Silence has always been a distraction for me. I need music or a medley of conversations to help me focus and concentrate. I always have music in the background, and when I work on something important, I have a few favorite playlists that help inspire and focus me. Recently I took a closer look at one of my favorites: Leonard Cohen, a musician/poet from Canada. I found some fun and interesting connections between his songs and how to best work with designers. Here are five Leonard Cohen songs to keep in mind when working with a designer:

1. First We Take Manhattan

Clarify your needs. Be a good partner in the design process, let your designer know what you want from the project, and of any designs that appeal to you. Communicating your needs is never a bad thing. Just like in the song, spell it out: "First we take Manhattan, then we take Berlin." Specifying your needs and making sure that everyone involved knows what is expected of them will leave more room to engender creativity: your designer won’t take Berlin before first taking Manhattan.

2. The Future

Include pertinent deadline information, always. Most designers work on multiple projects at the same time. They need to adjust their priorities based on concrete information, like deadlines. As Leonard Cohen would say, "Get ready for the future: it is murder." Hopefully the deadlines associated with the project don’t end in murder, but keeping your designer in the loop for when the future is nigh will ensure your project will remain on track, with no loss of life.

3. Who By Fire

Explain your issue; don’t just try to solve it. Instead of asking to make a font bold or bigger, tell the designer what you need the title or sentence to do in relation to the rest of the design or page. As the lyrics go, "…who shall I say is calling?" Knowing the concept behind the changes allows your designer to come up with innovative ways to solve the issue. However, if you do have an idea about how you might solve the problem, include it (but don’t forget to explain what the problem is so that your designer has a chance to offer a solution).

4. Anthem

Trust your designer’s skills. You hire designers for a reason; don’t micromanage their creative process. Be willing to give them space, space to innovate and create; you might be pleasantly surprised at what comes of it. My favorite line in Anthem is, "There is a crack, a crack in everything, that’s how the light gets in." Trust that your designer can break through and shine a light on your work.

5. Waiting for the Miracle

Give your designer time to work well. Time—time to marinate, mull, and sketch—is a necessary part of creating good design. One must wait for the miracle to come. Patience is best, as the lyrics suggest: "Nothing left to do when you've got to go on waiting, waiting for the miracle to come." Give a designer time to work and you will see what miracles of design emerge.

Once you collaborate with, and trust in, your designer, a world of opportunities will open up. In a similar vein, HCL Technologies realized the importance of its people and reassessed their strategies to capitalize on their strengths. GTM members can click here and learn how HCL Technologies uses a three-step transformation process to invest in a collaborative, employee-focused, customer-centric business model. If you are not a member, check out the sample on slideshare.

Jannette is the Senior Graphic Design Artist for Growth Team Membership, a premier best practices research group within Frost & Sullivan. You can follow her on Twitter: @jwhippy.

My story is one of overconfidence and surprise. I thought I pretty much knew everything I needed to know about InDesign (the software I primarily use for my job). However, I had an opportunity to attend an InDesign seminar, and with the recent release of the new version, I decided it might be worth my time to check it out. I suppose it’s *possible* that InDesign’s newer features might affect my workflow, but I prepared to be bored. Having used InDesign for more than 11 years, I was confident that most of the lecture would hold no interest, but I would put up with it because my experience using the new interactive tools was minimal, and I might eventually want to take advantage of them.

My overconfidence bordered on narcissism. I sauntered into the classroom, confidence oozing as I settled into a chair and nonchalantly tapped my pen on my pad of paper (not thinking I would need more than one sheet). And the lecture began. As I feared, we first discussed the basics: paragraph styles, character styles, master pages, and more. While I was correct that most of the discussion was not entirely new for me, I was pleasantly surprised when the lecturer delved deeper into the functionality of InDesign and, shockingly, I learned I was not the InDesign maven I had made myself out to be. It was really fun to learn of undiscovered (by me) functionality in some of the features I had been using for years.

