Before you begin
To make this work you need:

• A basic understanding of Photoshop.
• Photoshop (in case you don’t have Photoshop you could give Gimp a try).
• A few sketches of the pages you want to make.
• An idea of the ‘feeling’ you want to communicate.

Step 1: Grid and baseline

Grids make it easy to make decisions on what to place where. One of the most popular grids in the 12 column 960 grid that you can download from  960.gs. Pick the psd file from the zip and use it as a starting point for your document.

Opened the 960.gs grid and added a baseline – available for download in the mock-up template.

Bonus: Marc Boulton wrote a lot on designing with grids.
Bonus: Teelax has created a psd file ready with columns, baseline and some text.

Step 2: Background pattern

Add a little more character to your mock-up by using one of the quiet patterns from Subtle patterns.

Added wood pattern – this one and 5 others available in the mockup template.

Bonus: how to make a pattern in Photoshop.

Step 3: A typeface with character

Use Font Squirrel to find a typeface that will give your site a bit of extra character. You can use it for the logo and important headers. The rest of the copy can be in Arial or Helvetica and you can use Lipsum to quickly generate some copy.

Added these typefaces: Bebas, ChunckFive, CabinSketch, Josefin and Pacifico – all 5 typefaces are available  in the mockup template.

Bonus: more on selecting typefaces.

Step 4: Add the interface elements you need

If you look at Dribbble you see that some people are obsessed with creating interface elements. Luckily a group of these people has made their work available for free. You can find many of these elements on 365psd.com.

Added navigation and button

Bonus: the web is obsessed with icons, here’s a good set, and a blog post with more.
Bonus: there are some attempts to create a complete sets, here are some examples.

Step 5: Add some bold photography

If you’re looking for some great photos to add to your mock-up, the easiest thing you can do is go to Flickr’s advanced search and check the ‘search in Creative Commons’ photos box, for example these landscapes.

Combined the video player plus a spices image.

Step 6: Make a clickable prototype

By using a service like InvisionApp you can easily connect  your screens and click together a prototype.

Linked two screen together in the Invision app, you can try it here.

Bonus: a free option to connect images is connect a sketch.
Bonus: If you plan to use the mock-ups in a presentation instead, here are links to an iPhone template and a MacBook Air template.

Finally you can download one zip with the grid, 5 backgrounds and 5 fonts via this link:
Download the mockup template zip here

Let me know how it goes, and leave a comment if you know more great resources.

When asked once what his goal with his practice was, Koolhaas answered: “to keep thinking about what architecture could be. What I could be.”¹  And it is this ‘could be’ that plays a defining role in Koolhaas’ career.

0. Introduction
Rem Koolhaas studied scriptwriting and architecture and is heading OMA/AMO, an office he co-founded in 1975. You might know him from his books Delirious New York or S, M, L, XL and his practice from the CCTV HQ, Casa da Música in Porto or the Central Library in Seattle.

It is not easy to define Koolhaas. Although his buildings can be found all over the world, it’s hard to recognise a typical Koolhaas building by visual appearance alone. To define Koolhaas you have to move to his realm, leave the world of bricks and steel, and enter the world of images, models and processes, a world of ideas. Not what is, but what could be.

His buildings and his books do, however, have something that makes them recognisable as a product from OMA. A product that is very much influenced by the process of creation, a bottom up, labour-intensive, research-lead way of questioning everything. His products are assemblies, where Koolhaas refuses to give any easy answers, and instead reveals a selection of evidence and demands from spectators to form their own interpretations.

OMA Idea Machine

Koolhaas’s greatest achievement is therefore not a building or book, but a system that is capable of harvesting, questioning and producing ideas. What Koolhaas has built is a very large version of himself, a system that, through a method of researching and building, is capable of reliably creating beautiful and intelligent ideas on how the world could be. In this article I want to discuss the system that Koolhaas has built to get in that position and how he manages to remain at the forefront.

