This idea derived from a Smashing Magazine post, Designing for a Hierarchy of Needs by Steven Bradley. It is a riff on Maslow’s pyramid, the hierarchy of needs, as applied to design. Sean uses this pyramid to dissect the qualities of a successful product or service. For example, in a successful product, functionality, reliability and usability are givens. But great service comes when you teach them profiency and “empower users to do more and do better,” and give them opportunities to be creative by providing samples for inspiration.
Sean showcases several features Typekit added to enrich the user’s experience of browing fonts (tagging, galleries, and lists) but the highlight of the presentation was the story of the Typekit blog. Like many burgeoning businesses, the company blog posts were almost entirely nuts-and-bolts announcements. Sean admits, “There were a lot of ‘hey this is new, hey this is new, hey this is new’.” It was once Tim Brown and Mandy Brown (no relation) joined Typekit to help find its voice.
“Mandy poured rocket fuel on the blog,” Sean says, and it became a source of great content, both educational and inspiring. A key example of this is Frank Chimero: Typographic Hierarchy, where guest writer Chimero outlines the foundations of the hierarchical system of typography. Chimero starts with plain text content and methodically walks the reader through styling by adds spacing, grouping, weights, sizes, positioning, color, shapes, transforming plain text into fully realized design.
Sean McBride
Sean outlines the principles of a great product/company blog:
- Good content requires planning.
- Get experts to write what they know.
- Content can teach, inspire, and inform all at the same time (more than announce a new feature or new set of fonts that are available – benefitted them in the long run by showing customers how to use the product in a better way)
- Give customers the tools to do more.
While typography is more accessible than ever before, it has also never been so valuable. In addition to providing type itself, Typekit provides knowledge about why type is important. It gives designers new frameworks for choose and use typefaces, inspiration for using type well, and the confidence to step outside comfort zones.
But these lessons are applicable to more than type: look to liquor bottles. Sean says. Sure the booze is great, but what if you want to know, “how can I use my booze better?” Put cocktail recipes on the label. Pinterest is another great example. “People love ways to get inspired.” And you can foster confidence by lowering the barriers to entry—instead of paying a lot for music one song at a time, services like Rdio let you pay a little for access to all the music you want.
In Q&A, Sean offered his thoughts in response to Matthew Butterick’s criticism of poor web designs. The audience member asked, “Are the web standards the problem? Or is it the lack of imagination?”
“We’re still in transition. A lot of people are comfortable with their workflow, and a lot of these developments have tossed a wrench in. Like Mandy said, you have one paradigm and you hold onto it until you’re ready to jump into something new. People are comfortable with older ways of working. I don’t think it’s a matter of not being brave enough, but rather I think we haven’t provided enough tools. That will make a better case for people to make that paradigm shift.”
To summarize: the future is here, it’s just not fully distributed … yet.
by Cori Johnson @cori_is