For those of you using InDesign, and who might think a seminar is beneath you, here are some fun things I learned (if you don’t use InDesign, feel free to skip ahead):

• InDesign can create an automated table of contents, which then creates bookmarks when exporting to PDF (super easy to set up, and then super easy to update!)
• Text anchors are so much better than bookmarks when creating hyperlinks within a document (bookmarks were always a tad buggy; text anchors seem to be reliable, fingers crossed)
• One can add guides and crop marks to InDesign libraries (how awesome is that?!)
• Use character styles to avoid over-rides in paragraph styles (I hate those little plus signs in my paragraph styles)
• Don’t be afraid of GREP; use the built in codes and get your feet wet (I am still a little afraid but am taking baby steps)
• InDesign can create variable text that automatically updates (goodbye 2011 copyright in a 2012 document)

But my story definitely applies to those of you who’ve never heard of or used InDesign. I am glad I attended the seminar despite my ill-conceived assumption that I knew everything. Remember there is always something new to learn (I filled four sheets of paper with notes); perhaps it’s doing a repetitive task differently, or simply adding to the knowledge you already have. Always educate yourself and never say no to a learning opportunity. If you can take a class or attend a seminar to learn more about the tools you use everyday, my advice is to take it! Even if (like me) you think you have it all under control.

Jannette is the Senior Graphic Design Artist for Growth Team Membership, a premier best practices research group within Frost & Sullivan. You can follow her on Twitter: @jwhippy.

Dieter Rams, a German industrial designer, introduced ten principles of good design. I am going to focus on one principle in this blog post: good design is innovative.

I am not a product designer, but innovation is something I work toward in my page and infographic designs as Senior Graphic Design Artist for Frost & Sullivan’s Growth Team Membership program. Creating clever and different ways to explain processes and data takes time; I call it marinating time.

Speaking of marinating, I love to grill. And I love a good marinade. I think marinated food is just fabulous. However, sometimes (most times) I don’t build in enough time to marinate and I get (what I feel are) sub-par grill results. Talking about grilling right now makes me a little sad what with fall just around the corner. I love the change in seasons (probably because I grew up with only two in the Pacific: rainy and dry); fall is one of my favorites, despite the shorter daylight hours and the temperature drops that deter me from venturing outside to grill. So while grilling (for me) is a late-spring, summer activity, marinating can be done year round (when I remember to plan ahead). Just like marinating food, marinating on design takes time: time to think and time to allow myself to follow meandering thoughts, jot down many sketches (I go through a lot of paper), and come at ideas sideways.

These marinating sessions require me to think loosely about a problem or page. When I let my mind wander, flashes of inspiration hit and I come up with some unique and clever ideas. It is a rush when an idea flashes and I grab it and run with it, sometimes the idea fizzles once I start fleshing out the details, but more often than not, the idea solidifies into a great page or a lovely section of an infographic.

I often tell my team that I need time to marinate on a page or an infographic. This time to muse and reflect is crucial to my design process. If you find yourself stuck on something, the flow of a presentation or even just one page; I highly recommend setting aside time to marinate, the brain often comes up with interesting solutions when you allow yourself to think sideways.

Jannette is the Senior Graphic Design Artist for Growth Team Membership, a premier best practices research group within Frost & Sullivan. You can follow her on Twitter: @jwhippy.

It’s rare for me to meet a Cabernet Sauvignon that I don’t like. My favorites are Cabs with backbone: big and full-bodied. I like my wines earthy (even a little herbaceous [taste and aroma of herbs]) with some tobacco flavor. And I love when the wine finishes dry. My wine preferences have matured and changed over the years (I have attended many, many tastings) I started off liking the more fruity, light reds and creamy, buttery chardonnay’s and now I really cannot abide either.

My design skills have also matured and improved through the years. I have designed many pages, some good, some great, some forgettable, and some truly insightful. I find that my best designs are conceived when I have a few key principles in mind. When keeping proximity, similarity, and order (a few of the Gestalt principles of perception) top of mind I produce clean, easily navigable pages.

• Proximity occurs when elements are placed close together. While they are still separate objects they are perceived as unified because they are close to each other.
• Similarity occurs when objects look similar to one another; they are then perceived as a group or pattern. Repetition of colors or objects is pleasing and aids in fast comprehension.
• Order (or symmetry) occurs when the whole of a figure is perceived rather than the individual items that make it up. When designing to instruct, order and symmetry help the information to be consumed and comprehended quickly.

