Insight Categories: Design

Before we recommend any office interior branding opportunity, we agree on a desired tone, determine where the client is in their design and build process, and identify places where that brand can live organically. It may be as simple as how and where the logo lives, inside and outside. Some clients choose to display aspirational quotes or their core values as reminders of why they come to work each day. Others showcase their history to tell their unique progression as a company or use photography to build a sense of pride and empowerment within their community. Less literal and more evocative expressions of the brand can take the form of art or murals that capture the spirit of the company.  And still, others incorporate technologies for a more interactive and immersive experience. Four of my favorite and most successful client collaborations follow.

 

Cystic Fibrosis Foundation

A long history of work with Cystic Fibrosis Foundation (CFF), including a 2012 rebrand, gave us a deep understanding of their brand, community, and culture. Upon engaging a nationally recognized interior architecture firm to design their new office space, CFF asked Grafik to work in tandem with them and truly bring the CFF brand to life in this new workplace. The results are open, modern spaces that reinforce the Foundation’s vision. Backlit photos throughout the space echo the power of community—a core pillar of their unique brand.

 

Ofinno

Ofinno is a research and development lab. Their inventors work in teams to create portfolios of patents that make future technology breakthroughs possible. With their rapid growth came a new website, positioning, logo, and visual identity—and a new office. The new space needed to reflect their future-tech focus, yet be warm and inviting with a nod to their truly collaborative ethos, all to attract and retain the world-class talent needed to excel. Their new brand pillars are now on the walls for all to read, and their joy in their home is evident.

 

Ligado Networks

After adapting a new name and identity, Ligado Networks set out to refresh their office with new signage, colors, and materials throughout, including distraction-glass treatments. As creators of the new brand, we partnered on the interior updates, even consulting on acoustic sound clouds for greater office privacy. Together, we identified the corridor leading to their main conference room as the perfect space for introducing their storied history of patent innovations to prospects. We combined elements of the new brand vocabulary, storytelling, encased satellite artifact, and actual patents mounted to plexiglass systems to bring Ligado’s expertise to life in a short, engaging stroll.

 

Van Metre Homes

Northern Virginia homebuilder Van Metre Homes asked Grafik to bring their brand story to life, both internally and externally, in their new design center and corporate headquarters. The Design Centre is where Van Metre consultants help clients build their dream home by showcasing the available interior finishes. Both clients and employees enter through a light-filled, contemporary space featuring a large wall covered in reclaimed wood with the newly refreshed Van Metre corporate logo. To create a cohesive experience in the Design Centre lobby, the same reclaimed wood finish serves as a backdrop for the new Van Metre Homes mantra and brand imagery. Powerful video testimonials reinforce the Van Metre brand when customers arrive to meet with their designers. We extended this branding to several Van Metre Homes community sales centers, such as the craftsman-inspired single-family home community, Meadowbrook Farm, featured in the second photo.

 

Incorporating your brand into your workplace can go a long way to making the practice of your mission, vision, and values second nature for your employees. Plus, it makes a terrific first (and lasting) impression on potential and current clients. Think of it as a natural extension of any branding effort.

Each week, we convene for a caffeine-fueled “Lightning Chat” about the past week’s hottest news. Through cross-functional input and debate from different teams – designers, developers, strategists and anyone else that’s in the trenches on a daily basis – we aim to find new perspectives and “lightning bolt” ideas about branding and marketing. Here are a few topics we covered this week, and why we think they matter.

Ancestry.com apologizes for racially insensitive ad

The genealogy company Ancestry.com received major backlash for their recent commercial that very clearly romanticizes slavery and interracial relationships in the Antebellum South. Set in the 1800s, a white man holds out a ring to a black woman, presumably a slave, asking her to run away with him to freedom in the North. Afterward, the screen fades to black and a voiceover recites, “Uncover the lost chapters of your family history with Ancestry.com.” The message, “without you, the story stops here,” appears on the screen followed by the image of a marriage certificate.