1. Observation
The easiest way to uncover new ideas is to be in areas where life is being transformed fast. Koolhaas and his team have been working on a structure that is capable of searching the world for opportunities where change is happening faster than anywhere else, where certain breakthroughs can be made. Some places like the historical centres of European cities have hardly changed through the centuries, whilst others like Beijing, Dubai or Laos seem to redevelop themselves within years. As he states: “We define an agenda, and then we look at the current moment and see where and in what way we could make certain breakthroughs and that is completely independent of making a constant sequence of architectural projects.“²

In 1998 OMA made their research and create approach more explicit by creating a specialised research department and think-tank, which deals with architecture in its unbuilt form. AMO is focused on research, publications and exhibitions. Through this research OMA manages to be present on the scene before the scene appears.

Research and Create

Long before Koolhaas the builder arrives, Koolhaas the writer was already there. In his role as professor at Harvard he explored the Pearl Delta before being asked to build for CCTV. Before proposing an infrastructure plan in Dubai, the manual was already published. Before working with Prada his research on shopping was already available in book form.

New ideas are most easily created in an environment of young ideas. It’s no wonder therefore that AMO’s and Koolhaas’ research projects can be found in many emerging economies of the world.

2. The studio practice
Another way in which Koolhaas differs from his competitors is in how his studio is run. Koolhaas doesn’t come up with the masterplan that is then refined by his architects. On the contrary, his practice defines itself by an enormous freedom, in materials, in methods and in working hours. One might say that at OMA it’s avoided at all cost that answers are given based on no other ground than authority. What Koolhaas therefore provides are questions and not answers.

As Koolhaas puts it: “What the OMA process focuses on is not the creator but the critic. In our way of working, the important person is the one who is shown various options and then makes a critical decision. The result is better architecture.”³

This practice of avoiding ready-made answers runs deep at OMA, it can be found in the way they source their materials. Kunlé Adeyemi states: “Of course it’s easier to use materials from the shelf, from the catalogue, but we can’t be on the cutting edge if we do that. So, we develop our own materials, we develop new structures.”⁴

Another aspect of this freedom is the way employees are allowed to manage their time, so they can be productive without being constrained by fixed working hours. As Mark Veldman states “You can walk out or you can stay the whole night and you can work here. You have a freedom to continue to work.”⁵

Lastly, the fear of becoming predictable and stagnant even reaches into their hiring strategy. As managing director Victor van der Chijs mentioned “We really want every year at least 25% of our people to be new. And we want them to be young, bright people.“⁶

In order for Koolhaas to have the greatest chance of uncovering new ideas, OMA is created around renewal and regeneration. Although Koolhaas himself, with his 30 years’ service, is a  constant factor, it is his continuous work of critiquing himself and the outside world, whilst at the same time also creating both of them, that becomes the key to the design process.

3. Models
Models play a crucial role at the OMA design process; produced in large quantities, they function as a container for ideas and constrains. Because of their shape they create an immediate impact there is no need to go through long documents, a model is an an entity to makes experiments easy. As one of their architects states: “[w]hen you have  creative minds you get a lot of ideas. The luxury product is in the fact that we an actually test all of them. Of course, it’s wasteful but that is what makes it a luxury.”⁷ Dozens or even hundreds of ideas are turned into presentations, diagrams and models which through a process of constant critique, slowly turn into a final plan. As a journalist noticed: “[p]ast reception [...] is a meeting room filled with smaller maquettes. At first glance there appear to be perspex and foam models for dozens of projects – but close up you see they’re all clearly the same site, a masterplan in Moscow, modelled over and over again, with different arrangements and relationships of buildings.”⁸

One of OMA’s accomplishments is therefore also that they manage to run a profitable business whilst allowing for an enormous amount of ‘waste’ to be created. This way of working also allows to blur the distinction between the research, concept and design phases. In these worlds the information that came from outside slowly grows into a plan that could transform the future. As Albena Yaneva writes, “Manhattan, Seattle, Cordoba are brought into the office; their life is re-enacted in the studio practice.“⁹ The playground of ideas is constructed through mixing client demands, the environment, laws and budgets, but also opportunities, ideas, and dreams. In an endless circulation, ideas turn into shapes and shapes into ideas.