There are more principles, but these three are the ones that help me the most when designing guidebooks.

Chelsea Cappetta created this slideshow that showcases all the Gestalt Principles:

Inspiration hits at the strangest times: morning walks with my greyhound, a quiet moment sipping wine, or a busy and hectic day of running errands. It turns out solutions come more easily when I stop thinking about the problem. However, a key component of my ability to visualize solutions is having an understanding of the broader view.

Telling someone else’s story can be challenging. As a designer of Best Practice Guidebooks, I am not involved in the primary research and robust storyboard discussions required to create our guidebooks. When a guidebook is passed to me the researcher must explain everything, in extreme detail and I am responsible for visualizing the story. However, I often find the details distracting and, while it is good to have them, I need the big picture. Working with researchers who have a superior understanding of the subject manner and are able to step back and explain the overall view helps me to create meaningful structures and visuals. When I step back from the details, clarity often ensues.

Understanding the big picture helps me to better visualize graphical solutions to complex ideas. Once I design the concept, the details tend to slip into place within the larger, coheseive structure.

Visualizing text can make presentations more interesting and help your audience grasp the core concept quickly. If you are looking to make your work more visual, more exciting, details are nice to have but if you don’t understand how they all work together, visualizing your text will not be easy. Take a step back from your page and think about what you are trying to communicate. 

As an in-house designer who works alone, I require constant feedback. It’s the only way to know if I am on the right track. Recently, I had an epiphany: I have ignored my best design resource available, my fellow designer. I could have kicked myself for the oversight. I was working on a poster that was just not fitting together well. I ignored my first instinct to send it to a friend, and instead sent it to a fellow designer in a different department. Her insightful comments and suggestions helped me to see the holes in my design and the fixes we discussed made the poster better.

Feedback is only as good as the reviewer. If your reviewer doesn’t know your intended audience or have much experience in your subject, their feedback (while interesting) is not as meaningful as another, more appropriate, reviewer. Take care in gathering feedback. Your work will get better if the feedback gathered is from someone who understands/is part of the audience you wish to engage. As Seth Godin says: “Shun the non-believers.”

Everyone is familiar with the saying "Don’t judge a book by its cover" but I can honestly say that I ALWAYS judge a book by its cover (even after I've been proven wrong, I still do it). First impressions are everything. Take this book cover for example (see Figure 1):

Figure 1: The 1994 cover art for "Arabian Jazz" by Diana Abu Jaber

I would have never picked up this book had it not been recommended; I found the cover to be loud and garish with the colors and illustrations suggesting something cartoonish. In spite of this, I thoroughly enjoyed the tale of an Americanized Jordanian family living in upstate New York.

Similar to a first interview, where what you wear matters, the design of your work can help to attract the audience. A good design can open the door; it can also influence how the work may be approached. Does the reader begin with a hesitating, skeptical eye? Will they feel free to dive in to what has been written with an open mind toward enlightenment? I find it so much easier to talk to someone who already thinks I am wonderful, rather than to first convince them that I am wonderful.

Good design is easy to navigate, maintains consistency, and enhances the content of the piece. Embrace whitespace (or negative space) so that the viewer can easily navigate the page without losing their focus on the presenter or the content. The headings and subheadings must always be consistent so that one is never confused about the hierarchy of the text. Design must always enhance the content being presented, every image must have a good reason for inclusion on the page.

However, a good look is not everything. Content must support design. No matter how beautiful the design, if the reader is not happy with the content, we've lost them.

I am happy that I took a chance on the aforementioned book; however, I would have invested my time earlier if I had felt the cover provided a better visual introduction. The book cover was redesigned in 2003 (see Figure 2).

Figure 2: The 2003 cover art for "Arabian Jazz" by Diana Abu Jaber

The new cover gives the reader a visual hint of what the book is about, the white picket fence evoking America and the sun icons juxtaposing the family's Middle Eastern heritage; and the text has a clear hierarchy making it easy to navigate the page with one quick scan.