The ad aired on some television stations in Utah, but after the video caught fire on YouTube it was immediately taken down both on TV and online. 

ooooh my god LMAOOO who approved this ancestry commercial??? pic.twitter.com/Isy0k4HTMA

— manny (@mannyfidel) April 18, 2019

 

Our take:

We’re assuming this concept, however offensive, originally stemmed from significant data showing that many Ancestry.com users search the site for Civil War-era family history. But the spot should have told that story in a way that wasn’t so wildly misrepresentative of historical norms. This commercial and others like it (Pepsi, anyone?) act as a reminder that every creative decision must be thought through and tested by a variety of perspectives, both internally and externally.

 

Sherwin Williams translates brainwaves into new paint Colors  

Paint company Sherwin Williams took experiential marketing to another level with its new activation titled, ‘Thinking in Color,” the first user-generated content color spectrum ever created. It’s an immersive experience that helps inspire creativity by actually visualizing the colors a person’s mind creates through a brain-monitoring headset. According to Adsoftheworld, since the debut of Thinking in Color, over 2,000 participants have generated unique hues from 16 million possibilities.

 

[source: thedrum.com]

Our take:

We love that Sherwin Williams’ core product—paint—had little to do with this campaign. It was more about leaving the audience with an intimate feeling of what it’s like to interact with the brand: exploring infinite choices in color and bringing what’s inside the mind to life.

 

Corona blocks Ipanema Beach With A Wall of Trash to Highlight Pollution

According to the United Nations, it is estimated that up to 13 million metric tons of plastic end up in the ocean each year—the equivalent of a garbage truckload every minute. To bring attention to this issue, Mexican beer brand Corona blocked off Ipanema Beach in Rio de Janeiro with a wall of trash. A powerful sign on the wall read, “One day, the trash left on the beach will stop you from getting into it.

Created by agency Soko in partnership with Mutato, this campaign is part of a global deal between Corona and NGO Parley Of The Oceans that helps to protect the sea from plastic garbage.

 

[source: thedrum.com]

Our take:

It was cool to see Corona parlay their well-known “Find Your Beach” tagline into a corporate social responsibility campaign. Of the many experiential campaigns we’ve seen this year, this campaign, in particular, was an innovative approach to a serious issue that many consumers may have trouble truly comprehending. And the campaign was made all the more relevant by its Earth Day release.

 

Xbox gets rid of disk drives in fun mockumentary

This week, Xbox made the smallest of changes to its gaming console by removing the disk drive. To announce the change, the company released a 90-second mockumentary that takes a “behind-the-scenes” look at how its designers and engineers came up with this simple idea.

 

[source: lbbonline.com]

Our take:

As our Chief Creative Director says, you don’t have to change much to change everything. Xbox’s tongue-in-cheek announcement was a great way to get the word out and reinforce its fun relationship with consumers. We drew some parallels between this campaign and the playfully self-deprecating messaging Carlsberg UK used to relaunch its beer products, centered around mean Twitter reviews and an admission that it was “probably not the best beer in the world after all.”

Shakespeare plays are fun. While at first they may be hard to decipher, every time you read or see one, you’ll notice something you hadn’t before: you’ll catch intricacies, nuances, and profound observations on the human condition. It’s not every day one gets the opportunity to dig deep into King John, Macbeth, or Love’s Labor’s Lost, but we did as part of our efforts to breathe new life into Folger Theatre’s 2018-19 season. And boy, was it fun.

Folger Theatre is the production arm of the renowned Folger Shakespeare Library and an absolute DC gem. Offering unique, contemporary takes on Shakespeare’s timeless works, its innovative offerings help fight the stigma that Shakespeare is too “old” or “intimidating” to enjoy. Grafik’s job was to create a new visual identity, unifying theme (Shake the World), and marketing strategy for Folger Theatre’s 2018-19 season to bring new, younger audiences to the theater doors.