Round after round

Model-making allows the office to play with often contradictory constrains of client demands, the time pressure and the environment for the building. Models and books turn constrains and ideas into visual and physical representations that can be used as building blocks to create new worlds. “Erez Ella: Every model has one or more things. You cannot really say what is that – a composition of few things, of materials, of whatever.’ As such, they accommodate a contested assembly of conflicting demands, restrictions to demolish, constraints of history, programme, zoning, typologies, structure and roof, mechanical and electric systems as well as a variety of human concerns– users’ experiences and client’s demands, all translated, transplanted into and accommodated by one entire – the model.”¹⁰

In this way Koolhaas’ practice is able to create and maintain many representations of possible futures that can be tried, altered and questioned. Round after round these representations run their courses, altering, disappearing and merging with newer and older ideas.

The practice of making a large selection of detailed models allows OMA to keep more complexity in the design process. The longer they can push final decisions forward, the more chance there is that a great new idea might emerge. And so each model reflects the studio as a whole, a collection of changing artefacts always in flux towards becoming more refined, intelligent ideas of how the world could be.

4. Archives
“Ten years ago the Netherlands Architecture Institute (NAI) proposed to acquire OMA’s archive. They sent an art historian for four months to the office’s basement storage to make a inventory of all the items. When the work was done, OMA decided not to sell. Instead they hired the art historian as its archivist.“¹¹

Archives via Borix1

One of the reasons that OMA can afford their process is their ability to recycle themselves. By using their large archive of models and books they manage to use time more efficiently and to store a larger amount of complexity. “Archiving the models allowed architects to keep the traces of creativity for a longer period of time; de-archiving them meant they could rediscover those traces of design invention that time had left intact.”¹²

An example here is the Casa da Musica in Porto where “the abandoned and temporarily forgotten model of the private house came up to the office and re-entered the cycles of design. Lingering on the tables of the models for months, it was finally take with new assumptions, reshaped, refreshed and adjusted.“¹³

Working with their vast archive allows OMA to work with a large volume of ideas and a higher internal complexity, thereby enabling them to pick a good idea from a much larger pool than would otherwise be possible.

5. Books
Besides the archived models, OMA uses another method to carry information and ideas through time. As shown in OMA’s exhibition at the AA, besides an architecture firm, OMA is also a massive book production machine, where they use books in all stages of the design process, such as documenting research, saving projects’ stages or capturing outcomes.

OMA Bookmachine - via Dezeen

These books help to get a grip on time, and allow for a large quantity of information to stay within reach. In the research phase they contain the photos, diagrams, texts and schemes. “Shohei Shigematsu: [w]e use very naive diagrams almost like cartoons in children’s books. We also spend a lot of time on making books, which is also part of the presentation materials. There is also an element of clarifying things for ourselves.“¹⁴

And later on the books function like their archives as a way to store and shelf design ideas. “Like the tables of models, the books are summaries of the design steps that make the material trajectory of a project traceable. They keep some traces of exploration, and present the results of design experimentation. Like the tables they allow the designers to go back and rethink the design moves previously made.”¹⁵

Books play an interesting double role at OMA, they are both used to start building processes and to summarise them. Although other architecture firms have combined building and writing (think Le Corbusier, Buckminster Fuller) no firm has managed to operate a book and build business on the scale of OMA.

6. Conclusion
The process that Koolhaas uses to uncover the future before anyone else, is through the ability to bring in new ideas faster and to maintain a higher degree of complexity within the studio and in each project.

It is therefore not the buildings, models, books, exhibitions or magazines that are Koolhaas’ biggest achievement, but the creation of a structure that is capable of producing a constant stream of ideas. As Koolhaas states “[t]he biggest part of our work for competitions and bid invitations disappears automatically. No other profession would accept such conditions. But you can’t look at these designs as waste. They’re ideas; they will survive in books.“¹⁶

One might even suspect that Koolhaas mainly builds buildings to have something to write about, as he concludes in an interview in 2004. “Maybe, architecture doesn’t have to be stupid after all. Liberated from the obligation to construct, it can become a way of thinking about anything – a discipline that represents relationships, proportions, connections, effects, the diagram of everything.”¹⁷

