One Day Out 2017: "Beauty in digital: trendy or timeless?" by Aude Degrassat

Back! We're just gonna jump straight back into it so we're not running too behind schedule. I saw people are sitting at the top now which is really cool as well so hope you enjoyed your break. Next up I'd like to welcome Ud to the stage. She's the Art Director at Elephant and I'm really looking forward to this talk. It's about beauty and design. So please welcome Ud to the stage. Hi everyone. My name is Ud DeGrasseut. I'm a French Art Director and I'm currently working in New York. And I'm going to speak about beauty today. So my first touchpoint with beauty was since I'm a child, I've always loved drawing so I'm drawing since I'm a child. And I had this interesting moment in my life where each year I was looking to the previous drawing I was doing before and I found them quite ugly. So on one hand it was quite depressing but on the other hand I was quite satisfied because my it was proving that my eyes were getting educated and I was improving. This led me to study graphic design. Back in this time, I don't know about you, but it was it felt it was more noble to study print design than digital. So I started studying print design and font was really a weird mysterious word for me. I didn't understand it so well. I decided to get specialized in creating fonts. This finally I studied web design and I discovered all the possibilities of what that was bringing with digital. And this led me to study and work in different parts of the world. Barcelona, Los Angeles, Paris, London and New York. Each company I've been working in before I worked and when I was thinking should I work there or not, it was with this first question in my mind. Do they care about beauty? Is what they do beautiful? And am I going to do beautiful thing if I work there? So the first idea I had is that if I'm working with beautiful content, I'm going to do beautiful things. So at the very beginning, I worked for luxury, fashion and culture. And then I decided to challenge myself and see if I could find beauty I'm now an Art Director at Elephanth which is located in New York and San Francisco. I work in WHATEVER YOU WANT. I working in New York and San Francisco and working in New York Elephant is a quite interesting place to work because we're not too big not too small. It's a sister agency. Agency of huge and at the beginning, open when we worked for after, as we work. working in Google, we decided to create Elephant network 115 person across New York SF, across New York and SF, and we work for a lot of different kinds of clients. So in my daily life as an art director, I have a lot of decisions to take around beauty. And this brought me a lot of different questions. Are there any common rules about beauty? What makes a digital project beautiful? Does this look right? Is beauty necessary? Or is this just a trend, or is it going to fade? And how can I ensure the beauty of a digital project? And most importantly, how do aesthetic trends impose themselves in the digital world? Because we are always confronted to this kind of question, right? When we judge a project between your co-worker, when you speak with your boss and he doesn't agree with you, is it just subjective? Who's wrong, who's right? So the question I'm going to try to answer today is beauty in digital, trendy, or timeless. Can we ensure the beauty of a project in this always evolving landscape? So everything I'm going to share with you today is a result of my international background. So as I told you, I work in different places. So I was confronted to a lot of different cultural approaches. Also, as a result of my personal projects, so I do a lot of side projects. One of them is cilesoleil.com. I invite you to check it out. It's about, I'm passionate about sailing, and it's about a sailing trip I did from France to Canary Island. It's another way doing side projects to think about beauty because there is no client. You're the only one to judge. This is my current work, my current experience at Elephant. Also, that influences me because we work in very small team. We come from a lot of different background. And as we are still quite small, we can reiterate, change our minds, like collaborate and think about beauty together. And I did quite a lot of philosophical research about beauty. And thinking about that, I applied it to digital. I'm thinking if there is any big difference, what is the specificity of beauty in digital? So I'm going to first try to answer this question. What is beauty in digital? And what is the specificity? It's going to help us understanding how do we create beauty in digital. Before going any further, I want to share some facts with you, scientifically proven. First, beauty matters. Aesthetic impressions are fast. It takes less than 500 milliseconds to have an aesthetic impression when you see a project. So it happens before any cognitive process. And it's also called a process of understanding. And it's also consequential. So what we say is that beauty matters because beauty is going to influence your emotion. And your emotion is going to influence the way you interact with something. So if you find a project which is really beautiful, you're going to be in a mood where you're going to interact differently compared that if you are really frustrated and you don't like it. So then we can think about banking, for example, which is a stressful situation. And then we can think that beauty even matters even more in this kind of situation. And also, it's enduring. So it's going to influence your loyalty. It's going to make you come back or not. If you look at the art history, design history, there have been tons of rules around