In order to pay homage to Folger Theatre’s historic roots and remain true to the brand’s personality, we used historic engravings as the baseline for our visuals. Thanks to the stunning and colorful textures and patterns overlaid by artist Andrew Bannecker, we brought modern flair to an otherwise traditional collection of images. Each piece incorporated figures, symbols, and themes from each play.

 

In preparation for the season’s opening, our team made sure Folger Theatre’s digital marketing was best utilized to further engage and expand its audience base, resulting in not only a 60% increase in ticket pageviews on the Folger Library’s website, but also sold out shows before they had even opened.

Over the course of our year-long engagement with the theatre, we learned a ton about Shakespeare and also brought home gold for Best Cross-Platform Integration Campaign at the 2019 American Advertising Awards Washington DC –our 53rd Addy in our 40-year history. While winning awards is fun, working with clients with such different challenges is even more rewarding. 

Check out our case study for more.

Intriguing as it is to imagine a world where artificial intelligence is so advanced we can be fooled into believing a robot is physically and emotionally human, I know I probably won’t live long enough to see it. But there’s still much I will be able to experience as A.I. rapidly develops. From self-driving cars to robotic farmers to glasses that give sight to the blind, A.I. will fundamentally alter the way we live, work and relate to one another. Instead of worrying if a robot will one day sit at my desk, I shift my focus to how A.I.’s potential to transform my industry.

Here are a few new and emerging design tools incorporating A.I. that I find exciting:

• Adobe Sensei is an artificial intelligence and machine-learning framework operating behind the scenes in Adobe’s tools. Currently, you can see it at work in the Face-Aware Liquify feature found in both Photoshop Creative Cloud and Photoshop Fix; the tool uses AI-driven face recognition to let users select and edit human faces in photos.

• Autodesk Dreamcatcher is a generative design system that enables designers to craft a definition of their design problem through goals and constraints. It infinitely remixes content, techniques, principles, and patterns to create massive numbers of design variations.

And at a broader consumer level:

• The Prisma app transforms photos and videos into works of art using the styles of famous artists (Van Gogh, Picasso, Levitan) or well-known ornaments and patterns.

• Flo turns a phone into an intelligent camera and movie maker. This app auto-edits raw video footage at the press of a button into short movies by combining machine learning, computer vision, and natural language processing.

New professional tools are coming to market seemingly every day. The benefit they all have in common for designers is providing more time by freeing us from the most tedious, repetitive tasks we love to hate. Automation and other benefits of artificial intelligence will give us the ability to be more efficient. We’re able to explore and invent more freely, adding to creativity and job satisfaction.

As all designers know, time is our greatest asset, and we need to use it wisely. We have to be conscientious when it comes to process and not become lazy and cut corners, because much of the strength in design lies in the steps taken to create the final result. Process done right leads to great things. In an age when everyone thinks they can design because they can click, there is also continuing downward price pressure on professional design services.

All of which leads me to the aspect of design A.I. won’t get to any time soon: empathy.  One of the essential things that I took away from design school was to really know your audience. If we develop solutions in isolation, we run the risk of creating solutions that sometimes completely miss the mark. In a data driven world, empathetic research is more than facts about people; judgment must be applied. There is a fair amount of interpretation required to discern the meaning behind what people say. Scientists will attempt to recreate empathy, but I think robots will always be missing the essential equipment. As Sherry Turkle, a professor of the social studies of science and technology at MIT states:

“They have not been born; they don’t know pain, or mortality, or fear. Simulated thinking may be thinking, but simulated feeling is never feeling, and simulated love is never love.”

Empathy must be part of the process to arrive at smart, beautiful, and more important, impactful design. If one day a robot manages to come up with an award-winning campaign, I still question how great it would be. Because in my eyes, apart from process, where great ideas come from is still a mystery.

The Halloween work day at Grafik ended with an agency-wide solving of a murder mystery created by two of our designers. While done purely for fun, once we had finished with the game, we realized how much creating a path to solving a mystery had in common with creating a website’s UX. And just as with user experience testing before launch, there are always surprises. Here are some of the surprises and parallels.