This text eventually made it into a presentation
Rem Koolhaas –designing the design process

Martin Belam wrote a review of this presentation

More about Rem Koolhaas/OMA
Articles:
OMA
Barbican event site
Rem Koolhaas, Index Magazine – Although a bit generic in the opening, the journalist manages to get some good information out of Koolhaas in the end
Intelligent Design, The New Yorker Daniel Zalewsky – Reads like a James Bond story
Interview with Rem Koolhaas – Der Spiegel catches up with Rem Koolhaas’ current work
Tomes, sweet tomes – The Guardian reflects on OMA’s book exhibition at the AA
How to build a universe that doesn’t fall appart two days later  – Although not directly about OMA, this short story by Philip K. Dick is used as the opening motive for the current Barbican exhibition
OMA/Progress at the Barbican – One of the more insightful reviews of the Barbican exhibition

Videos:
Rem Koolhaas/OMA – Good introduction into Rem Koolhaas
OMA’s Vimeo channel – OMA’s own archive,  a good place to start exploring
Barbican’s OMA videos –  Videos of talks helt during OMA’s Barbican exhibition
OMA’s Hong Kong project – Although not a winner, this article and video give a good feel for the style
OMA’s Cean Library proposal – A case of explaining a complex conceptual project

Books:
Made by the Office for Metropolitan Architecture: An Ethnography of Design, Albena Yaneva – my main source  for this article, describes OMA’s love affair with blue foam
Delirious New York – Koolhaas’ first book
Project Japan – Koolhaas’ latest book
Considering Koolhaas and the Office for Metropolitan Architecture – A Collection of essays reviewing Koolhaas from a cultural perspective

References

1. Rem Koolhaas, Index Magazine, 2000
2. Rem Koolhaas, OMA in Conversation, Barbican, 2011
3. Intelligent Design, The New Yorker Daniel Zalewsky
4. Made by the Office for Metropolitan Architecture: An Ethnography of Design, Albena Yaneva, page  80
5. Inside OMA, William Wiles, Icon, page 146
6. Inside OMA, William Wiles
7. Akkaoui, Inside OMA, William Wiles, page 149
8. Inside OMA, William Wiles, page 146
9. Made by the Office for Metropolitan Architecture: An Ethnography of Design, Albena Yaneva, page 85
10.  Made by the Office for Metropolitan Architecture: An Ethnography of Design, Albena Yaneva, page 56
11. OMA/Progress, Barbican free guide
12. Made by the Office for Metropolitan Architecture: An Ethnography of Design, Albena Yaneva, page 65
13. Made by the Office for Metropolitan Architecture: An Ethnography of Design, Albena Yaneva, page  86
14. Made by the Office for Metropolitan Architecture: An Ethnography of Design, Albena Yaneva, page 33
15. Made by the Office for Metropolitan Architecture: An Ethnography of Design, Albena Yaneva, page 72
16. Interview with Rem Koolhaas, Der Spiegel
17. Content, Rem Koolhaas, 2004

Massive thanks to Alia Zapparova for reading and reviewing this text

Within this new world, Design of Understanding tried to answer two questions:
1. How do we begin to understand our current world?
2. How do we begin building our future?

1. Understanding the world.
Gill Ereaut of Linguistic Landscapes proposed an interesting method of understanding the inner workings of an organisation: through looking at the internal language of a company. How are departments called? What job titles do people have? Which words are used in emails? All these small signs create a rich insight into the hidden ways of corporate thinking. If this internal language and these silent assumptions are not addressed, a change of corporate strategy is guaranteed to fail. Ereaut mentioned that in many cases companies came back to her every five years because they had managed to recreate their own problems. If you want to change a company’s path, if you want to follow a beautiful new strategy, you need to address the unspoken rules and the silent assumptions. In short, you need to look at the language, because it is language that constructs the world.

Tom Armitage offered a different way of creating models of the world. In his talk on game design he explained how games can serve as a model for the world at large. If we want to understand a game, we often just start playing it, thereby testing our assumptions against the unknown rules of the game. It’s only through playing that we slowly uncover the rules within the black box. Well designed games are unstable games where not all rules align; for every two rules that reinforce each other there is a third one that creates friction. It is this friction that makes it fun to play.

