakeholders will be on board with the vision. They’ll see just how excited we are to work on this project and they’ll want to help us accomplish this vision. With a vision of a preferred future, it’s easier to get support, funding, research, and any other resource you might need to accomplish your vision. Your stakeholders will be saying, “This is awesome. What do you need to make this happen?” It puts you in a position of making the future happen rather than waiting around for someone else to tell you what it is.

Here are just some of the reasons how designing for vision can improve our careers:

It gives us a creative outlet.

Designing for vision provides an environment for us to express something that we might not otherwise have the opportunity to express.

It creates a conversation with other people.

Our designs get them dreaming about where we’re going, what’s possible, and what’s ideal without any of the usual constraints.

It brings people together.

Individuals are no longer stuck obsessing over one little thing; the entire team can get a sense for where we could or should be headed.

It builds credibility.

People see you as a thinker, a visionary, as someone who is interested in providing long-term value, not just value for the immediate need.

It lives beyond us.

These designs can be so exciting that they get passed around to other people in the organization. Long after we’re gone, they still might be hanging onto that vision of the future.

And so, for these reasons, our ability to create visuals that communicate beyond words has the power to bring people into a world that didn’t exist before. We can show them what the future is like before the future has even been created. A picture is as close as you can get to being in this new future without actually being there. People can become really excited when they see what it will look like. This is what it’s like designing for vision.

Practicing Creativity

Designing for vision requires that we are purposeful about practicing creativity on a regular basis. You’ve got to step away from your project and dream a little bit now and then, even if the idea never sees the light of day. Sometimes, the prospect of making one...more...control...seems mundane and boring. If you’re bored of your day-to-day job, this is a way to make it exciting and fresh.

FIND INSPIRATION

One of the missing ingredients for learning to design for vision is a lack of inspiration. Some people might consider pursuing inspiration a waste of time compared to the act of simply getting things done. But when the goal is to create something completely new that didn’t exist before, it’s almost impossible to do that well without an external, aspirational, creative stimulus that models how we might approach our own endeavors.

The easiest and most practical thing you can do is to simply look at other people’s products. Find designs that you like, discover how they might be applied in your context. Download and use as many apps as possible. Collect a repository of favorite websites that you can reference when the time comes, browse through pattern libraries, try new open source tools, read case studies, go to a conference, read a book—there are almost too many resources to help you find and create inspiration that you have no excuse, other than the practice and habit of making it happen.

SEE UX EVERYWHERE

There are models everywhere—including those outside the world of tech—that can influence your thinking and passion for designing digital products. We tend to see the world through our lens of UX and may comment on the usefulness of everyday objects as a matter of pride. Turn those powerful observational skills into an opportunity to find patterns in the real world that will inform your designs in the digital realm. Ask yourself this: how does the design of this thing apply to my current project? Is there something it does well that I can use? Start seeing everyday objects as opportunities for learning and inspiration in your own work.

USE A DIFFERENT CANVAS

An alternative way to get the most out of your creative mind is to stimulate it in a different way. Pursue a different artistic endeavor; try something completely different from your usual design-a-thing day job. Find something that allows you to create, express yourself, and sink into a mode of creating so that the worry of delivering melts away. Without hard expectations about what you create, you’ll be free to think more clearly and enjoy the process. This could be cooking, landscaping and gardening, painting, photography, or any other creative hobby that interests you and will spur you to greater comfort with your creative self.

You might even do something out of your comfort zone, something that you’re not at all interested in or are not particularly skilled at. Being uncomfortable has the fortunate side effect of causing us to see things in a different light, to approach problems in a different way. When we have no bearings on how to behave or what to do, we have no choice but to be creative and make it up as we go along.

For me personally, I am restoring a classic car as an act of deliberate creativity. For several years now, I have been working on a 1969 Triumph GT6+, a small British sports car. Prior to starting this project, I had very little mechanical knowledge. In fact, on the day the car arrived at my house, a neighbor stopped by, pointed to the distributor on the engine block and said, “Wow! You don’t see those anymore.” I had no idea what that part was, so I just laughed uncomfortably and replied, “Yep, you sure don’t!” But since that time, I’ve completely dismantled the entire vehicle, cleaned and painted each part, and am now meticulously putting it all back together.

