Josh Feldman is the co-founder of Prophet Communications, the Digital Media development company
that merged with frogdesign in 1997. A graduate of the Rhode Island School of Design,
he was a winner of the 1994 New Voices-New Visions award, and named
one of the top designers on the Web by C-NET and Infinet's Cool Site of the Year award.
For examples of his creative projects, take a look at Spectacle.

As a frog creative director, he focuses on balancing aesthetic,
user interface and information delivery issues for frog clients
such as Sony, Intel, SAP, Los Angeles Times, Levi's, Bank of America,
and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.

on design:
I have always believed that design is more than just communicating-- design
and typography have for me always been about evoking a mood, eliciting
a response, and making people notice.

    

How does a user interface designer know that a given design will work? How does anybody develop enough confidence in a design to move it toward the real world? The methods designers use to evaluate user interfaces require training and experience. But the people who need to hire designers are unlikely to have those skills. How do the people who are paying the bills know they are getting good answers? “We should not be surprised that design decisions have to be sold, even the ones that designers would not find controversial.”These questions matter because a client’s confidence comes into play when selecting a vendor, deciding whether or not to adopt a consultant’s recommendations, and even in deciding whether to hire a designer at all. We should not be surprised that design decisions have to be sold, even the ones that designers would not find controversial. The result a client wants — satisfied users — is not something the client can know has been achieved until well after the product is finished. Yet designers are selected with their designs unseen, and approval to begin building according to a design is usually given by someone who does not have the time or inclination to account for all its details. Learning from television Last summer I watched a fair amount of HGTV (Home & Garden Television), the cable network devoted to makeovers of homes and gardens (just to see how professional designers in other fields work of course). I especially enjoyed “Designers’ Challenge,” in which three interior designers compete for a client’s remodeling project. The producers of the program condense the information gathering, vendor selection, construction, and presentation phases of the project into half an hour. In the first segment, the clients explain their problem and say how much they are looking forward to professional help, professing ignorance and incompetence in interior design. They receive presentations from designers in the second segment. Part of the fun after the commercial break is to see if the clients will select the “right” designer, and how it all turns out. Clients do not make the major decisions about their own home remodeling projects. It is the designers who decide which walls will be moved, where windows go, and where to put plumbing and electrical fixtures. Designers bring along tile, paint, and fabric samples for the clients to review. In Selling the Invisible, Harry Beckwith advises service providers to “accentuate the trivial” as a means to help people justify their decision. Though I’m sure the program is heavily edited, this give-and-take over trivia seems to be where clients develop rapport with the designer, and accounts for a big part of their decision to choose one designer over another. The limited roles of designer and client apply to every episode, and for good reason. A designer who chose the colors and textures without consultation would stand out as arrogant and tyrannical; a designer who badgered the clients about where they think the sink should go would seem insecure, incompetent, and sycophantic. Invariably, these stories have a happy ending, with clients effusive about their new rooms. Though the shows are produced to have a certain timelessness, making it unclear when they were taped or how long each project actually took, it is difficult to imagine that after a remodeling project involving a camera crew and television producers, a client is going to say that the ordeal was not worthwhile and had been a big mistake. It doesn’t matter who the clients are or who the designers are. The show has a format that leaves everybody feeling confident in the project’s success from beginning to end, as we should expect from a cable channel that sells design. The Magic Fax Machine Test