To understand our current world therefore it is not enough to come up with new theories. To understand it, we must play and keep on playing. Because only through play we will able to slowly reverse engineer the process in the black box and discover opportunities for new approaches.

2. Building the future.
Timo Arnall of Berg made a case for the use of film as a medium to bring the future closer. Film, if done well, is powerful in unpacking actions over time and allows insight into complex emotions. More than any other medium, film gives you a bodily experience of what you see. This makes it a powerful medium for testing ideas before they are made. The touch screen in Minority Report is a good example of a cinematic interpretation that made touch screens look desirable long before they were commercially possible.

The challenge of making people enthusiastic for new technology is also something that Alan Patrick dealt with. He sees hypes and bubbles as unavoidable, and even as a positive phenomenon for new technology to cross the chasm between early adopters and early majority. It’s thanks to the madness of crowds that so much money was pumped into ICT, the Internet and social media, and although much of this money evaporates, in the end we do manage to have better technology.

For me Dan Hill‘s talk was the best of the day, he took all that was good from the previous talks and pushed it forwards. In his work as strategic design lead at Sitra, the Finish organisation for innovation, he deals daily with the challenge of changing the country for the best, whilst avoiding all pitfalls that come with change. He used Wouter Vanstiphout‘s idea that the only way to change cities is by changing the system that governs them, and used the metaphor of dark matter to explain this. Like the universe, our world consists for 90% out of dark matter, a thick layer of rules, regulations, ideas, habits and codes that, although invisible, make our 10% visible world possible. To start changing this invisible world of dark matter, Hill proposed the usage of Trojan horse strategy. A Trojan horse or a McGuffin is a token that is built not for its own existence, but for the sake of understanding and changing the world in which it has been brought to life. Through cycling this new object round after round through the dark matter, slowly the invisible starts to reveal itself (also a theme Tim Arnall and James Bridle). Once the outlines of the dark matter have revealed themselves, experiments can be created to explore the possibilities of altering these lines.

It’s here that the world of games and the world of dark matter start to come together and make a clear statement: the only way to start understanding complex adaptive systems is by starting to play with(in) them. And the only way to change them is through many rounds of slow iterations.

More reviews:
The Unpacking of Complexity by Lulu Pinney
The Design of Understanding by Aden Davies
Sketch notes by Amanda Wright
Sketch notes by Eva Lotta Lamm
Lanyrd page 

Inspired by Will Myddelton’s post on the open UX university I got the idea for a series of workshops that could help people become more active in the UX community. Posting the idea on the London IA message board resulted in many positive replies. Attendees, speakers, co-organisers and hosts all came forward. After the initial post it still took a few months to connect all the dots, but on 7 July the first Uxdo took place.

The theme of the workshop hosted at Fortune Cookie was writing and featured Martin Belam and Cennydd Bowles. Martin shared great tips on getting into the blogging habit and optimising your posts and Cennydd made it clear that editing is as important for a good piece as writing itself. At the end of the evening everyone agreed to write a blogpost and two weeks later the majority lived up to it.

Here’s a list of all the posts that were written after the uxdo workshop:

Martin Belam – Cennydd Bowles on the value of editing
Tim Caynes – Writing to be read: a workshop on being a better writer
Heidi Blanton – Who has rights to your Twitter photos? TwitPic updates TOS.
Sally Smith – Copywriting and interface design: five unifying principles – UX Sleuth
Lucy Hughes – Interactivism
Francis Rowland – Science, stories and better design
Will Myddelton – The Story Of How I Got My Name
Tyler Tate – Learning Styles: The Cognitive Side of Content
Martina Schell – UX in startups: 6 tips from the frontline
Simon Doggett  – The London UX Job Pool – A Guide for Candidates
Jason Mesut – The Portfolio Rant (part 2)
Cennydd Bowles – Simple Harmonic Motion

These posts form a wide and rich collection of stories and ideas, which I think is an amazing result! And I hope that everyone feels inspired to keep on writing.

