This article was originally published at Fast Company.
For many technology companies, design is mysterious. So when I work with startups, I try to demystify design by talking about processes and skills. The idea is: design is not a magical creative thing that designers are blessed to do. It’s rational and objective, and the components are pretty easy to understand.
People are often surprised when I tell them writing is a design skill. I used to work with an excellent visual designer who hated being called a visual designer. His defense was: “Isn’t all design visual?” Well, no. Most of our design work is expressed visually, but we use design to figure out all sorts of things: what a product does, how it works, and what it says. The last one — what our products say to the people who use them — continues to surprise me as one of the most important things we need to decide as designers.
