“Don’t be afraid to ask questions. When you’re just starting you can’t possibly be expected to know everything.”

Inez Torre: Designer, Creator, Innovator

Inez Torre can only be described as a result of what occurs when incredible talent and industrious work ethic collide in a perfect storm. The Portugal born, London based designer is an industry leader, with her take on creative design, sharing her talents with companies the likes of AKA UK, The Economist, Guardian Labs, and CNN.

Starting her path to success in the gorgeous city of Viseu and it’s Instituto Politécnico de Viseu, Inez Torre learned how to craft her art in a spectacular fashion. Furthering her learning by attending the University for the Creative Arts in England, she left their Masters program to embark upon a more than stellar career.

Now Inez works as the Senior UX Designer for the British Broadcasting Corporation’s iPlayer website, and works to bring her talented view of design and vamp the broadcasting giant’s already illustrious organization. Inez Torre has taken this chance to express her take on the modern design industry.

What’s your opinion on the Design Industries current trends?

‘Trends’ would be considered a passing thing, and while they apply to visual styles, in terms of the user experience I see new techniques to create a greater immersion and fluidity of the designs as a constant evolution. They won’t disappear once the new trend comes along, they will influence it. Personally I quite like the simplicity of Material Design, it feels alive and allows for great flexibility.

Horror films are a personal favorite for Inez

Where do you see the industry’s direction going towards?

Design with the user as primary focus. UX Design is now so present in the industry, and it seems to be still expanding.

What trends do you hope to see more of and continued to be developed upon?

Interaction design incorporating motion graphics. VR is on the rise at the moment and as experiences become more and more immersive, the interactions within the user journey will be increasingly more important.

Courtesy of CNN International

What would you like to tell someone who is just starting, or

have a desire to start getting into design?

Don’t be afraid to ask questions. When you’re just starting you can’t possibly be expected to know everything. And asking questions doesn’t mean you know little, it just means you want to know more.

What one Sci-Fi technology would you want to have

right now,and what would you do with it?

Tough to pick just one…but I’d probably go with teleportation as it’d save me all the time wasted commuting!

Chart designed for AIDS Day

If you could give the person you were when you began on your

career one piece of advice, what would you tell yourself?

Remember what you love designing and do it! Starting as a freelancer, I often would overwork myself with projects that would completely kill my motivation. It would’ve been so much better for me if I took the time to also pursue my own projects. I eventually realized that and it does help balance things out!

Read More at Breaking Down Design with BBC’s Inez Torre

ShortPixel, Progressive Image Optimization

It’s possible there isn’t another group of people who care about optimization, more than the good folks over at ShortPixels. Between Ionut Croltoru, Simon Dudulca, and Alex Florescu, ShortPixel has more than thirty years of experience behind it. ShortPixel is a Word Press plugin that allows designers to optimize their images, therefore allowing them to optimize their pages in Word Press.

Their Twitter reads like a progress report, constantly letting their users and fans know about their latest improvements, and achievements. Image Optimization may not be the trend now, but with increases in the move to cloud based server options, optimization on every level becomes a critical factor. Alex, who designed the compression API, took time to speak to us about the boons and benefits of Image Optimization, and how it can improve even the core functions of your website.

How does Image Optimization

impact current design trends?

I would expect that having images that take less space, can allow designers to use more of of their available page. 

For those who are unaware, what is the purpose of

Image Optimization, and what kind of

impact can it have for your website?

Most of the time images used on  any given web pages aren’t optimized. That means that while they look good they are much bigger that optimal even though sometimes they were saved for web in Photoshop, for example.

The purpose of Image Optimization is to keep the visual aspect untouched but reduce the size of the images. This positively impacts the page speed of websites which sometimes can be twice as fast.

Having a faster loading website is good for the end user but it is also good for SEO purposes. Many people may not know this, but page speed is one of the bigger factors affecting their Google ranking.

What are the biggest benefits someone can see

from the use of Image Optimization?

Usually the main benefits are speedier websites that lead to lower bounce rates, increased conversions, and more visitors as the site ranks better in search engine.

