When Kliner Perkins hires designers it's official: 7 Tips From Leading Design Entrepreneurs

When Silicon Valley's most prestigious VC in Q4 2012 sets up the Kliner Perkins Design Fellowship, and a National Design Award is given due to a designer's design entrepreneurial work you know the US is finally catching on. But what are the secrets to design breakthroughs? Here's a starting point: 

                                       

      1) Learn to code and understand web analytics: because in the beginning you can't afford a full web development effort and you will have to sell your goods online - there is no more door to door anymore and if you can't push the BUY button because there is no system to make that happen, your project is not going to make it.
      2) Never underestimate how important design is: if your product looks bad, if your site does not work on tablet and smart phones it's all over. Customers know 1st impressions mean everything and now almost as much as the product itself.
      3) Don’t allow design to damage your focus: if your not Steve himself, then you may have to work with someone that is and in that, be flexible as your design might not be your own
      4) Keep a side project: Google allows 20% of time to employees own projects. Use this as your guiding principle as you can't "design" all day many times your building what has already been designed
      5) Read everything. Listen To everything. Experience as much new as possible: design inspiration is the key to disruptive design and zigging when others are zagging - the point to "winning" new clients in a sea of also-rans
      6) A prototype is worth 1000 words: this is an absolute must. Prototype fast and Prototype often. The faster you and clients can see what is going on the faster you get to the endpoint
      7) Think like a student as that is what a designer is: if you can't think outside the box you just created you can't innovate. The tighter the rules the harder it is to be "different" and different can sometimes be disruptive or even fully "innovative" by Schumpeters definition.

And there are many more, but with these your products will be that much further ahead of the competition.

                                

View All Of iGNITIATE's Design, iNNOVATION and iNSIGHTS here

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Apple 'got' design for $2.5M in 1982 and by a Frog. Here's how Steve did it.

Ever wonder how Apple 'got' design? Like Gates bought DOS, Steve bought design for $2.5M/yr in 1982. Here's how Steve did it and not as Fast Company says: 

Even Fast Company scrubs the data & history but not as Christopher Mims @ Quartz magazine reports it and described here. Like any market advantage, a competitive advantage starts well before personal popular culture (read advertising and 'news') has us believe or is even aware of the advantage itself. Microsoft exists because Gates bought DOS for $50K and turned it into Windows for IBM. AC and DC were fought after by Thomas Edison who developed the opposing format to thwart competitors and performed hundreds of experiments on filaments with a whole team of researchers not inventing the lightbulb, Ive's didn't usher design into the entire culture of Apple: I've's entire group was the prodigy of a Frog - the son of Hartmut Esslinger.

It isn't often that we stop to may homage to the firms whose shoulders that we here at iGNITIATE stand on top of, but after years of knowing Hartmut and the folks at Frog, and the recent articles on design at Apple being always there from the beginning, we thought to jump in on the "correction" of the marketing machine that is Apple, Issacshons book, and Ashton's movie on the late, great Steve. However in the beginning, there was Hartmut and his firm Frog and fact that Apple bought design, brought it right into the boardroom and did it all for $1m/yr in 1982 or $2.5M 2013 dollars and the article How I Taught Steve Jobs To Put Design First tells all.

Hartmut goes on to describe how From Phones To Tablets: 26 Apple Designs That Never Came To Be and How to Innovate, Step by Step which Hartmut know exactly what he is talking about.

                                

View All Of iGNITIATE's Design, iNNOVATION and iNSIGHTS here

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