1. No one will use your product the way you expected

We had big plans for our mystery to be solved by learning A, then figuring out B, which would lead to discovering C. We truly thought we had anticipated how everyone would play the game. But in murder mysteries, as in UX design, you can never really plan for how your users will interact with your product. Sometimes they will go from A, to B, to C. Other times they will start with F (where did that come from?), move straight to B, then zig zag through all kinds of interactions before finally getting to the end result, leaving you scratching your head. There’s no wrong way to use a product. Leave room in your user flow for “non-traditional” interactions.

2. Sometimes you have to break open the locked box

One of our major clues in the mystery game was an intriguing box locked with a number code. Three riddles had to be solved to open the box, but it soon became clear that the combination had accidentally been reset and it was permanently locked. The box was the centerpiece of the mystery and we didn’t want to spoil the storyline by smashing it open and revealing the contents to everyone. But, ultimately, finishing the game was more important than the “integrity” of the storyline. The same is true for UX. When users find issues, don’t immediately dig in your heels and say “they just don’t appreciate the experience we are crafting for them.” You are trying to make their lives easier, not harder. Show your cards, open that locked box, let them have the experience they need.

3. What’s obvious to one isn’t obvious to EVERYone

Remember those riddles I mentioned? One of them could be solved with a little bit of internet sleuthing. We didn’t tell the players because that would make it too easy. And yet, even at the end of the game, no one had bothered to try and solve it. What gives? We made the mistake of assuming the players would Google it instantly. But without any guidance, it just seemed like an unsolvable riddle. So the next time you catch yourself saying “of course people will know this,” or “this feature is completely intuitive,” take a moment to re-empathize with your user. You might be making assumptions that will disrupt the UX.

4. User testing is the best testing

All the planning, strategizing, and QA’ing in the world can’t prepare you for seeing users interact with your product. In addition to learning what to change for version 2.0 (and 3.0… and 3.5…), you’ll learn a great deal about your own biases and preconceptions (see point 3). Whether you’re building a website or writing an office-wide murder mystery game, your users are the ones who will give you a Pass or Fail. Let them play the game, solve the mystery, and then put everything you learned into making an even better experience next time.

Typography is a powerful thing. It can elevate a brand or it can destroy it. In some special cases, it can keep a brand alive for hundreds of years. It can be the glue that holds together an entire civilization’s visual identity. Nowadays, it’s extremely difficult to find cultures that remain loyal to their typographical heritage. You can walk around different cities in the world and see infinite varieties of fonts, a wide range from beautiful to the dreaded Comic Sans. They are certainly not cohesive and fully representative of the city’s brand.

I recently got back from a family trip to the Basque Country, a territory in Northern Spain and part of Southern France. The Basques have their own unique culture, architecture, color palette, and language that has no connection to any other spoken in Europe or the world. It’s one of Europe’s oldest and most mysterious civilizations, dating back thousands of years.

My brother-in-law, a proud Basque, gave us the most amazing tour of this special place he calls home. As we travelled through the beautiful, quaint towns of this region I noticed how loyal the Basque are to their heritage, and how desperate they are to keep it alive. It’s very easy for a culture to lose its identity when it spans two different countries. So, how do they do it? They follow strict guidelines for cities to maintain the “Basque” look. And what caught my eye the most: one primary typeface. Everywhere.

They use the same typeface for anything you could imagine: house numbers, storefronts, dental offices, government buildings, even napkins. It’s called (no surprise here) Basque. Or Euskal, which means, (what else?) Basque in their language. Basque is a folksy font, but eerily enough it is inspired by inscriptions in old Basque tombstones and cemeteries.

If you see that typeface, you know you are in Basque Country. They use it with pride. There’s so much history and value behind each character. I don’t think they’ll be re-branding anytime soon. It’s who they are and always will be.

