Updated January 18, 2021. See this twitter thread for details.
The design services landscape has undoubtedly evolved in the last decade.
Regardless of size or model, there’s been a rich history of graphic design services being a “relationships businesses.” Firms typically became known and trusted for their leadership, teams, and results. Reputation is still a factor today, but the variety of means for engaging with design practitioners continue to expand.
Outside agencies still exist and are now competing with the impulse within some companies to either build or acquire their own internal design teams. Individual freelancers and small boutique shops are looking for ways to specialize in countering these pressures. Freelancer marketplaces have been around for a while and focus on a race to the bottom in affordability.
An even more recent trend is the rise of design service companies that commoditize typical graphic and digital design production services and outputs and wrap them up in a SaaS (software as a service) styled capabilities model that offers predictability of pricing and flexibility of commitment.
The business world loves its acronyms. Perhaps this is model could be known as “On-Demand Design Services (ODDS)” or “Unlimited Design as a Service (UDaaS)” 🤓
What do these companies have in common?
Emphasis on a tiered fixed-price model, quite similar to SaaS companies
A contract-less monthly commitment that can be canceled any time
Ability to increase or decrease the scale of services needed month to month
They are usually remote-only, nobody shows up on-site to help you
Anonymity and variety, no guarantees that you can choose or know the designer(s) working on any given project
Proprietary online portals track all workflow processes, job requests, feedback, iterations, and sign off – asynchronously online.
They are headquartered around the globe
Many offer unlimited revisions
A promise of end-product ownership (IP, files, assets)
Some offer a “risk-free” trial period
Some target a mix of end-customers, from companies seeking design help to other agencies and freelance designers that need immediate assistance
Most emphasize graphic design production, NOT strategic thinking or brand creation
Here’s a copy of this list in an Airtable database that you can bookmark, follow or copy.
Disclaimer: I am not affiliated with any of the above services, nor have a had the opportunity to work directly with any of them. This article is meant for information purposes only and is not a recommendation to purchase or use these services.
If I’ve missed any related companies, or if you are a business that has hired any of these companies in the past and wish to share your experiences – please get in touch.
Sometimes the analog approach is a quicker and easier way to achieve a particular design thinking task.
A classic example is the appropriately stereotypical use of sticky notes by User Experience designers to facilitate various design thinking workshop exercises such as card sorting and other ideation models. The ability to quickly write-out and rearrange notes keeps the ideas flowing.
After your effort has wrapped up, there’s often a desire to capture the analog results in a digital format. Transforming analog work to a digital copy allows a team to move toward the next phase of sharing or synthesis.
Here are some useful apps that can help quickly capture and convert photos of your hand written “Post-it®” sticky notes to editable text.
The Post-it® App
From the brand you know and love. “The Post-it® App brings the simplicity of the Post-it® Note to your Mac, iPhone and iPad. Whether you use Post-it® Notes for collaboration or for personal note taking, the Post-it® App helps you keep that momentum going.
Simply capture analog notes from a photo, or create new notes right on your device for those important reminders. Arrange, refine and organize notes and ideas on your board anyway you see fit. Then share your organized board with friends and co-workers, or export to your favorite applications and cloud services—including Trello, PowerPoint, Excel, PDF, Dropbox, iCloud and plenty more.”
Brill
Brill is an app that promises to help you digitize faster and work smarter “take photos of multiple handwritten sticky notes and instantly convert them to digital text in 100+ languages. Up to 200x faster than typing.”
“Save time when capturing your handwritten notes. Share to email, Slack, Jira, Trello and more!” With auto-detection and bulk uploading, Brill can “Take photos of multiple handwritten sticky notes and instantly convert them to digital text in 100+ languages. Up to 200x faster than typing.”
Miro
Miro is your team’s centralized platform for collaborating on user story and customer journey maps, workflows, and more.
One feature is a “Stickies Capture tool allows you to convert real stickies to fully editable Miro sticky notes. Share them and collaborate in real-time, turn them into Jira tasks or make a part of digital diagrams, templates, and more.”
Evernote
Evernote lets you “Take notes anywhere. Find information faster. Share ideas with anyone. Meeting notes, web pages, projects, to-do lists”
“The Evernote camera is specially designed to enhance and transform your Post-it® Notes into beautiful, digital replicas of all your notes.”
Stock Up on The Real Thing!
Post-it® Teamwork Tools are the actual Post-it notes, large notepads, and other physical supplies that can help you facilitate your UX and Design workshop sessions.
Here’s a personal-perspective case study on how I had the opportunity to collaborate with the band and their label on both the recordings and design to support their latest release.
The Dogmatics have contributed to the Boston rock scene since the early ’80s. Read their backstory here. Two thousand nineteen marks a momentous new chapter for the band, their family, friends, and fans.
The Dogmatics announced this July that they had joined the local label Rum Bar Records and would be releasing their first new material in over thirty years. Jerry Lehane, Tom Long, Peter O’Halloran, and Jimmy O’Halloran (in honor of their late brother Paul) were laying down new tracks. Garage rockers in New England and around the world rejoiced in anticipation.
My family and I have been close to the band and its extended circle for many years. For over a decade, I’ve been a member of The Hired Men, a band that includes members of The Dogmatics among a gloriously amoeba-like group of other established local musicians. Our two bands have played together and even combined forces for live shows.
