If you're a designer at an agency or a big corporation, you probably identify yourself by your specialty area or the specific kind of work that you do.

At that point you can go back for another round of discussions with a well-formed opinion and rationale. This gives you the head space to synthesize the information you've gathered from the team, weigh the pros and cons, and form your own perspective. But once you have input from the people you need to hear from, I recommend setting aside some time to just think it through on your own. What's important to remember is that any impactful new product idea is going to be somewhat disruptive to the business, so some pushback is a good sign. Input is important – but consensus isn't always the right approach.Īny impactful new product idea is going to be somewhat disruptive to the business It can be easy to find yourself in an 'everybody-has-an-opinion' scenario, which can take up time and leave you more confused than when you started.

While all of these perspectives from across a company are critical and can have real benefits, giving everyone a seat at the table can also have its drawbacks. She came to us with the idea of doing something to totally change how screen brightness works – so we built a first-of-its-kind feature that adjusts the light coming from the app based on location and time of day. The concept for Lumin, a feature we launched recently, originated from a member of our Customer Experience team, who heard from a number of our readers that they were concerned about the health implications and eyestrain of exposure to blue light from phones and tablets at night. At the other end of the spectrum, a new product idea at a startup can come from anywhere inside (or outside) of the company. We also perform targeted customer testing and analysis to determine whether the feature we're proposing will be valuable to our readers. student in graphic design at the Rhode Island School of Design, named her video “Type High,” which means the height of the type from the face to the foot.At Oyster, we get as many relevant people involved as early as possibleĪt the very minimum, this effort can involve insight from the engineering team on how a new project might fit into their existing projects and priorities, or how long developing various aspects of a potential project might take. This video, set to the soundtrack from “West Side Story,” is a great little primer. These terms have become industry jargon, but in the age of digital typography, their origin has become lost. Depending on the design, these hot-metal “slugs” would either be “leaded out” by placing thin sheets of metal between the lines or closed up by “taking the lead out.” When all the type was set in layout form within a metal frame (“chase”), the printer “locked it up” and “put the job to bed” on the bed of the letterpress.

Around 1886, the invention of the Linotype speeded up typesetting, letting typesetters keyboard in the text, which was cast out of molten metal one line of type at a time. Terms like “upper case” and “lower case” harken back to the days of handset type when capital letters were stored in the upper section of the typecase and small letters in the lower case. To understand the nomenclature, it helps to see how type used to be made out of wood or metal. This stop-motion video by Lynn Kiang isn’t so much about letterpress printing as it is about where typesetting terminology came from.

Willem van lancker