In the process, I’ve learned a lot of about engines, but I’ve also learned a lot about design. I’m inspired by the engineers who created these cars before there were computers. I’m amazed at the ingenuity of working within such limitations and I’m baffled that humanity figured out how to make a car in the first place! But building a car has given me a way to step away from my desk, to pursue something creative that is 100 percent outside of my comfort zone. I rely on other people for advice and tools. I am constantly reading and learning about these old cars. It’s a slow process, but one that has freed my mind and given it new places to go, be inspired, and enabled me to return to work, armed with fresh ideas.

The takeaway here is to find something that can add to your fulfillment of designing interfaces and push you to greater limits of creativity.

Before (top) and after (bottom) photos of the frame and engine from my GT6. I didn’t know much about cars before starting this project, but the process has given me a creative pursuit away from the screens and digital interfaces of my daily life.

IDEATE AND ITERATE

Ideation and iteration are both important to ensure that we’re practicing creativity. Generating new ideas should be one of your primary outputs. Iterating on those ideas, then, gives us a chance to refine and mature them. These approaches are important when working on visionary vaporware that has no current basis in reality. Thinking of a single new idea and expressing it in a mockup isn’t too difficult, but it’s far more difficult to come up with five completely different or derivative ideas. That’s what we need to do regularly: learn to generate as many ideas as possible and iterate to make as many different versions as possible. Set a goal for yourself to create at least five completely different designs. Don’t reuse elements; create new ones. Begin with a blank canvas each time. Then, approach the same problem with a different use-case. Go about creating each one by setting the previous design aside. The more ideas and versions you have, the better. The exact quantity you produce or the fidelity of these ideas isn’t important. The goal is to make it a habit of thinking differently about our projects and forcing our brains to learn (and relearn) how to design.

Making It Happen

Practically speaking, designing for vision is creating visuals that express your vision of a preferred future. You design mockups of your product, website, or app, but instead of being constrained by all the limitations you know you have (engineering, marketing, support), you create what you believe to be the best possible product and illustrate that with some form of interactive prototype or static mockup. You can then show or present these designs to your team or executives to inspire them to want to achieve the same goals. The purpose is to create a conversation that results in the organization chasing after something that is bigger than the current vision (perhaps even impossible), but is inspiring and motivating.

However, frozen in the day-to-day maintenance of our jobs, we often overlook just how influential our ideas can be. It’s hard to think about vision and the future when there are so many other things to do.

Documentation needs to be written. The mockups need to be updated. And I have to get ready for a meeting this afternoon. How could I possibly take the time to design for something that doesn’t even exist? That isn’t even part of my project?

It can be hard to see the value of creating something that’s not on everyone’s radar. No one is expecting you to do this. No one is explicitly paying you to create visionary, inspirational stuff (usually). It’s sort of above and beyond your normal activities and so it can be a challenge to find the time to create things just for the purpose of inspiring others. But the long-term benefits of being purposeful about this direction are well worth it.

We have to be purposeful about making the time and space to do this every so often, whatever is the most efficient for you while not interfering with your regular work day. The following sections offer some tips for setting aside the time you need to design for vision.

FIND A DIFFERENT ROUTINE

One of the most important things you can do is to find a completely different time and space to go dream about the future. You want to break from your usual routine so that your brain isn’t even in the same mode that it usually is when you’re pumping out UI controls on a daily basis. Finding that routine is about looking for a different time, space, activity, and materials that will help you to relax, free your mind, and get down to the business of creating things.

Time

You might want to limit yourself to a certain block of time each week to be sure that it doesn’t interfere with your work. It can be easy to get carried away and spend all your time making stuff that doesn’t pay the bills. So set aside a specific window of time that you think will be helpful. A former boss of mine let me spend every Friday on these kinds of endeavors, but you might be even more limited than that. Set aside one or two hours each week. One hour is more than enough time to mock up an idea if you remove the usual constraints. It’s just enough time to get your thoughts flowing, but not enough to disrupt your daily work.

If that still seems like too much, set aside 15 minutes every day. Just 15 minutes. It’s not enough time to get any serious designs made, which is why it can be so effective. You’re forced to come up with ideas and solutions quickly because there isn’t enough time to think deeply about any one concept. The focus is more on ideation. Set a timer and begin sketching your ideas. Jot them down before the timer goes off. Each day you’ll have these small snippets. Which ones do you go back to? Which ones seem to have the most potential? At the end of a few weeks or months, you’ll have some really great concepts that you can further refine into expressive mockups.