As a designer, one should question every typeface you select when creating a brand. Does it help tell the brand story? You never know. It could still be around hundreds of years from now.

Touch has memory
-John Keats

My father loved books. Our home was filled with them. My picture books were over-sized art books and my bedtime stories were The Highwayman, The Charge of the Light Brigade, or (my favorite) The Raven. What I never realized, until I inherited his library, was that my father had amassed a tidy sum of old books and first editions. One in particular took me a while to figure out: a first edition of Edmund Burke’s seminal A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful. Burke isn’t even listed on the title page, the publication date is in roman numerals, and the cost is written as [Price Bound Three Shillings.] I assumed it must have been purchased in England but once the roman numerals were deciphered as 1757, I was then reminded that America wasn’t America yet. Upon further examination, someone had penned his name in beautiful script on the first leaf. It appears to read Henry Evans. Could this be the Methodist minister, Henry Evans, born a freeman in Virginia in the 1700s? So much history, all in one book that is older than our country. To hold it in your hands is a profound and singular experience.

On the unconscious level, touch seems to impart a subliminal sense of caring and connection.
—Leonard Mlodinow

The greatest temptation an old book invites is to run one’s fingers across the thick, cotton-heavy pages and swivel the book in the light to watch the shadows play across the letterpress words. Touch generates communication at a near subliminal level. It creates a mood and establishes a connection instantly. A crucial part of our sensory experience, touch has been receiving increased attention in recent years following the findings in Hertenstein & Keltner’s 2006 study “Touch Communicates Distinct Emotions” that humans can communicate discrete emotions through touch. The power of touch is why haptics plays such a significant role in computer applications; and it’s something that is built directly into paper and ink. Printed material can be touched, savored, and treasured.

Everything you touch touches you.
—Jidenna

Digital printing offers a cost-savings and convenience that can not be ignored. Unfortunately, most digital presses are little more than glorified office printers. They are powder-based and heavy coverage yields a waxy, unpleasant texture. Luckily, there’s HP’s patented ElectroInk which produces coverage and resolution remarkably similar to offset printing. And, as the HP Indigo presses keep getting bigger (both the HP 10000 and 12000 are 29-inch presses), it is possible to utilize this unique technology for a wider range of print projects. Because of its offset-like capabilities, the convenience and flexibility of Indigo printing can be combined with specialty finishing elements for impressive and tactilely satisfying results.

We leave traces of ourselves wherever we go, on whatever we touch.
—Lewis Thomas

One of the most practical applications for combining new technology and old technology is your company’s business card strategy. Business cards have enjoyed a recent surge in popularity because of the connection they create. Fabricating a gorgeous business card, that feels as distinct as it looks, instills your brand with intimacy. Fortunately, combining the cost-savings and flexibility of digital printing with the impact of artisan-crafted finishing is, from a production standpoint, a piece of cake. Shells can be specialty printed on fine, or boutique, paper with letterpress (“hot type,” like my father’s revolutionary book), foil stamping, emboss, and/or deboss to be stored and later married to digitally printed “on-demand” sheets to create an effective—and expressive—calling card.

Waldron Private Wealth: The backs of the cards are 2-color foil-stamped on Classic Crest, Patriot Blue, Smooth, 100C. Blue foil on blue paper creates the subtle background pattern. The fronts of the cards are 2-color letterpress printed on Classic Crest, Solar White, Smooth, 130C. The two sheets/sides are married to create a custom duplex that also hides the bruising from the letterpress.

Summit Trail Advisors: The backs/shells of the cards are 1-color foil-stamped on Mohawk Loop Vellum, Urban Gray 110 DTC. The fronts of the cards are 2-color letterpress printed on Classic Crest Antique Gray 100C. Once both sheets/sides are printed, they are married and trimmed creating a custom duplex paper.

I have just one superstition. Whenever I hit a home run, I make certain I touch all four bases.
—Babe Ruth

In today’s communications marketplace, there are many platforms available for a brand to be built upon. Utilize all of them, new school and old school, in your tactile designs to make sure that your message hits home.