Rumour has it that the next Uxdo will be on workshop facilitation and might take place in mid-August, be sure to follow @uxdo on twitter to find out when the next one will be.

Earlier this year I was lucky enough to be able to attended a meet up organised by Jason Mesut around the theme ‘What makes a great UX portfolio’. Judging by the discussion that spun out at London IA the last word on UX portfolios hasn’t been said. In this article I’ll share what I’ve learned so far.

1. Know yourself
Every successful pitch starts with good self-knowledge. What is it that you want to achieve by making your portfolio, what should be the idea that you want to install in the mind of the viewer? Why are you applying for this particular job at this particular company? Do you know the direction in which you would like to develop? What makes you so much better than all the other candidates? Those questions should be answered in your portfolio. A portfolio is not meant to be a perfect reflection of your past career, it’s a sales tool that you use to steer your future. Therefore it’s perfectly fine to put a spotlight on those projects that you are proud off, and to show off your skills in the areas you’d like to develop yourself in.

2. Know your audience
It’s hard to decide what you should do if you don’t know your audience. Every hiring manager is different and this should be reflected in your portfolio. Try to gain as much information as possible about the (kind of) person and the company you are addressing. Are you being hired as the only person or will you be part of a large design department? Will the hiring person view your portfolio on the road on her iPhone or look at it at her 30” iMac? Or is she more likely to print it at the very last minute so she can look at it whilst walking to the interview room? The answers to these questions will define the kind of information, the amount of pages and the size of pages (A4, A3, 1980*1200, etc) that will best fit your audience.

3. Tell a story
Make sure you take the lead. Based on your goal (get the job) and your audience (the hiring manager) you can create a visual narrative supported by text. Roughly your portfolio could be structured like this:

1. Top-level view. Show that you understand UX design: show user research, idea generation, idea implementation and testing.
2. Zoom-in. Build up trust by demonstrating that you are an experienced professional: show the different design phases of several projects, make sure you mention the goal of the project, your role in it and the outcome.
3. Team-player. Gain some browny points by demonstrating your obsession with UX: were you involved in organizing an event? Did you write an interesting blog post? Or did you give a presentation? This is your chance to show it.

Through text and visuals you can make clear that they simply have no other option than to invite you for an interview.

4. Sweat the details
Think once more about your goal and your audience and make sure they align. Crop your images so only the essential is shown. Remove words until only the necessary are left. Tune your case studies. Maybe you can use a quote from a happy client. Perhaps you can illustrate your statement about card-sorting and workshops with some photos. Have a look at some great portfolios out there and try to find their nifty little details; speech-bubbles, consistent heading or using an interesting font. And finally put your contact details on the first and the last page.

5. Test and iterate
Print your portfolio, show it to a friend, show it to a mentor, look at it on your mum’s old laptop. Does it stand all these tests? Read through your text, ask a friend to read through the text, make sure there are no spelling errors, no page errors and no wrong images.

6. Learn from others
Here’s a collection of discussions, blogposts and portfolios from around the web. It’s always good to know what the competition is doing.

Should you make a portfolio:

• To portfolio or not to portfolio, that is the question – You the user
• You don’t need a UX portfolio
• Is a robust portfolio for a UX designer necessary – Quoare

How to make a good portfolio:

• The portfolio rant part I – London-IA
• What do clients/employers/recruiters look for in a UX portfolio – Quora
• Thoughts on creating a portfolio – UX exchange
• Online UX Portfolio – Conflict of Interest? – IxDA
• A good UX portfolio – Diane Cherie
• 7 steps to a Kick-ass UX portfolio- Semantic Foundry
• Better UX portfolios
• Fill your portfolio with stories – Jared Spool
• How to ace the UX job application – Foolproof

Examples:

• Abby Covert
• Simon Doggett
• Umanka Karkada
• K van Laan
• Hilary Coolidge
• Danny Hearn
• Danny Hope
• Anthony J. Davies

Get some visual design inspiration:

• 10 steps to the perfect portfolio websites – Smashing Magazine

And finally, thanks to all the great advice given in the London IA forum and by the attendees of the portfolio meet-up. I’ll leave you with one question: what advice would you give to people who set out to create or update their portfolio?

