Ben Holliday is an experienced design leader, writer and speaker. This is his blog (started in 2005). If you’re new to this site, Ben has published a playbook for design linking together many of his blog posts from the past 5 years. You can book him to speak at an event, get in touch or follow him on Twitter.
There’s a lot of design education out there. I get asked sometimes what people should ‘study’?
If you want to be a good designer, my advice is to study broadly and follow your interests. A design degree is great but it’s how you spend the rest of your life learning and being open to new ideas that matters most. Continue reading…
A lot of digital agencies and technology companies talk about ‘digital service design’.
What I think they mean by this is that they’re designing experiences and digital interactions that happen on a screen.
Service design will never be effective if it’s only seen as ‘digital’ or given the remit to work as ‘digital’. Continue reading…
A short follow up to my blog post about seniority in design.
These days, people assume that I’ve always been confident and comfortable speaking in front of a room full of strangers or having to speak up and lead conversations.
Nothing could be further from the truth. Continue reading…
I’ve started sharing my reading lists over the past couple of years. It helps me keep track of what I’m reading:
I also have a list of general book recommendations covering topics including: leadership & creativity, user-centred design, agile & ‘Lean UX’, research, data & analytics, and designing better organisations. Continue reading…
Everything is busy (again).
I’m surviving on something like 20-30% less sleep at the moment thanks to Zac’s arrival (conservative estimate/and I get to catch up with sleep a bit when traveling for work).
This is a quick update to cover the last couple of months. Continue reading…
All design is strategic unless you just see it as implementation.
Lingjing recently wrote about the importance of strategy.
I like this approach as a framework. It’s simply a way to think through and take forward a set of actions working towards a clear end-goal. Continue reading…
I don’t like talking about ‘redesign’.
The challenge is to design services all the time. Not to redesign them.
A redesign is a project mentality. Something with a start and end date. The opposite of this is making design part of how an organisation thinks and does things all the time. Continue reading…
May was all about the boy.
Zac was born on the 17th May – 9 days late but everything went smoothly this time around. Zac is our fourth child and joins his 3 older sisters in the expanding Holliday household. Continue reading…
Written by Ben Holliday. Based on work developed with Kirsty Sinclair and feedback from the FutureGov design team.
There’s a question of why designers make so many maps. We love maps. But there can be confusion or misunderstandings about why we’re making them or how they can be useful to service teams. Continue reading…
A busy month that included the Easter break and a family break to Somerset. In the meantime I’ve been mostly working in London, and we also wrapped up our FutureGov work in Glasgow.
I hit a sweet spot with writing this month.
I made a conscious effort to finish some things I had in draft, setting aside some dedicated time over a weekend. Continue reading…