Ready to bring your brand to life inside your office?  Any office redesign today should, at minimum, reflect who you are as a company and, at best, boost morale, inspire collaboration, and encourage innovation.

The modern office has evolved. Say goodbye to employee cubicles and static reception areas branded solely with a company logo. Today, we seek to create a seamless experience between working from home and the office, one that will inspire teammates and help attract talent. Messaging is now an integral piece, too—go big and embrace themes regarding “why” your organization exists, rather than bombarding employees with how you want them to act and feel.

“By weaving the brand messages into employees’ everyday experiences, managers can ensure that on-brand behavior becomes instinctive.”
–Harvard Business Review

An excellent post by The Harvard Business Review, “Selling the Brand Inside,” outlines when office branding should be considered and why; I’ve incorporated many of their ideas, along with my recent experiences with several Grafik clients, into this piece.  Below are 5 considerations for implementing successful office branding:

1. Architects aren’t brand experts, and brand experts aren’t architects
It’s important to bring together your architect/interior designer and your branding agency early in the game. Too often a company engages the architect without consulting the branding agency until much later. It’s a common oversight that hinders collaboration, as neither player has accounted for the other in their timelines and budgets. Once together, clearly establish goals, budgets, and the timeline, and provide a portrait of current employee habits. Let each player do what they do best—architects are experts in space design, with deep resources for furnishings. Your branding agency can determine any messaging and recommend elements that reflect and support the brand.

2. Have a strong and empowered project lead
To manage the relationships and clearly define roles, responsibilities, and lines of communications, appoint a project lead from your firm. While there should always be transparency and consensus, especially on something as long-lasting as office design, the project lead should ideally have healthy decision-making authority to speed the process.

3. Consider technology’s role
You don’t have to be a tech firm to incorporate technology into your office landscape. It can enhance brand engagement, add entertainment, or help employees work more efficiently. As more work is done on open platforms, meeting and collaboration rooms are in higher demand. You can build in systems that help manage and book meetings, like Event Board from Teem or an iPad display for better workflow. Again, whichever use you’re making of tech, bring your IT professionals into the planning process early.
Part 2 of this series will focus on how we’re working with clients to elevate their brands using innovative tech applications in the workplace, such as Adobe’s Executive Video Wall Experience.

4. Make the time for both prototypes and site visits
Bringing a brand to life in a physical space requires material reviews, testing, and on-site meetings to a degree exceeding most other branding efforts. While much can be done through email communications and sharing of files, we tell our clients to expect to see us often throughout the process so that we can prototype designs and assure that the scale of work fits your space. This part is critical. What something looks like in place is often very different from what it looks like in a design; the same goes for a material you may have loved as a sample.

5. Personalizing your space
What’s often left off the table when considering an office rebranding is what makes a space unique—personal touches such as fine art or found objects that represent who you are without literally stating your brand messaging. Combining this thinking with new and innovative furnishings and technologies can move the needle from being a corporate refresh to something more human, aspirational, or unique, like Google’s camper in their Amsterdam office.

If you’re the DIY type, you can search for artists online to buy or commission art. If you’re not, you can take your search offline to visit galleries or even make a trip to Art Basel to find meaningful art that resonates with your company (and have a good excuse for a short trip to Miami in December!). For found objects, don’t overlook flea markets, antique stores, and more online searching. If this just isn’t your cup of tea, ask your interior design team to present recommendations from professional art buyers.

Branding your workspace can feel like a daunting task, but it doesn’t have to be. I hope breaking out the considerations into manageable stages will ensure you have your best resources aligned from day one.

Great logos defy trends, endure, are memorable, and serve as the visual shorthand for their brand. However, logos are also expected to remain relevant within their cultural context. This is a tricky tightrope to walk. Customers often form emotional connections to logos; when companies dare to update theirs, a predictable uproar follows. In May 2016, Instagram transformed their logo to reflect the evolving nature (and young age) of its users and the internet completely lost it. But, as my colleague Scott predicted, after just a few weeks of using the new icon on their phones, people forgot the change even happened.