When they asked me to play mandolin and sing backup on a few new songs, I jumped at the honor. The band worked out of a fantastic barn studio with the expert ear and production skills of Ed Riemer. Tim Heap joins in on a track, and they were even able to collaborate remotely with their long-time keyboard player John Goetchius.
After they completed the recordings, we started throwing around ideas for the album artwork. Rum Bar Records would be releasing it on 7” vinyl, CD, and Digital.
We played with some concepts. Ultimately we agreed that our goal was to strike a balance between the nostalgia of the band’s storied history and the contemporary context of these new songs.
The final layout is a compositional hybrid of their previously released albums. We carried forward the classic logo created by Barry Hall, and stacked it above a white framed b&w photo. The album’s title is hand-lettered in sharpie (a nod toward the many setlists the band hastily penned over the years before hitting the stage).
BTW The cover photo is from series I took a while back when Peter pulled his legendary Fender Telly apart to try and find the date of manufacture.
The palette is inspired by the logo coloring on their album “Thayer Street”. The yellow background was an intentional strategy to grab the viewer’s attention. A primary consideration was the desire for a cover that would stand out among the many thumbnails vying for attention in the digital distribution landscape.
This partnership was a perfect synergy between a band and institution that have both been helping to make the Boston music scene “wicked good” for many years. The rollout included an in-store performance at the Norwood location.
The album is out now in the digital marketplace and the physical goods officially release on October 10th. The reception has been excellent so far.
“She’s The One is no run of the mill comeback. This thing’s a stone cold triumph!” – Faster and Louder
“It’s always renewing to hear a set like this at Newbury Comics. The store had the gorgeous yellow vinyl copy that sold a lot of copies during the day. Score that if you can.” – Boston Groupie News
“Throughout the band tears through each song with frantic, fun abandon…
Who knows what prompted this reunion, 33 years later, but it’s clear that they’ve managed to sand away any possible rust that may have settled in over the past several decades, offering a revisiting of a band that always deserved a much wider audience beyond their native Boston. She’s The One could very well be the release to make that happen.” – NeuFutur Magazine
Topping it all off, many of the events mentioned above have been captured on video and may be part of a forthcoming documentary about The Dogmatics (stay tuned). I couldn’t be more excited about all this well-deserved attention the band is getting.
Some key points may call into question whether or not Apple is using a bit of dark pattern UX to expediently persuade customers to adopt this complex feature.
The key assertion of the complaint is accurate – one cannot eventually turn off or otherwise reverse the choice to move to Two-factor Authentication.
Here are some things that go against good user experience design practices:
There are commenters on the Macrumors article that suggest that people are “dumb” if they want to turn it off and lose security features. However, there are valid use cases for wanting to turn this feature off – so if that’s not possible there are people who would like to be aware of that information up front and may choose not to adopt the feature.
When a promotion uses wording that expresses a certain mental model to users such as the idea of turning something on – people tend to expect the converse option of being able to turn something off. Apple explains its step one as “Turn on two-factor authentication in Settings”, so they are responsible for insinuating the expectation. Related Apple email messaging uses the word ‘enable’ which also sets an expectation of ‘disable’ (third parties talking about this matter are referring to Apple’s feature as ‘opt-in’, which also suggests a method of ‘opt-out’).
If Apple wanted to describe this offering clearly, they would say something like “Switch your account over to two-factor authentication – an effective security upgrade that cannot be reversed” – this might give certain users pause and allow them to consider the tradeoffs of security vs other personal concerns (i.e. make a well-informed choice).
The important irreversibility details effectively contradict the way they ‘sell’ the commitment level of the feature. In addition, they separate and include those details further down the page in an FAQ style section. It certainly does seem like Apple is using content strategy techniques to knowingly obfuscate irreversibility with its ‘easy’ two-part instructions pattern in the main content area.
It’s my assumption that Apple has probably been aware of this issue for some time, even if it was not initially the goal. It’s also my hypothesis that a design-driven company must intentionally make a decision to sustain knowingly-flawed user experiences.
I’ve been intrigued by the potential endgame of a single environment that could satisfy the needs and modes of operation for both visual UI designers and developers. Convergence of tools has been a theme of my “Looking Ahead” new year blog entries for 2017 and 2018.
Typical UI Design tools still offer an excellent working model for quickly manifesting design ideas at any level of fidelity. Many of us know of situations where a well-executed mockup that took 30 minutes to render in a design tool (drawing pictures of screens) might get a dev estimate of many hours or days to execute (QA’d production code).
As long as that dynamic exists, many designers will continue to prefer WYSIWYG drawing tool interfaces over working directly in code – especially when they are early in the ideation process.
Popular tools like Figma, Sketch and AdobeXD continue to make moves toward exporting out to React and potentially other libraries. However, as of now, these are one-way, and the real deal will be bi-directional or zero-conversion options.
Here’s a roundup of new tools looking to shorten or even eliminate the distance between drawings of screens and production-ready code (in alphabetical order).
Alva
Alva – “Alva lets you design interactive products based on components engineered by your developers. And guess what – we are entirely open source.”
Interplay – Fast prototyping that combines the power of design systems, production code components and live collaboration.”
Interplay announces early sign up: “Create delightful, responsive experiences. Fast prototyping that combines the power of design systems, production code components and live collaboration.” (React, Angular and Vue) https://t.co/5k4LExgxuJ via @interplayapppic.twitter.com/v0TEW5Rz27
Iterative.ly – “Iterate on top of your live app using your design system. Launch an experiment in under 10 minutes. Continuously improve your product.”