beauty. Symmetry, closure, proportion, harmony, golden ratio. So beauty has been studied in a more universal way. And we found those rules. But if you think about art history and design history, these rules need to be transcended. And they have been transcended all the time. Why? Because we need this unexpected thing. We need to have a feeling of the new when we see a beautiful thing. If we see something, if you like music and you listen too much, you're going to be used to it. And you won't have this feeling of beauty compared when the first time you listen to it, for example. So we have to have this feeling of the new to appreciate and to see the beauty of something. For example, I'm thinking also about a joke. When I say that beauty allows us to integrate unexpected or evolving language in a new way, you take different bits of knowledge and you put it in a way that you didn't expect it to be like this before. So for example, a joke, you're going to take a situation, a character, different things you already know, but putting them to the same. You're going to take different stuff that already exists and putting them together is going to bring new perspective. And then you will have this moment of, wow, it's beautiful. I never saw that before. So what is beauty in digital? Many think digital beauty is based on short-lived trends. It's a common thought and it's very valuable. And I'm going to explain why. So what is a trend? I'm going to first explain to you what is a trend, how does it work, and then we're going to try thinking about what is the specificity of a trend in digital. So a trend is a direction of a curve from an old English word meaning to turn. It has been mainly used by scientists in the 19th century, and it has been brought in our world by fashion. If we think about how a trend works, for example, in fashion, here is an example. This is an example about fashion through the 20th century in women's clothes. We can see that it goes from complexity to simplicity. And this is a common pattern about how trends work. A trend is based on the opposite side of something mainstream, a common thought. For example, here we go always from complexity to simplicity. So the exact opposite of an existing popular style is a starting point of a new trend. Another thing to think about is how does it work. It's a long process of observing and simmering. So here, like in the shape in the middle, is the number of people. So you can see that it takes a lot of time. At the beginning, you have the trend creator who are these other people. Then you have the trendsetter who are people really curious and who doesn't care about standing out. They are not afraid of standing out. And assuming some new trends. And usually they are followed with a lot of people. So then you have the trend followers, then mainstreamers, early mainstreamers, mainstreamers. And then you can see that the number of people goes down to anti-innovator. So when a new trend appears, it takes a lot of time. So to resume, how does a trend work? As I said before, it's a reaction to what has become mainstream. It's a long process of studying. It's a lot of time simmering and observing. And trends are rooted in a broader cultural context. For example, jeans were made in California. So a lot of fashion trends, for example, takes place in a very particular place in the world. So now if we think about trends in digital, how does it work? It's also a reaction to what has become mainstream. I'm thinking about flat design versus Q-morphism, for example. But it's a much faster process of simmering and observing. If we think about fashion, like fashion shows, it happens seasonally. If we think about car fairs, it happens once a year. In digital, we share all the time. There is awards, it inspires. There are so many places where you can be inspired and see new trends. Because also, it's part of the global culture. So the place where a trend happens is everywhere. It's on the web. That's why it makes it so powerful and so essential. So then, if you think about art. So here, I choose Mona Lisa because it's a famous piece of art. And most of people would say it's beautiful. Then if you think about a website you saw more than two years ago, most of people would say it's not beautiful anymore. So if you think about this time difference, why a piece of art that has more than 500 years ago, why do we still like it? And why any website we saw that is older than more than two years ago, we don't like it anymore? So it seems that trends are based on... Sorry, that beauty on digital is based on short-lived trends. But what I'm going to try to explain now is that something else is happening. Digital beauty is an evolving language. So let's take a look to some of the famous trends in digital. And let's see if we can find some. Let's see if it's just an opposition to something mainstream. For example, interactive and spectacular effect brought by Flash in 1996. For example, if we think that at the beginning we were very constrained in the HTML multi-column website, then we could do everything. We could do glossy button, drop shadow, animation, everything at once. So this trend has been brought by this new possibility, and people were so enthusiastic that they couldn't control themselves, and we did them all at once. So this brought this trend. If we think about typographic-based design, at the beginning, fonts were very informative. Then we could use more, and they became bigger and bolder. And now it's part of the beauty of a project. Why? Because, as I said, at the beginning we didn't have choice. But also, the quality of screen, is approaching the quality of paper. When the screen was so pixelated, you don't want to see those fonts in big. Now it's so