Reflecting on that particular logo evolution got me thinking about how designers, traditionally, are taught to approach logos. What if rather than thinking about logos as fixed and static, finite pieces of branding that need a whole refresh down the line, we look at logos as living, breathing branding that constantly changes and evolves from the very start. We already approach websites and other user experiences with this perpetual beta strategy, so why not logos?

Some brands are already creating “living logos” that transform infinitely to reflect the rapidly changing culture we live in. But for these living logos to succeed, there must be constant visual cues within a rich visual identity so customers can still recognize the specific brand. Design icon Michael Beirut calls such logos “consistently inconsistent.” Indeed, in Beirut’s identity for the media company Upworthy, the logo shape is fixed, but new visual content continually inhabits the “U.”

Design studio Experimental Jetset designed a “responsive W” for the Whitney’s new visual identity. The logo contracts and expands as it adapts responsively to the context it appears in, but always appears as a thin hairline with the name “Whitney” locked in the upper left-hand corner.

Google famously replaces its logo with an illustration or animation to celebrate a holiday or topic, but does so consistently by spelling out “Google” horizontally and placing it in the same spot.

Oi, a Brazilian telecom company, took it a step further and developed an interactive approach to its logo. The logo is a shapeshifting mark that allows anyone to animate it with the sound of their voice or music. The result is an infinite array of logo marks as unique as each of Oi’s customers. In Oi’s case, the name Oi is a fixed logotype, set in the same place, while the shape, in the same color gradient scheme, shifts and morphs around it.

As customers increasingly engage more with brand and, in turn, shape their own unique experiences with each brand, it’s entirely plausible that purely static logos will become a thing of the past. This doesn’t mean that traditional logos will be one more casualty of the digital age. The creative process remains the same—logo design begins with a concept and is driven by designers playing (smartly) with shape and form. Living logo systems simply allow logos to be more engaging, customizable, and relevant wherever and whenever they appear—a win-win for all.

It’s undeniable that the world of developers today is pretty much an old boys club (actually, a young boys club). But the current state of the workforce is not an argument for men having a more natural affinity to be developers than women (I’m sure there are plenty of reasons, not the least of which is the gap that still exists in women earning STEM degrees). Key to being a great developer is a core set of disciplines. As you will see, they are gender neutral. Whether you’ve been in the industry for years, considering attending General Assembly, or are anywhere in-between, the most important step is to make the following five traits a part of your working day. Do so, and you’ll succeed in this constantly evolving industry.

1. Understand the Puzzle, Don’t Just Solve It
Why you hit a roadblock is just as important as how you were able to go around it. The process a developer goes through to solve a problem can often be more important than the end result. Comprehending not just the inner workings of what you are performing, but why you are performing that task and how you go about solving a problem are critical to growth. A great developer will ask “why did the code work?” instead of “what did this code accomplish?” Knowledge gained from understanding the process of problem-solving programming issues is just as important, if not more, as being able to solve a problem. This is essential to all who are truly successful in the field.

2. Have a Growth Mindset
Technology is always changing and developers must change with it—“Growth Mindset” is the idea that the brain can change and develop over time and does not get fixed at a certain level. As a developer, this mentality is essential. When someone asks you to start a project on a piece of technology that is different than what you are used to, you need to be able to train yourself on how that new technology works. Having this mindset to continually grow our abilities is what allows developers to stand out.

3. Try to be a Jack of all Trades and Only a Master of Some
As a developer, I recommend you choose and master a platform for your core knowledge, but continually work on expanding the breadth and depth of your knowledge. Boxing yourself into a certain discipline can be a slippery slope. While it allows laser focus on a specific technology stack, you miss out on other stacks that may be more interesting or beneficial. Rapid technology change combined with the rigors of development require increased amounts of flexibility—an agnostic developer is more suited to succeed in the long run.