For those looking at getting their feet wet, what are the

first steps to take in beginning to learn about

Image Optimization?

There are many resources on the web but one may want to read about it more this here. It’s also crucial to be able to live test how much a website can be optimized, so we offer our own compression test. To upload some images and see how much they can be optimized and how the compressed image looks like, we have made our online image compression available for everyone to use.

What further developments can we expect image

optimization to make in the future?

I would expect that image optimization becomes ubiquitous in the following couple of years as it becomes more and more important. It should also become more and more accessible as it is now for WordPress users for example.

For designers, what can Image Optimization

do for them and their projects?

Image Optimization can lead to happier clients when their sites load faster and will attract more visitors. This is especially true in our experience for WordPress users. They choose a web design by the way it looks but later they may discover that unless they use an image optimization plugin like ShortPixel the site will start loading slow and the whole experience be sub par.

Designers can take care of delivering an initial design with all the images optimized, but they can also educate their clients in using tools to make sure all the website images are properly optimized.

From my experience, this attention to detail leads generally to happier customers which in turn leads to more referring customers

Read More at ShortPixel’s Alex Florescu: Breaking Down Image Optimization

“As design becomes a more integrated component on everyone’s lives and technology pushes it’s ever-stretching boundaries, there are amazing opportunities for hybrid and niche design fields.”

Outbrain Lead Designer, Erica Schneider

It’s hard to wonder where we will be in ten years. It’s curious to think if a young woman living in Montreal, Quebec, Canada thought the same thing when she began her stellar career in the world of design. While attending Dawson College, it’s curious to think of the die hard Montreal Canadiens hockey fan as a leading designer in New York City less than ten years later.

Erika Schneider is one of the few people who define design. Her experience ranges through web, UX, graphic, and even print. Her technical background gives credence to her incredible ability to stand out and innovate the world of design. Through her work with Outbrain, a leading marketing company, she has helped to design for some of the largest corporation in the world, ranging from news outlets like CNN, and the Washington Post; to Ziff Davis Media.

Erica’s eye for design has a deep and intrinsic capability to discern what people look at, and how they react to it. A true artist in a field of modern design, Erika has lent her time to delve into the questions on the field she helps personify.

Outbrain’s NYC HQ

What’s your opinion on the current trends?

Digital design trends are fickle creatures. Like a fashion trend, they come, they go, they come back again with a riff on the original. Some stick around, and flat design seems to have stuck, for now that is…I am not sure we could even call flat design a trend anymore, but either way it was one of the most drastic recent visual shifts in digital design which makes it pretty interesting. Whenever a digital trend appears there are both tradeoffs and benefits. Flat design grew from designers’ realization that skeumorphism, with its bevels and shadows, did not scale well across smaller devices. As a reaction to this, and perhaps with the realization that these interfaces were pretty darn garish, the design trend swung from overly styled to barely styled. The minimal elements of flat design scale much more effectively on all devices. As I mentioned there are also tradeoffs, and one important tradeoff of flat design is the difficulty in deciphering what elements on a page are clickable and which are static. On the other hand, removing unnecessary styling, pages and sites became faster to load. There are always tradeoffs with trends and design shifts, and flat design is not an exception.

Another digital trend which is pretty fascinating is the convergence ‘bots’ and conversational interfaces. I was recently introduced the app called Lark where you have a chat with a robot that helps you live a more healthy life, there is Howdy the trainable digital coworker bot that integrates with Slack, and the quartz news app which was recently released in chat format. Considering all major networks like Facebook, Snapchat, Twitter have closed, private messaging systems, there is a solid foundation for people to create their own chatbots. Additionally, these bots often reflect a specific voice, which has turned out to be very influential in the success of apps like Slack. With Facebook opening it’s messenger app last year to businesses to help facilitate communication of brands and consumers, I’m curious what might happen next. Will Apple connect with businesses and Siri start to answer our customer support issues?

Where do you see the industry’s direction going towards?

