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.
A good rule of thumb for designers:
If you need to get into a finite level of detail, make something.
Artefacts are most useful when they become the design, rather than a plan for doing the design or building a product. Continue reading…
A quick update this month so I keep to schedule.
Overall, more travel throughout the UK. I’ve mostly been travelling between London, Glasgow and Newcastle. With a couple of visits to Manchester in between.
I also went further afield than usual and flew to Milan for 24 hours, before dashing back for my daughter’s 8th birthday celebrations. Continue reading…
A good rule of thumb.
Don’t accept the low expectations of your teams, clients, or the sector you work in.
Everyone has the opportunity to challenge what’s happening around them. This is whether you have permission to do so, or not.
Challenge people to do more with less. Continue reading…
I spend a lot of time in London and Manchester at the moment. Over the past few months I’ve started to notice the trend of new bike rental services — like Mobike.
I was in Manchester again last month and was reminded just how familiar it now feels to find these orange-tinted bicycles all over the city. Continue reading…
Lots of travel all over the UK this month.
In-between work travel we had a great family break at Forest Holidays near Maldan in North Yorkshire, with a day trip to Whitby for fish & chips. There was snow on the first day of the trip which caught us a little off guard. Continue reading…
Thoughts following this tweet, yesterday.
There is an often overlooked secret to making progress:
The quality of your conversations is as important as your process.
Process is an easier proposition to package, share and even sell to organisations in response to a set of problems that they’re setting out to solve. Continue reading…
As a designer, I very rarely say ‘it depends’.
I would rather have an opinion, then be right or wrong.
‘It depends’ suggests there’s too much context surrounding what you’re thinking about. It’s better to frame something more carefully so you can decide and move on. Continue reading…
Option 1 is always ‘do nothing’. It’s a very popular policy or strategy.
Make no mistake, doing nothing is a choice, even when you default to doing nothing.
Doing nothing by default is not pursuing the alternatives to a set of problems. For example, an alternative policy, business model or service blueprint. Continue reading…
I’ve written before about the importance of mission statements.
Something I see regularly is confusion between ‘vision’ and ‘mission’ statements.
A definition:
Vision: What we want to achieve. Continue reading…
I’m trying a new approach to writing and publishing his year.
In my end of year review for 2017 I said that I needed to think about how and where I publish blog posts.
I’m now only publishing new blog posts on my Medium account. It’s much easier and faster for me to write down and share my thoughts using Medium (especially using the mobile app). Continue reading…