1. Know yourself.

The first thing I learned was that, although the job title might be the same, User Experience Designer can mean many things depending on the environment you are looking at. A start-up might expect you to be knowledgeable in user testing whilst also capable of doing some front-end coding. An agency might expect that you’ve have created and presented pitches, whilst client-side might expect you to design email campaigns as part of your job.

Because all of these different expectations it is important to know what you want, what you can do and where you might find the most realistic fit for those two. In my case I found that what I want, –growth in my knowledge and skills in designing advanced web-applications– was quite hard to achieve with my mix of skills (best to be described as senior web-designer). This showed itself by the variety of salaries that companies were willing to pay me for roughly the same job title. Best advice would be to contact a more senior practitioner, who knows about your work, and gain a good understanding about your strengths and interests.

More to read:
How to get a job at a webdesign agency.

2. Have a portfolio

You might have a well written CV, hundreds of connections on LinkedIn and Twitter, and a well maintained blog, but without a good portfolio you’re unlikely to land an interview. I would advise to have three versions available: one pdf version that you can send out to recruiters, an online version that you can link to, and a set of printouts that you can take with you to an interview. You’d be surprised to find out how many times it’s quite a challenge to get online during a job interview.

As for what should be in your portfolio, have a look at Jason Mesut’s rant over at London IA.  As you can see from my portfolio there is still room for progress. It’s not completely clear which story I want to tell: am I a visual designer with some IxD experience, or a beginning IA with some visual design experience, also the items seem to be in a random order. The positive feedback that I received was mainly on my sketches and more conceptual work; which probably proves the point that the process is more insightful to look at than the end product.

More to read:
To portfolio or not to portfolio that is the question

3. Recruiters

As soon as you’ve uploaded your CV on Monsterboard you will get plenty of phone calls from hungry recruiters, all of them will promise you that you are exactly the right match for their inspiring position. Therefore make sure you’ve done your ‘know thyself homework’ and are able to quickly judge if the proposed job is matching your criteria. From my experience, there are some recruiters who are really good, who are interested in you and are willing to invest time to follow up on conversations. Here are some agencies that took the decency (or precaution) to ask me to come over for a talk: ZebraPeople, Futureheads, Propel London, Ecom recruitment and Vanburn at ITHR. Don’t forget, however, that many companies don’t (or even refuse) to work with recruiters, so it’s worth doing some active searching yourself.

4. Automate your search

No need to keep on visiting websites to hope for an update; modern technologies come with plenty of options to stay in the loop without working too hard. The following services allow you to sign up for an email update on your search query: the Guardian, Monster, the Ladders. And these services you can follow by RSS: uxwork, UK UPA jobs, London IA jobs, etc. What also might be an idea is to search Twitter for UX jobs and to choose the ‘show tweets nearby’ tab.

5. Linked In

LinkedIn was for me the site where I kept coming back to. It has the ability to do background checks on the companies and the people who are interviewing you. Also more and more companies are actively using LinkedIn as a recruitment tool.

6. Quality over quantity

At the moment there is a strong demand for UX designers in London, therefore if you aren’t too sure about a company don’t worry too much about turning down a job offer. In the end it’s better to only go to job interview with companies you are interested in, better one well-researched and prepared interview then ten careless conversations.

more to read:
Improve your changes of a job in UX
Grow your UX skill set
Things you need to know to get an IA/UX job
Getting hired

Please let me know in the comments how you’ve experienced finding work and which knowledge you’ve found essential.

When we judge the quality of a product we judge it by the total experience. That is: the actual properties of the product plus the experience we have with these properties. Because the experience depends not only on the product but also on its surroundings —other products available, emotional attachment— the perceived value of a product varies from place to place and from person to person. This split between the actual product quality and perceived quality leads to a situation where it becomes possible to increase the perceived value, without actually increasing the actual product’s quality. To stay competitive many companies choose to increase their experienced quality through large advertisement campaigns that enable the price of the product to go up. It can create a situation where expensive products become expensive, not because they are good, but because the marketing campaign needs to be paid for. I would argue that there is a better way: increase the perceived quality through actually increasing the quality. This is the age-old path of the craftsman.