Although UX is still a burgeoning branch of digital design, according to User Testing’s ‘2015 UX Industry Survey Report’, over 60% of respondents stated their companies UX budgets were staying the same or increasing. Companies are seeing the value of integrating UX into their company fabric and of using data to inform design decisions. Moreover, the realization of the value of informed design decisions is giving design a stronger seat at the table than ever before. This in turn gives designers a new level of validation when making and proposing design decisions.

Recently I have noticed the trend of merging UX and UI roles. This one role covers all the tasks that a UX or UI person would normally do. I am seeing hybrid positions ‘product designer’ or UX/UI designer at influential companies such as product design consultancy leader Pivotal Labs. This is likely due to the invariable crossover of the responsibilities of the UX and UI silos. Some companies are struggling with which task goes to which role and their solution is to create one role, the magic unicorn that does it all.

What trends do you hope to see more of and continued to be developed upon?

Virtual reality has been made accessible to the masses thanks to NYT VR and Google cardboard. I’d like to see how Facebook (Instagram), Twitter and other social media outlets harness this technology to enhance social interactions.

Wearable technology is another really cool push towards our connection with the digital realm. I mean, it’s crazy! Our bio rhythms are measured and parsed into actionable and shareable data, we have this at our fingertips every day. My dad just discovered that his iPhone had been covertly working in the background to count ever step he’d taken over the past year! How can we push this concept further, is there a way to measure and monitor the health of seniors that is easy for them to understand or communicate to health care givers? Will there be an opportunity for widespread use given the aging population of America?

fork, splitting the bill, keeping the tab, and solving the headache- From Erika Schneider

What would you like to tell someone who is just starting,

or have a desire to start getting into design?

You are not just a graphic designer anymore. As design becomes a more integrated component on everyone’s lives and technology pushes it’s ever-stretching boundaries, there are amazing opportunities for hybrid and niche design fields. I read a fun Co.Design article a while back which listed all kinds of really cool super-niche designer/UX jobs of the future. One of the most intriguing jobs being ‘Human Organ Designer.

What one Sci-Fi technology would you want to have

right now, and what would you do with it?

Although I have a fantastic chair at work, and have the opportunity to use a standing desk, my muscles are always hard as rock, there are knots in my back and I have recently been on a tear to figure out what exactly I am doing that is such a stress on my body. As a culture most of us sit at a desk for up to 7-8 hours a day, this messes up our body! I envision a technology that would allow our wearable devices to connect with the state of specific muscles in our bodies in real-time and send us signals to relax that part of the body, feed us actionable steps to release the stress as it is happening, maybe tell us how to adjust our body position to allow for a rebalance in the moment. I am imagining this kind of incremental adjustment might help my eternal ‘I need a massage!!!’ feeling.  Our health-related wearable devices already send us valuable biofeedback, so I don’t think this is too far down the road.

Looking back on your earlier self, if you could give

yourself one piece of advice, what would it be?

Stefan Sagmeister said once, of his experience in Asia working on many different types of projects at an agency, that he learned about all the things he did not want to do. If you have the opportunity to take a job where you’ll be exposed to tons of clients and varied types of projects, even if it’s not your dream job, GO FOR IT! You may not love every part of it, but you’ll certainly be able to come away with some fantastic experience under your belt. Keep in mind that knowledge of what you don’t love is as valuable as knowledge about what you love.

You can follow Erika’s work at her at: http://erikaschneider.com/

Read More at Out-of-the-Box with Outbrain’s Erika Schneider

“If you’re looking for a first project, start with a problem that you’re facing — turn inward and identify a few pain points in your life.”

Brynn Evans, UX Lead of Google’s Communications

Brynn Evans is the type of person who everyone instantly likes. She’s personable, articulate, and has a mission-driven ethos about her work and life. She studied Psychology (BA) & Science and Technology in Society (BS) at Stanford University, Cognitive Science (MS) from UC San Diego, and spent time working at the legendary Xerox PARC, all before transitioning to user experience design where she now feels driven to bridge the gap between technology and people. She often refers to “social technology” to describe her passion — using technology and design thinking to address the real problems we face in society.

