Book Review Chronicles. 100 Things Every Designer Needs to Know About People.
The very book that made an indelible impression on my perception of the design world and personal attitude to design as a profession.
Back to 2012, I had been trying myself in design and the only thing I knew about being a designer was a bunch of well-known tools: Adobe Photoshop and Adobe Illustrator. Only tools mattered because as every self-taught design-newbie you think it is all you need. Knowing perfectly Adobe products seemed to make you a professional. How I was wrong about it!
One spring day at a large IT event I stumbled upon a book “100 Things Every Designer Needs To Know About People” that changed my entire perception of the design profession. It is not about drawing fancy things, it’s about how to convey a visual message to the end customer. Huge kudos to the author, Susan Weinschenk, for gathering so many facts and thoughts about people perception into one piece of paper. She gave a decent starting point for every beginner, especially if you are going to step on the UI/UX path.
You would ask what is a point to provide a review as so much time has passed since then. Yeh, reasonable question. I would ask the same :) However, this book takes a prominent place in my design career so it is a perfect choice to start my review chronicles about each book I have read. And there are lots of them about design, psychology and business and hope there will be even more. If you have an interesting book to share with, please feel free to leave a comment with your thoughts on it.
Going back to the reason why we are here — yeh, the book. It is not going to give you step-by-step instruction how to create certain designs, it’s about understanding the roots of those designs. I’d say that comprehension is what you gain reading this assemble of facts. Understanding people you are designing for is the main outcome of “100 Things Every Designer Needs To Know About People” and it is great because not every publican can boast such achievement for a reader.
The beauty of this book is a way how it is structured. There are 10 coherent chunks aka chapters and each of them can be read separately from each other without doing harm to your overall comprehension of the entire book. This dividing principle is an efficient way of keeping so much information on each particular shelf in your mind.
Some of the facts are pretty obvious for the first glance, others seem quite revealing even for advanced designers. Each chapter brings fascinating aspects of human consciousness and unconsciousness to the design table. For example, it is the only place where you get listed major issues of how people see, read, remember, think, focus, feel and decide. What is good to know that every fact refers to the rigorous studies in each of these fields allowing you to dig deeper and dive into serious external research with real data and experiments following provided referrals.
Someone finds the amount of content for each statement too brief. Unfortunately, it is not meant to be a thorough study of a single subject. Its main task is to deliver you with a list of existed information to make you aware of a wide range of psychological technics that works perfectly and are welcome to apply in the real life situations.
Despite serious mood of the book topic, it is written in very simple and comprehensive manner, which is much appreciated. This style encourages a fast and easy reading of every written sentence. On more perk of reading the book are examples of how all those weird perception things can be applied in the real life of design solution. It is a big thumb up for that.
What I personally found extremely useful as a designer finishing “100 Things Every Designer Needs To Know About People” is that there is a lot of knowledge out there to be gained besides basic design fundamentals of creating shapes and matching colors. This is exactly what has to be learnt by newcomers into the design, no matter if it is graphic, UI, UX etc. Another side of the moon in every kind of design is psychology. Sometimes I doubt what is even more important in providing solid results in my profession: design knowledge or psychology ones. However, the right answer is always in the middle.
P.S. If you don’t have this book in your reading list, you certainly have to add it if you are a design person 🤓
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