Space

The space where you work is also really important and affects how you work. Our brains work themselves into routines (and ruts!) based largely on our physical location. We condition ourselves to work when certain factors are present, many of them being physical: the chair, the window, the position of your desk, even your position in relationship to other people. Part of your challenge might be to find a different physical space where you can go. If you want to create something different, you’ll need to go somewhere different. A new space can inspire thoughts and ideas that you wouldn’t normally have. New spaces have new sounds, new visuals, and unexpected stimulations all around you that contribute to your sense of creativity.

I personally find it difficult to get work done if I’m not at my desk, but because I occasionally travel, I’ve taken to listening to music almost constantly while I design. As a result, I usually can’t get any serious design work done unless I’m listening to music piped through headphones. I’ve learned that this is the way I work now. So if I want to do something out of my normal routine, I have to go somewhere other than my office: a different room in my house, a local bookstore, or a park. The exact location doesn’t matter as much as the change of routine. If you expect to create something that isn’t routine, you must change your current routine. Go find a new, perhaps unexpected, place to let your brain percolate thoughts and come up with better ideas. You’ll need to learn what works for you, but the process of searching for new, interesting places to create will yield better discipline and a different way of designing.

Activity

Sometimes, the best way to come up with better ideas and create better designs is to actually not do any designing at all. That is, change your activity to give your brain an opportunity to relax and wander. Do something that would wholly prevent you from even accessing a computer or any of your usual tools. For example, rather than sit with your laptop at a coffee shop, go for a walk in the woods, hike in the mountains, do yoga, pull weeds in the garden, go jogging, sit on the beach, watch the sunrise—do something that will allow your mind to be still, listening and thinking to what the future could be.

When I get stuck trying to figure out how something should work, I go run. Fresh air, no screens, my brain is free, and my mind wanders. I usually don’t even pay attention to what I’m thinking. I’m not explicitly trying to solve problems, but it’s during these moments of thinking of nothing that the solution presents itself without me even trying. Not always, but often. And even if I come back to my desk without having come up with the best idea ever, I am usually better prepared to tackle my work again.

Your brain’s ability to solve problems while doing a different activity is a common yet remarkable phenomenon. Remember that great idea you had in the shower? Or that thing you fixed while sitting in traffic? It turns out that we all have better ideas when we’re relaxed: doing a simple task and letting our minds wander.¹ Anything that you can do that is relaxing and pleasurable will allow your brain to also relax and come up with ideas or solve problems you never thought possible.

You won’t be able to actually create something tangible from a change of activity like this, but it will force yourself to be unencumbered and think freely about how to solve some of the difficult problems you face. When you’re out in the woods, you don’t have your computer. You’re forced to just think about all the hard problems. When you return, write down you thoughts, sketch out your ideas. Make a record of what you learned in the hopes that it can turn into something worth communicating to others on your team. A change of activity yields a change of ideas.

Materials

Lastly, I recommend changing up the kinds of materials and tools you use to force you into new habits and new ways of approaching your work. The simplest method is to bring along a pad of paper and a pencil, even if you’re not the type to draw or sketch. Often we design based on what we already know we can do with our tools. Our ideas are limited to the tools we have in front of us. When something is a little more time-consuming to express with existing tools, we become stuck, waste time, or avoid that idea altogether. Changing the materials you use is a great way to discover new approaches because you’re not limited by your typical toolset.

Once I was designing a UI that needed some specific icons, but I was tired of reusing similar icons over and over. I had developed a habit of just searching common icon libraries and grabbing something I liked. I needed to find something with a more unique personality, so I went outside with sidewalk chalk and drew my icons on the driveway. I then took photos of each of them, imported and traced them, and placed them in the project. There was nothing artistically innovative about the resulting icons, but I accomplished my goal of creating something unique that communicated the style and tone of my project. Changing materials gave me more opportunities to create a better vision.

I would also highly recommend removing Internet access from the equation when you’re trying to find new ideas. It’s too easy to search and copy other ideas. Although there’s nothing wrong with that, in terms of generating new ideas for your own product (taking someone else’s idea and expressing it in your own context), I personally find it more helpful when I’m untethered from the online world and forced to use my own brain capacity for all of my thinking. It’s about reducing my dependence on screens or tools for finding solutions to problems. I have access to too much information. Often, my access to infinite amounts of knowledge hinders my own ability to truly be creative and solve problems with good, old-fashioned thought. When I intentionally put myself in situations in which I can’t access those screens, I have no choice: I’m all on my own.