Today Brynn is a UX Lead at Google, managing four products teams in the “Communications” technology org including Project Fi, the Google-owned and operated mobile phone service. She’s also an avid community organizer and innovative leader in the field of UX — she co-founded XX+UX (a monthly meetup for women in UX), co-founded the Awesome Foundation chapter in San Francisco (that gives monthly grants of $1000 to people doing “awesome” work), co-organized an exclusive design thinking conference called Overlap, and regularly speaks at conferences around the world.

Brynn’s career has garnered accolades, awards, and published works, establishing her reputation as someone who everyone wants to work with. I caught up with Brynn about her feeling on current trends in the industry and what the future holds.

What’s your opinion on current trends?

“I see a lot of design trying to apply metaphors from real life to make technology feel more natural. Google’s Material design is about using cues from paper and physical materials to create an illusion of familiarity on the screen. Apple’s Force Touch is about using haptic touch in more natural ways. Uber’s new redesign is about connecting atoms and bits — uniting the physical and the digital worlds. These designs aren’t all equally successful (yet) but it’s a nice direction to be headed because many people still see technology as ‘hard to use’ or ‘not for me.’ We’re in an era of trying to bridge the gap between technology and real life.”

Atrium at Google’s Dublin Campus

Where do you see the industry headed?

“Our industry is often criticized for being insular or solving problems that no one cares about (e.g., artisanal firewood??) Luckily, I’m seeing a shift towards focusing on real problems that people face, not just the surface-level problems of young people in urban areas. For example, the U.S. government has a design team that’s focused on issues like veterans, healthcare, and immigration. Startups like Wevorce are trying to make divorce more pleasant and swift. And in my own work, Project Fi (Android’s new wireless carrier) intends to make mobile connectivity accessible and fair. Everyone needs access to the internet to connect with friends, family, or important information online, and although this sounds like a “techie” problem, it’s not any longer.”

What would you tell someone who is just getting started

or wants to get into the field of design?

“If you’re looking for a first project, start with a problem that you’re facing — turn inward and identify a few pain points in your life. From here, focus on what’s at the heart of that problem and start designing out realistic solutions. Aim for 5-7 different solutions. Then test out the top ideas on yourself or with friends and family. See which solutions worked best and what you would change or modify about each. Rinse and repeat.

Open seating area at Google’s London Campus

Although that might be sort of vague, we are all designers of our own lives so it’s easy to get started by finding problems that we’re intimately familiar with. Solutions will flow more naturally and you’ll see how this will you oriented towards solving problems rather inventing solutions. There are way too many apps today that are a half-baked solutions to no real problem — that’s not good design no matter how shiny or beautiful they may be.”

What is one Sci-Fi technology you want to have

right now, and what would you do with it?

“Well, Virtual Reality (VR) already exists today but I want next-gen VR, whatever that means. The best experience I had with VR was actually in an Uber, when I was sharing a ride with a friendly stranger. We were stuck in traffic, so he pulled out a VR headset from his bag and asked, ‘Do you want to go to Mars?’ I said yes! So I put on this headset on and suddenly I’m standing on the surface of Mars, looking all around at the dirt, crevices, mountains, and looming sky above. It was incredible. Then I advanced to a new scene, and then another. I started touring all the popular places around the world. I was teleported to Paris, Egypt, India, the Amazon…. all these beautiful places around the world felt so real and so present.

It reminded me that VR has the potential of making the world more accessible to people. If you can tour around places that feel as if you’re actually there, you could develop an appreciation for other people’s lifestyles and culture without needing money to travel. Of course there are other great applications of VR too, like helping people work through physical disabilities (e.g., learning to walk after an accident).”

Office at Google’s Mt. View Campus

Looking back on your earlier self, if you could give

yourself one piece of advice, what would it be?

“Never think that you’re not good enough. I’m more or less a self-taught designer so I had a lot of moments feeling like I didn’t know enough to be a UX designer. I see this pattern in new grads and other people transitioning into the field from other professions. But the truth is, design is about solving problems in creative ways so we need different perspectives from different types of people. We need healthy debate. We need to always have an open mind and try out new things. That comes from expressing your opinion and not worrying about how good you are or how much you know. You just gotta go for it until you realize that your perspective is the perspective that everyone wants to hear.”