beautiful that we can make them bigger and bolder, and we can appreciate them. Let the picture be the background. So if we think back to the origin of web design, all these flashy colors, these GIFs, and then we had some vectorial illustration, and then we have picture, and now video. Why? Can we see this trend going this way? It's because now we take picture and video from much better quality. It loads faster, and it looks much better. So it has been brought also by technology. Skeuomorphism is a little different. So when we were confronted to this touchscreen at the very beginning, we did the interface look familiar for people, so they could interact with it better. So why did we use it? Why did we use this paper, laser, all this texture? It was to make people interact better with the product. Flat elements and grid-based design. So it's first an opposition to skeuomorphism, but not just that. We had this need to populate design in so many different devices that it was the perfect answer for responsivity and to populate all this design. So if we think to these trends, some of the digital trends are based to an opposition to what has become mainstream. I'm thinking also, for example, in 2008 when we used retro and vintage, but this was not only digital, this was everywhere. Those trends, like when it's based to something that has become mainstream, when people use it, when everybody uses it, they're going to fade quite quickly. But most of the digital trends are supported by technique innovation and user experience improvement. So digital trends are different. They are a massive celebration of a new possibility. And those trends won't fade as much as just purely visual trends. They're going to fade because at the very beginning, everybody will say, wow, I never saw that before, I'm going to do it. So they're going to do it because they like it. But then everybody does it, people don't like it so much, but they still make sense. So then people will use them when it makes sense. So if we put them all together next to each other, what are we doing? It doesn't do something like that, right? Then it's like an addition. And what are we doing? We are creating a current collective toolbox that is always evolving. So this is a logical thing. It's a logical and necessary pattern of web design evolution. So short-lived trends now shift to styles that you can mix. And you can do everything with it. I'm going to do a little bit of flat design, a little bit of skeuomorphism. I'm going to add parallax. So for example, we can think about material design that uses a little bit of skeuomorphism and flat design. So now we can do, we have all these pallets of tools that we can use to better express our thoughts. Born for experimentation and innovation, digital trends expand the possibility for creating beauty, giving more solutions so we can better express our ideas. That's why I call it an evolving language, because at the beginning it's as if we had four words. Now we have so many words that we can be more precise. Digital beauty is an experience. So at the very beginning, beauty was based on screens that were not linked together. You click on a button, there is a cut, and you arrive in another page. And as I explained before, the goal was to be as free as in print design. And now we are. We can use as many fonts as we want. We have so many colors. And we are completely free in the layout. We are moving to the beauty of experience. And the goal is to be as free as in real life. And here I did two things. This little graph to explain that now animation, for example, is so much part of the beauty of a project. And when I think about animation, it's like in real life. You don't go to work from your home in a cut moment. We do like we take the tube and we go in some places. So life is made of transition. And it's what has been reflected now in the current trends that we can see. So at the beginning, beauty was based on the layout. And then we can see that so many other stuff are part of the beauty of the project. And it works when everything goes well together. So motion, sound, storytelling, technology, content, usability, copy. So, for example, the beauty is now completely with this completely linked together. If we go even further, context is part of the beauty of a project. If we think about geolocalization, augmented reality, like everything, the context feeds the beauty of a project. And it's a two-pass thing. So now we have also these variability trends. And if we think about our role, we don't design buttons anymore. It's not about buttons, right? We have new trends about prediction. The experience of the thing will know what I want to do before I click on a button. So we don't design screens anymore. We design experiences. Digital beauty is evolving into immersive, seamless, and transparent experiences with less reliance on visual or tactile cues. So I try to explain what is beauty in digital. It's experience. It's a sense of experience generated by an always evolving language within an always evolving medium. Our language is keep evolving. How do we create beauty in digital? This is my second question. So beauty lives in the present. As I said before, when you look at a project, it's about bringing a new element to something that already exists. And as designers, when we see this new thing, this new trend that's coming out, we say, wow, how did you do that? Oh, it's crazy. I never saw that before. I'm going to do it. So we have this feeling of beauty. Digital trends, as I said, are a massive celebration of a new possibility. And when it's purely visual trends, the enthusiasm and the usage is going to fade quickly. But most of the trends, as I said, are based on technology. And