Jessica Hische: evaluation

Transcript context

…I want to take a quick tangent. Most people listening to this podcast are not designers. They're product managers, founders, engineers, and folks building product. I've always wanted to see the world through the eyes of a designer, because there's so much I don't see and there's so much that affects how I think about something that I don't understand when I look at a logo, and so I thought it might be helpful just to spend a little time helping people see a designer a little bit. Let me just ask you this question. When people look at a logo or a brand, what are just elements that make it what it is, that make you feel the thing you want to feel that we may not recognize? I think most people are better at understanding the feelings and sensations that typography and logos give us than they give themselves credit for, because what we are as people are endless absorbers of patterns, and information, and all this kind of stuff as we move throughout the world. We don't take time to sit and digest it, but it's still coming in and getting logged. That's why if you see something funky in the world, you're like, "That's weird. I don't like that. I don't know why I don't like it, but I know I don't like it." I think even as a non-designer, you can see that in typography. The whole being able to recognize patterns thing, I talked about this a bit at config, it's like it's a safety thing. Looking into the world, your eyes can spot that thing that's a little bit off, and that thing that's off feels not safe to you. It's thinking about when we look at a meal and there's a thing on the plate that looks like it's moldy or something like that. You understand that doesn't look right to me, this doesn't smell right to me. Your body knows it before your brain knows it. Even as a non-designer, I think you can look at examples of logos where something's not quite right and be like, "Something's not right here, I just don't know how to name it." But I think a good exercise is just looking at fonts that are available in the world and asking yourself, "What feeling does this give me?" and just write them down. It doesn't matter, just give yourself permission to say whatever is happening in your mind, the first thing. Don't overanalyze it. Just look at it and be like, "That feels calm to me. That feels exciting to me. That feels whatever to me." The more you do that, the more you can start seeing similarities in the ones that feel exciting, and the ones that feel calm, and the ones that feel whatever, and then get into analyze mode of, "Oh, these 10 things that I said feel calm are a lighter weight, have more generous spacing, have rounded edges, have rounder bowls to the letter forms." You just start seeing commonalities between the things. It's just about seeing them all together to understand what those similarities are. I think anybody can do that. I mean, you're not going to have the language of the leg of the R and the tittle of the I. Don't worry about that. You don't have to know typography language to think about it, but anybody's capable of doing that. It can be really fun to just stop and ask yourself and notice. This is great. I want to go actually a little deeper. What I'm hearing is look at something, tap into the feeling you feel when you look at it, actually pay attention to it because there's wisdom in that. The specific things that you pointed out that impact that feeling are, you mentioned, spacing between the letters, the edges. I imagine there's just the color of it. What other specific elements impact the way someone feels when they look at a logo?…

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