So, set aside your computer, phone, and tablet for the time being. Grab some paper and a pencil and start scribbling down things that will help you create the next version of your product. Write words, draw boxes, and generate ideas that can contribute to your vision of what the future can look like.

For one project, I designed a set of icons using sidewalk chalk, took photos, and then traced them on the computer. The result was something that was truly unique and refreshing to work on.

Another time, I tried designing icons in the snow. This didn’t yield a real icon set for a project but it was an excellent exercise in expressing an idea with a very limited toolset.

Making Stuff Up

When it comes down to it, designing for vision is really just about making stuff up. There is no magic, except in your design’s ability to inspire people. Other than that, it’s just a collection of visionary vaporware that has no basis in anything real. You are just making things up, expressing them in a tangible way, and then using imagery to create an excitement and urgency about the future.

If we take that a step further, I’d suggest it’s as important to create a fake product with your designs and mockups as it is to create the version 2.0 of your current project. You probably have a pretty good idea about what version 2.0 is going to be like, but what are the products, opportunities, or niches that no one is even thinking about? What would the 4.0 version look like? We are too encumbered by the limits of our bosses and developers. What would you design if you had unlimited resources? What’s the right thing to build? Is your current product even the thing you should be working on? We need to be designing more 4.0 versions of our products and 1.0 versions of things that don’t even exist yet.

It’s a good practice to create a product that doesn’t exist yet. Look for opportunities within your organization and express them as best as you can. Don’t wait for someone else to come along and pitch the next big thing. Take ownership of your skills, create something from nothing, and give people a reason to get excited.

Don’t limit yourself.

Forget all the business requirements, legacy ideas, or engineering questions. Just create something that makes sense to you.

Start from scratch.

Don’t reuse anything from an existing project or copy and paste from a template. Design this thing from the ground up, with only raw materials.

Don’t obsess over the details.

It doesn’t have to be perfect; the purpose is more about communicating a concept than it is about what’s realistic and final.

Make lots of different versions.

The more different ways you can approach the problem, the better. When you think you’ve finished, try it again. It’s a good habit to force yourself to make just one more iteration.

This extends, too, to new designers who are looking to build their portfolios. Often, entry-level designers have nothing to show for their skill and are looking for opportunities just to gain experience. This is a great opportunity to find something that you think needs to exist, and make it happen. You don’t need an internship or a school project to help you create something; just go create it and build the case for it yourself. Make up a business, design an app for a new product, or imagine what interfaces will be like in the future. Don’t wait for other people to give you something to do; go create something for yourself and demonstrate your skill.

When I worked in the electronic-payment services industry, I had an idea for a new kind of loyalty card that our company could use and resell as a value-added service. It had nothing to do with my job. It was just an idea. But I spent some time (not a lot of time) creating mockups and designs that demonstrated what this new service might be like. I shared my ideas with my boss, who then sent it to the CEO and a few other executives. During my tenure, that idea never saw the light of day and I have no idea if it was ever even pursued as a product. However, it did create a conversation around our current thinking on loyalty cards, established my name with the CEO, and circulated a document that other people would later tell me they appreciated.

More recently, one of my retail clients had mentioned the need for their customers to easily reorder items that they had ordered in the past. During one of my purposeful creative pursuits, I created some designs for a standalone app aimed at power-users specifically for this purpose. I made some mockups and a simple demo showing how this system would work and shared it with the stakeholders on the project. Unknown to me, another team at the company was already working on something very similar. Although my own expression of that idea didn’t cause them to stop what they were doing, it did create a “great minds think alike” conversation during which our combined efforts were validated. I gave them something tangible and sharable that they could use to influence the thinking on their own initiative. It may not have been completely original, but it did demonstrate that I was willing to think beyond their immediate needs and contribute long-term value. My role was more than delivering the day-to-day designs they expected. I also contributed ideas and designs to another project that was outside my current scope. It gave me another platform on which to communicate with them about design.

I created a very basic prototype of a reordering app to express a vision for this opportunity. Then, I recorded a two-minute screen-capture video presentation of the idea. Even though my client was already working on a similar concept, it created a conversation that added value to the relationship.

You see, even when our ideas fall flat or aren’t entirely useful, they still create value for us as far as learning to communicate about design and build the kind of momentum we need to be successful. When we make things up, we show that we’re thinking, we’re invested in the success of the organization, and we’re smart enough to communicate our ideas to people in a way that’s compelling. This sort of commitment is invaluable to organizations.