Read More at Google’s Brynn Evans Weighs In on Current Trends

It is hard work. Harder than you might think but design is very powerful.

Keith Miller, ESPN’s Art Director of Digital Media

The World of Sports and Graphic Design are irreversibly linked. Where would the NFL, or the NBA be without their iconic logos, which rank in some of the highest national brand recognitions. In the space of sports media, no brand comes to mind quicker than ESPN. Keith Miller is a man driven to bring these two industries closer together.

Sports and technology, including graphic design and UX, are the two passions one can derive from examining Keith’s career. Keith’s contributions to Yahoo! as a Senior Designer helped lead his team in driving Yahoo!’s sports brand in innovation, passing global sports brand leader ESPN, as the most trafficked sports site in 2006. For a little more than five years, Keith Miller lead the charge in the innovation and dedication, and saw the coming trend of fantasy sports.

Leaving Yahoo in May of 2009, Keith joined Fastpoint Games as their creative director, where he worked to provide a better solution to online fantasy sports. Keith was only there for two crucial years before an old rival came calling. This time, however, as an employer. Keith joined ESPN, where he became a leading member of their UX design staff, setting himself apart with a distinguished production legacy. He would leave this all behind after three and a half years, joining Amazon’s team where he worked tirelessly to contribute, develop, and maintain a system that could help their customers by anticipating their needs before they even thought about it.

Brilliant Design- In Action

Though a brief tenure was in the cards for Keith at Amazon, Keith returned to ESPN, this time to take the prestigious position as Art Director for Digital Media. A trailblazing pioneer, Keith Miller found time to go over his feeling about the design industry and it’s future.

What’s your opinion on the current trends?

As a designer classically trained in graphic design specifically the swiss style I was always taught to strive for a balance between simplicity and beauty when designing. The fundamentals we were taught were based on the Basel school in Switzerland. With a strong emphasis on typography, gestalt psychology, where the sum of the parts equals the whole, and reductive drawing it was all about visual communication in the most direct and beautiful way. It is for this reason that I am encouraged by the simplicity and beauty of using flat design and basing design off of real work physics and materials in material design. Google has created a visual language that continues to unify its products in meaningful ways. I believe Immersive Design is also a powerful tool for creating meaningful experiences where appropriate especially in the TV space and emerging technologies such as V.R. My opinion on the current trends is that we are headed in the right direction. Gone are the days of skeuomorphic software design. As the world speeds up Responsive and flat design has been born out of necessity to simplify and unify.  

Why has it taken so long for mobile optimization to become an important factor, and push for more than just integration? With mobile technology growing every year, when will we see a unified design “language”?

The collective ‘everyone’ seems to generally resist change because change requires a certain level of investment. But what was once a group of outliers pushing mobile first has now become the obvious business strategy because the growth has exploded. More people have greater regular access to more types of devices. The Material Design team at Google has done an excellent job designing a new language and structuring the new language in a presentation which allows it to be easily learned. Apple is doing the same thing with iOS and I feel these are the two leading design languages that we have right now. We may never be able to have one but two is far greater than twenty.

Where do you see the industry’s direction going towards?

I definitely see mobile first and even phone first being the strategy that continues to grow. There have been debates as it grows around Native apps vs. Web views. Both approaches have benefits and drawbacks. Native apps take more time to design and implement but provide a richer experience and allow us to leverage the device toolkits and OS. Web views are much easier and faster to implement because the code can be HTML5 and CSS. But Web views are somewhat limited. The are lightweight but not as flexible.

Photo by Rich Arden / ESPN Images

What trends do you hope to see more of and continued to be developed upon?

I hope to see Material Design spread and the design language to continue to become more agnostic to the platforms people use. I hope to see continued synthesis between content and design when it comes to video and direct to consumer experiences as well as a style that is expressive but simple. Apple TV, Snapchat, Facebook but also Lifestyle design. I.E. in home, in auto digital integration. On the opposite side It is also a breath of fresh air when I see design that is well crafted in the physical world. Print design still has a place. 

What would you like to tell someone who is just starting, or have a desire to start getting into design?