4. Always Practice, Practice, Practice
This mantra can be applied to most things in life, but is especially essential for a developer of any age. With new ways to accomplish tasks via different frameworks and libraries, and the rise and fall of programming languages over time, practice is critical. To continually sharpen skills one needs to put in the time to refine and test new abilities as well as old ones. Putting in extra time outside of work on side projects or pair programming with other developers on tasks you are unfamiliar with will help make you more effective as a developer.

5. Allow Yourself to be Teachable
No matter how hard we try, we will never be able to learn all aspects of this intricate industry. Being a developer has many different disciplines and numerous technologies and languages tangled together and, if you’re smart, you will find yourself relying on the knowledge base of others to help accomplish tasks. Being able to learn and take criticism from others will help you strengthen your abilities and improve holistically.

Of course, a great developer will have many more traits than the ones I have listed above, but focusing on these pillars is an important start. My hope is that others can learn from what we have tried to instill here at Grafik, and begin to understand that anyone can be a great developer as long as they commit themselves to growth through learning.

As a developer, I’m always looking for ways to speed up the delivery of high-quality, scalable, and extensible solutions. Development frameworks offer the opportunity to do just that—however, not all open source development frameworks are created equal. There are a number of frameworks available to developers today, including Symfony, Laravel, Yii, and Zend. At a minimum, all of them are designed to achieve the following:

–Enable developers to speed up the development process by leveraging pre-built, extensible components—that means writing a whole lot less code, and less debugging and testing, too!

–Reduce the complexity and cost of maintaining, scaling, or extending a solution in the future. Drupal, Pimcore, Pyro, and others have built their open source CMS’ on top of a proven framework.

We’ve recently worked on several Drupal-based development projects, which has enabled us to get intimately familiar with Symfony 3. Having worked with the Zend framework on numerous Pimcore-based projects, we could objectively analyze and assess the value that both frameworks offered. Some of the considerations that go into selecting an open source development framework are:

1. Documentation: When working with an open source development framework, calling a support help line when you run into an issue isn’t always possible, so the quality of documentation is critical to your success.

2. Community: A framework’s community is akin to using the “ask an expert” lifeline on Who Wants to Be a Millionaire—sometimes you will run into a tough problem and you will need to lean on someone skilled in that topic. Ensure that the development community is active, engaged, and friendly.

3. Features and Functionality: The reasoning behind selecting a framework is largely to reduce the time and complexity of development. Make sure that the framework you choose has a wide enough array of features and functionality to build your desired solution, and also extend it in the future as business and user needs shift.

4. Learning Curve: Depending on the framework, the learning curve associated with getting up to speed can vary widely. This is another area where documentation can be critical, as well as the availability of high-quality third-party training videos.

5. Security: When developing any web-based solution, security is always critically important. Make sure that you’ve done the research to identify any potential security risks associated with a particular open source development framework—before you start using it.

While other frameworks may be more robust than Symfony 3, most are unnecessarily complex in design. Symfony 3 offers a highly functional environment with tools designed to make the life of a developer much easier—including a legendary Web Debug Toolbar and native support for development environments.

It checks all the right boxes: the available documentation is both robust and easy to digest, and the community is well-established, active, and easy-to-engage when needed. The learning curve is short thanks to the “embedded” best practices (that are natively applied without having to be aware of them or understand them) allowing a beginner to quickly feel at ease. Last but not least, Drupal 8 and Pimcore 5 are both built on the Symfony framework.

Symfony 3 also wins out over other frameworks from a stability, reliability, and workflow angle. It offers a tremendous amount of flexibility for developers—its Dependency Injection and the Event Dispatcher make it entirely configurable, with each of the bricks being fully independent. This means that you can architect the solution pretty much any way you want—full stack, build it brick-by-brick, or approach it as a micro-framework and select just what you need.

For developers, Symfony 3’s simplicity reflects its sophistication. Want to learn more? Check out Symfony 3 here.