the usage goes down not that quickly, but the enthusiasm goes down too. Because as soon as you see it all the time, you don't appreciate it so much. Now we use, for example, parallax. We don't say, wow, it's so beautiful. We said that at the very beginning. So it seems that trends anchor beauty in the present, but beauty does not come from the trends. We need to use trends as tools to shape beauty. So for a longer wow effect, to keep this feeling of beauty in the time, we need to search for beauty somewhere else. Where? Beauty needs a unique. So each brand, each project is unique. And it's already a convergence of connections. And as a symbol of the brand's DNA, our design should be unique as well. If we create, and it's not mathematical, but if we create the beauty of the project, if it's based on the uniqueness of the brand, your project is going to be unique. And because it's unique, when people will see it, they will have never seen it before, and they will have this feeling of the new. So this unique design will open new connections in people's minds and create a path to beauty. Then, when I said we design experience, we need to think about what kind of experience we are designing. Is it short, occasional experience, like a mini website, a campaign? Is it multiple short, occasional experience, like, I don't know, Instagram posts? It could be anything. You can think about it. Is it a long VR experience? Or is it multiple long experience? What I want to say here is that this feeling of the new, you need to keep it going. And inside your experience, if all the pages of your website, for example, are the same, people get used to it also. So you need to renew the beauty of your project also. It's like the music, for example. We have this palette of notes, and when you find a good harmony, there is a rhythm also in the music. So you need to keep this feeling of beauty last, to make it last. By finding beauty in the uniqueness of the brand, you will create solutions that are not trendy at all. Consistent uniqueness, always creates something new. So we need to use the brand, V&A, as the essence of beauty. Beauty speaks to humans. So we can see these trends about, back in the time, very complex design. Now it's more and more simple. And as I said, with the invisible, like, language that we create, with predictive design and verbality, it's getting more and more invisible. When it's invisible, or when we found this pattern, so we can see that user experience has raised a lot, and it brings some solution. Like, this should go there, this is like that. And sometimes we follow this pattern, but we forget about the beauty of the project that needs this newness in it. So this website or these experiences last longer, yes, but also, they look all the same. And they may be more enduring, but they don't have this specificity of beauty. So usability is very important, but it's not all what we need to make a beautiful project. When the usability speaks to user, beauty speaks to humans. And what is a human made of? It's made of mood, expertise, personal association, temperament, cultural predilection, own expectation. So we need to immerse ourselves in the, as you said, empathy, it's exactly that, as the customer's wider thoughts and cultural predilection. So they are not you. And if you think about this metaphor of the joke, when you're speaking to someone, when you do a joke, you don't do the same to your father as your children, and it's exactly that. So, if beauty requires an element of the world if it needs this newness in it, it also requires familiarity. And by saying that, I don't say that we need to do exactly what people expect. But if we speak the language of the people you're speaking to, we can guide them to the vision we have. So empathy is very important, as well as education. And for example, I'm thinking about this, this client meeting, for example, when we just show something, and they say, I don't like it, and then you don't know what to do. Maybe those clients, if there is too much stuff they don't know, if they don't have this, the same culture we have in design, maybe we need to guide them. It's like when you taste a wine, and you don't know wine so much, if someone explains to you, if someone guides them, guides you, you will appreciate it much better. By removing this, by removing the distance between subject and observer, empathetic design helps us to create works of great beauty. We need to design with a deep empathy for the world around us. Beauty starts with you. So, as creator, we need to be curious about the world. And this looks like a common sentence, but most of us, we go to a world website, City Inspire website, a lot of different websites that gather experiences that have been made, and that are very beautiful. But we need to find also inspiration in so many other places. We need to go to theater, we need to do sport, we need to do a lot of other stuff, go to the museum, to create after those connections in your mind. And then when you are confronted to a new project, it's going to be so much easier to find new connections. Finding this inspiration outside, the digital world. We need to encourage and valorize exploration. People who create all know that, but sometimes it's hard to make it understand when we have like a big deadline or things like that. But these exploration moments create those happy moments when you find something. So we need to really valorize this moment of exploration. Digital beauty happens when everything works perfectly together, and makes sense. That's why the way we designed before doesn't work anymore. Digital beauty won't happen by piling up layers of expertise. It's not anymore about a UX person giving you wireframe, you're