It is hard work. Harder than you might think but design is very powerful. Try to learn to be a ethical and responsible designer. Avoid the eye candy, unless it’s appropriate, and always ask why. Learn to learn quickly. The most successful designers become experts in the subject matter of the problems they are trying to solve for their clients.

What one Sci-Fi technology would you want to have right now, and what would you do with it?

I think I would like to have a Virtual Reality technology in my house. Imagine the freedom to be creative in any environment you choose with easy access. I think of Tony Stark in IronMan breaking technology down deconstructing and innovating and creating new technology. It’s an amazing prospect of an idea.

If you could give the person you were when you began on your career one piece of advice, what would you tell yourself?

One thing I would tell myself is don’t stress. Work hard but have fun too. Keep up with drawing and playing the guitar as creative outlets. I guess its never too late to pick those backup.

Read More at ESPN’s Keith Miller Talks Material Design

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Read More at Win a Free Year of Hosting Giveaway

DocSend is a sales acceleration platform that makes salespeople more effective by enabling them to track, control, send, and present sales materials with real-time document analytics.

DocSend Co-Founder and Chief Product Officer, Mobile Visionary

In June of 2007, the iPhone was released by Apple, creating a technological revolution that would change the direction technology was in. A year earlier, in June of 2006, David Koslow was a Stanford Computer Science Intern at Palm, working on the Palm OS browser, Blazer. When completing his Masters with a focus in Human-Computer Interaction, Dave worked as an intern at Google, working as part of the Google Alerts team, where he worked on back-end database optimization.

When Dave finished his studies Stanford in 2008, Apple had changed the world with their mobile device, and Dave already had his finger on the pulse of the industry. Dave dedicated himself for the next four years at Greystripe, a rich media ad network, where he flew through the ranks and led their engineering team in pursuit of success. Dave found success there, and even authored Greystripe’s native advertising SDK for iOS as well their cross-platform mobile video ad format. He would leave GreyStripe after four of incredible success to reach out into the world for himself.

In March of 2013, Dave co-founded DocSend, a sales acceleration platform that makes salespeople more effective by enabling them to track, control, send, and present sales materials with real-time document analytics. Since then he has continued to operate with DocSend as the Chief Product Officer, delineating high-level product vision and tirelessly need-finding with customers to surface opportunities. Here Dave continues to define his legacy as one of the true innovators in the industry of product design.

What’s your opinion on the current trends?

“You know I think when we, and by we I mean we collectively in the product design community, saw when there was that shift broadly to flat design, there were definitely things that were lost along the way. I think it felt like a kind of knee jerk reaction. And the fact is that we lost gradients, and the affordances of certain things being interactive. It’s been nice to see trends like material design more recently moving past that and making things like buttons once again appear interactive. And so I think that it was kind of interesting that history has us going back and forth, oscillating from things that are very skeuomorphic, like having a notebook look like a notebook, or having a desktop look like a desktop, and then moving to something more abstract, and then responding with ‘Well now we’ve tipped the scales too far in one direction’, and then we go back and forth.

And I’d like to think that over time, we’re kind of getting closer to something that strikes that perfect balance, between being visually compelling but also having those affordances so that you have an expectation of how to interact with it. One of the things I think is interesting, and I don’t know maybe this comes across as a nitpick, but we’ve been able to benefit for so many years on the desktop web, that having things like hover states and we haven’t quite gotten there yet on mobile.”

Why has it taken so long for mobile optimization to become an important factor, and push for more than just integration? With mobile technology growing every year, when will we see a unified design “language”?