Quality is realised through the interaction between the physical and the psychological world. Take a bottle of wine for example. The house wine sold in a local supermarket supplies the alcohol that will get your body in a more relaxed state. Nevertheless it is no match for the experience of drinking a French wine imported by a French friend whom you met years ago during your stay in Paris. They might do their physical job equally well, but the psychological impact is of a different magnitude. You can engage with the story, you feel the care, passion and dedication of both the friend and the château in every sip you take. Besides the insurance that only the best ingredients are used, you also want to be engagement with the story and the care of the craftsman who created the product.

In a competitive market the producers of products need to keep on innovating and increase their quality to remain competitive. In the category of computers it becomes quite clear that what was known as the best of the best five years ago is no longer relevant today. But what if innovation is no longer possible? If you are the producer of a famous quality whisky with roots going back for centuries, coming up with a new improved flavour might not be the successful path to follow. Instead what you can do is focus your attention on perceived quality. You can tell the consumers through advertisement campaigns about your unique values, your incredible ingredients, your centuries of tradition; all these stories increase the experience of the first sip.

The problem here is that the quality of the product remains the same. None of the hard working labourers in the distillery will get an extra penny for the improved experience, since what they are doing remains what they’ve been doing for centuries. Or even more in the case of mineral water, where the labour involved consists mainly of bottling the water that was already there. What goes for both mineral water and whisky is that the price that we pay to purchase these products is mainly used to pay for the advertisement that seduced us to buy these products in the first place.

I think this is wrong. We should not waste the sparse resources of this world on advertisement that informs us that we should really buy products of good quality by craftsmen who care. It does not benefit the hard work of the craftsman and it creates the risk of make-belief. Thanks to the power of branding and advertisement we might consider to buy products —for example clothes— that are of a higher price and lower quality than those we could have bought if we weren’t persuaded by the power of marketing.

The money could better be spent on making people aware of the advantages of purchasing products that are created by people who truly care about creating great products. People who not only perform their job, but master it, not because there is a demand for quality, but because pushing quality beyond the ordinary creates a sense of meaningful being for the craftsman. Passion, dedication, care and hard work create an environment where magic can happen. When the reason for making good products goes beyond the wish of keeping clients and reputation, there is a new space where good can become great. L’art pour l’art, craftsmanship for craftsmanship’s sake.

Jesse James Garett
We also have to look at the experience that is being delivered outside the medium that we delivered it in. Our work is not done when we deliver it, it’s done when it is used by our customers. An experience is (always) the outcome, but our goal should be to engage our users in it. We can speak about engagement in two different dimensions, the perception-action dimension and the cognition-emotion dimension.

Liz Danzico
Not only should we redesign the language and concepts that we are using, we should also alter what we design and how. We should bridge the gap between creator and consumer and meet in the middle, where the consumer can use and reuse what the designer made. We should also understand that to give room for improvisation we should be much more clear about the few rules that we keep in place. To enable improvisation we should design for three things: the present – it has to happen in the now, detectability – it must be understood at at least some level (see rules) and responsiveness – there should be a short feedback loop to keep people engaged.

Michael B. Johnson
We build bows for violins, useless in themselves, but essential to create beautiful things. Quality is the best business practice. We layer our films in three levels: the world in which the story is set, the people who live in that world and finally the individual. Beauty is not merely a side product. Making beautiful products makes people happy and enables them to be more productive.

Joshua Porter
If we want to have a bigger seat at the board table, then we should account for our work. Data-driven design might seem to be the answer but is not. There is a problem with the current divide between data-driven and intuition design. Intuition design might come a long way but leads us into endless discussions. Data-driven design might be clear but could cause us to optimise a sub-optimal peak without ever getting to the much higher mountain a bit further up. We should therefore set up a culture that takes the best out of both worlds. Data doesn’t design, designers do.

We can’t solve the problems with the same tools that created them. – Einstein

Insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. – Einstein