going to paint, and then you're going to add some text that doesn't fit inside. So we all experience that it didn't work like that. And for example, this is from my current experience at Elephant, but I saw some places that still work like that. And at Elephant we all work together, from the strategist to the copywriter, UX designer, designer, from the beginning to the end. And this helps a lot. So beauty will come from seamless collaboration. We need to create living design by making it grow together. And for example, prototyping is a great example of that. And it's going to help you, directly create beauty, because it's not about layout. And in front of the client too, prototype works so much better. Instead of showing them some static JPEG, and two weeks after, animate it, and it's going to, you will always have a gap between those two. If you prefer showing them like little bits of, little parts of the experience, but already with a good copy, already with animation. Because beauty, as I said before, comes from, from the, the, how to say that, the sharing of all this. So designers' vision and creativity are crucial for creating a digital experience. But designers don't own beauty. We co-create beauty. And what is make our work so, so different, and this the difference also with the piece of art I show you, Mona Lisa. It has been made by one person. Here, we are all co-creator. And I think people definitely feel it. When they see something that has been stretched in different senses to make it work, or when it came from this great collaboration. So how do we create beauty in digital? We co-create beauty in digital by designing with a deep empathy with the world around us, using the brand DNA as the essence. So as a conclusion, beauty in digital seems to be based on trust. But they are very particular. And we are in fact creating a language for beauty. This always evolving language shapes web native experience that educate our eyes and unlock our mind. Now, if I go back to the beginning of the presentation, if you think about this website that you don't like anymore because it has more than two years. Why didn't we like it? Why don't we like it now? Because we have so many other experiences to compare with. Beauty comes also for comparison. And the language we are all creating together gives us more tools to compare. And if we go back to the time when we have these four words to create an experience, our mind was also locked in those four words. And it's the only thing we know. So now we know so many other stuff, and we can appreciate how beauty works in so many other places. We have the tools to compare. And now we think that it's not beautiful anymore. But back in the time, we found it was very beautiful. So we need to use trends to uncover beauty in the present. But have a vision first. A vision adapted to your brain DNA will ensure its beauty. By saying that, I want to say that it's great to use trends as tools. But if you follow trends, it's not the same that if you have a vision first, and then if the trend doesn't exist, you will push the boundary of creativity to make your vision concrete. And maybe you will create new trends. It's not enough to think of how people use what we build. We should be thinking about how people feel. We create for people, with people. We should design with love. Thank you. That was awesome. Thank you. That slide deck was the most beautiful one. You're nice. Again, I have a hundred questions. I keep taking notes backstage. So I have to pick one, maybe two. I really liked what you said about empathy, actually. And I think it's really easy to forget that when you're designing something, right? When you're asking people for feedback, how do you tease out useful information? And sometimes it's impossible, because I show you something, and then they're like, I just don't like it. What does that mean? I think you need to understand why the person don't like it. And when I say empathy, for example, I'm working with this young designer that I really like, because she usually, some of us can take feedback from other art directors, and their opinion looks more valuable, because they are art directors and they own beauty. But as we don't own beauty, she listens to PMs, for example, and says, oh, yes, I'm going to think about it. And she takes it as seriously as she can. But seriously, as any designer, I feel that designers' feelings are not more valuable. And it's just trying to understand why. I think it's more about that. Yeah, okay. That's a good point. I have one question I don't want to ask, but I should a little bit. Do you feel like this whole trend thing is partially just because we share our work so much now? Like the dribble-ization of design is a thing. I think we talk about it a lot, sorry. But do you think that's partially it? Or are we all looking at each other's work constantly, and that's responsible? Yeah, definitely. Before, if you think about art history, I don't know, in Italy, where it tooks... There were trends, too. But it tooks years and years to go from Rome to Venice, or I don't know. Now it's instantaneously, and it's all the time. And we are in our... The way we are, because we are creative, we are looking all the time. And there are so many tools available to us. That's why it makes it so fast. But it's great. It helps us, as I said, like creating these tools, these palettes of tools. But then it's about us deciding if we use this because it's just cool, but maybe it doesn't speak to someone. Or if I use this because it's the exact tool that I need, the exact word, if I say it in a language, that I need to speak to these people. Amazing. Awesome. Another round of applause, please. Thank you so much. Awesome.