Taking Your Ideas to the Right People

Relationships are everything. Who you know will greatly influence the opportunities that are available to you. Working with and communicating with people will determine how likely they are to help you and connect you with those opportunities. It’s one thing to have great ideas and to even be able to express them in meaningful ways, but it’s another thing entirely to have an audience of people who are there to support, encourage, and help you on your journey. Even if you’re capturing that vision of a preferred future, it’s not going to help you if there aren’t people with whom you can share that vision.

The good news is that our skill in design can help us establish a connection with the people that make decisions. Like I’ve said before, everyone wants a designer on their team. Everyone needs something designed. You need to find opportunities to get in with the right people who have the power to make your vision a reality. You can take advantage of your success in articulating design decisions to influence these decision-makers.

This isn’t about selfishly pursuing one-way relationships. It’s about finding the opportunities to create your own success with people who can (and want to) support you. Usually, this is your boss: your direct report. Often, it’s a peer or other colleague who recognizes your talent and makes a personal connection with you. Sometimes, it’s an executive who periodically needs your help, which gives you access to them on a regular basis. Be on the lookout for people who have influence, build into those relationships, share your ideas with passion, and allow them to help you.

How can you do that? The best opportunities to build these connections are when someone needs a “favor” from you. When your boss asks you for help putting together a presentation, do it. If there’s a critical bug that needs to be addressed, be the kind of person who sees the urgency and pitches in without complaining. When the product owner comes to the team with a last-minute missing requirement, step up and support her by making it happen. The more often you can help other people, the more likely you are to get help when you need it. These kinds of situations are major deposits in the bank account of trust. The way to get what you want is to help other people get what they want.

In these relationships, keep your ideas, designs, and vision handy. Eventually, you’ll have an opportunity to share your ideas with someone who can make your vision a reality. They’ll be surprised, delighted, and impressed that you can create that level of vision and communicate it so tangibly. Having an audience of people who can help you execute your ideas is a necessary part of designing for vision.

More Than Pixels

The things we create convey a message to our audience. These pictures possess a quality that gives them a voice and breathes life into what is otherwise just a collection of pixels. Our brains perceive them as having more qualities than they actually have: intelligence, purpose, even a soul. That’s because our designs reflect who we are. They are a mirror of our own existence, a reflection of our ability to create and to be the created. As much as we try to design toward the personas of our users or the brand of the organization, our work is still a reflection of us: our style, tone, and personal touch is everywhere. Just as we are drawn to people who are like us, so too we design interfaces that reflect our own shape and personality. This is perhaps why it’s so difficult to talk about design: because we are so intimately knit up in all that we create that we cannot stand back far enough to see what it really is. It’s difficult to know if what we’re reflecting in our designs is what we ever intended in the first place.

Our skill at creating an experience for users that is both delightful and accomplishes business goals is something that few people can do. And even though we do our best to evaluate it, measure it, and improve it, I’m not sure we can ever have a complete picture of what we’ve created. No matter how much information we have, our ability to understand and talk about our designs is limited to our own unique perspective as the designer. When you hear your own voice on a recording, it sounds strange, “That’s not what I sound like, is it?” When you see a photo of yourself, you might think, “That’s not how I really look from that angle, is it?” Likewise, when we watch our designs operate in the world with a life of their own, we might react, “That’s not how I really meant for it to be used, is it?” We can’t always see ourselves (and our designs) for who we really are.

In this book, I’ve written a lot about how we should communicate to our stakeholders. The whole thrust of this content is to convey how critical it is to be able to explain yourself to someone who might not understand UX design. You cannot and will not be able to really succeed as a designer unless you learn to talk to people in a way that makes sense to them because your designs do not speak for themselves. But more than that, product design is bigger than any one person’s skill at communication. Our ability to create incredible user experiences is influenced by the constantly changing world around us: other people are involved, external factors are beyond our control, and our life and relationships make us who we are.

Design is volatile and changing, but being a better communicator is something that we can always have. Our designs may get discarded, but we can still talk about them and learn from them. That website will eventually shut down, but we understand the problem that it solved at the time. We may take another job, but we still carry these skills with us. No matter where life and work takes us, we can always rest in the knowledge that in any situation, in any role, and with all people, we are prepared to bring our ideas to life through the power of articulating design decisions.