“I think that we’re making good strides, and of course there is the favorite buzzword of ‘responsive design’. The fact of the matter is, there are just so few things you can code in mobile, and just have it work on desktop. So even with something like Bootstrap, you still have to go into your browser, open the inspectors, set up all the different screen sizes, have a look at how things actually will work, not to mention the fact, do the actual interaction patterns continue to make sense, even in a layout that looks good on mobile? And to be perfectly honest, I’m cautiously optimistic, but I do believe there is a sort of art to designing anything. I think that there needs to be a necessary manual process that actually goes in and patches up the design after the fact. But even with that way, whether you’re on mobile first or you’re on desktop first, you’re going to have to make a decision where you’re going to spend your energy, especially when you look at it from the view of an early stage start up, where you can only afford to focus on one, and I think for a while mobile was kind of the thing that came second. And I think that we had a bit of a knee jerk reaction to that. A lot of companies came out of the gates that are mobile-first. And so what we end up with is all sorts of services that are out there on the market that are mobile-first, and I think there were more companies that were on the market mobile-first then there was a need. I think we’re starting to see what happens when things go one way and not the other, and we’re seeing a rubber band effect where it’s starting to come back from that, and is making us ask some fundamental questions, ‘What about this application would requires that it be a mobile-first app?’”

DocSend has innovated the way people do business.

Where do you see the industry’s direction going towards?

“I’m very optimistic. I think that the way that software has advanced over the past twenty years, and additionally the way that infrastructure and cloud computing has advanced, in the past ten years, has made it so software can be written so that getting from zero to an MVP has never been faster. All of these off-the-shelf components are already there at your disposal and it’s up to you to kind of put the pieces together and create a novel application. The beauty of that is you don’t have to spend a ton of time coming up with your own real-time messaging framework, for example. You don’t have to spend all this time developing your own error reporting service.  All of that stuff is available right now through a variety of best-in-class services that really allow you to get off the ground quickly. And from a design standpoint, we’re maybe about ten or fifteen years behind. It’s still the early days, and I think that Bootstrap has been a wonderful tool for so many people. Starting DocSend, for example, we had bootstrap in place from the start, as well as these icon sets at our disposal. We could go and integrate it into our application, that actually is pretty darn good looking, really quickly. There’s just this stuff that wasn’t possible before, and I think what we’ll continue to see in the next handful of years is just further and further elaboration on that, that will develop into having more creative spirits get involved, and help establish a feedback loop that will lead to designs off-the-shelf that you can then use to go from zero to MVP incredibly quickly.”

What would you like to tell someone who is just starting, or have a desire to start getting into design?

“You know Ira Glass said something about his early days broadcasting. And I’m totally going to misquote him but, he basically said something to the extent of, Whenever you’re getting started in something, the best thing you could possibly do is to produce a high volume of work. And you’re going to look at it, and think, I suck at it, and you’re going to think it’s not good enough, and you’re going to keep at it, and you’re going to suck a little bit less. It will continue to get better, and that frustration will drive you forward. And so long as you can embrace the frustration, and make it a positive force in your feedback loop, it will drive you to continue creating and get back up and continue to produce a high volume of work. That’s going to be your way forward. Just do it, over and over, and over again.”

What one Sci-Fi technology would you want to have right now, and what would you do with it?

“Okay I’m going to answer this without sounding too cheesy, but I would say the lifeblood of what I do is rooted in understanding the customer. Getting inside their head, asking them questions, understanding what keeps them up at night. What’s the first thing they do when they come into the office, the first thing you do in the morning? What are the challenges? If I could have some way of doing a bit more than swapping shoes with them, to really for a moment experience life from their perspective, that would be incredible. An empathy machine.”

If you could give the person you were when you began on your career one piece of advice, what would you tell yourself?

“I think you’re never going to know everything. So you might as well just go ahead and get started, and give it your best shot. Because we can be preparing for the future our entire lives and never get to that point where we take the plunge and move forward from preparing to actually doing it. I think, especially when I was going to school at Stanford, ‘Wow, I’m just so far behind.’ I remember one summer in college I actually read the O’Reilly book on HTML from cover to cover. And like, who does that? Why would you do that? That’s how deeply I felt I had all this ground to cover, that I had to catch up. And you can really get into your head, that feeling of inadequacy, that you have all this stuff you have to cover until you know those things. That you’re not ready to get started. The fact of the matter is you are never going to know all the things. You’re never going to check all the checkboxes. And the best thing, the best way is to get out there, give it your all, and learn from your mistakes. And get back up, get back in there, and keep going.”

Read More at Interview with DocSend’s Dave Koslow