Do designers really need a team?
In fact, the answer to this question lies in the specifics of the event and in how much time the teams allotted to prepare the presentation. If we talk about hackathons, some of them go for 36 hours, and some 48 hours. Agree that in the second case everything is much simpler, because extra hours will not hurt anyone (and you can make an excellent presentation with a stylish design) . Hackathons, which are more about “coding”, generally do not require any efforts from the designer - the teams just need to use the classic Power Point and Keynote templates.
At Digital Breakthrough, we initially formulated the main message that we want to see multidisciplinary teams with all the roles - developers, designers, managers and marketers. This helps to develop the project from different angles, bringing it closer to commercially perfect. Nevertheless, during the final, many participants said that in 48 hours it was not easy to manage design and it doesn’t matter if there is a designer or not.
Teams will have much more time to prepare presentations for the final defense after the pre-acceleration program, so they can literally “smear” with tools for designing a truly suitable presentation.
Alexander Streltsov , co-founder of 152fz.rf, captain of the True Crime team: “A designer at a hackathon can be absent or present. It is possible to draw on one idea and white slides with basic thoughts. In the past I had the experience of presenting projects to investors and receiving investments. For them, design is less important. For a hackathon, it could be different. One can surprise the jury with a beautiful presentation, as this serves as an evaluation criterion. ”
Artem Pokrasenko , a member of the Crutches and Bicycles team, believes that any team needs designers: “There is an old joke that one of the problems of developing a product is that customers use it (the product) differently than the developer intended. A designer, and even if he or she understands in UX, helps to bring to a common denominator how the product is used and what it was developed for. Well, purely subjective - we love a beautiful product more. "
According to Artem, designers are definitely needed and there are a lot of pros:
First, the presentation should stand out from the others. For example, in the beginning you talk about a certain Petya or a legally formed group, Sing, who have a problem that makes their life very difficult. Then they suddenly find out that there is your product that can solve it. Thus, you show in a simple form the main idea of the project, point out the problem that it solves and demonstrate the satisfied face of Petit. Ease of execution is often the key to success.
Secondly, the designer unloads frontend developers very much. If there is a design, then they can only make up and associate with the back, and not invent what and where should be. By the way, on hackathons that are purely about coding, it is better to have another good fullstack programmer (from experience).
Vladislav Sirenko , a member of the Forevo Labs team, is sure that everything depends on the goal of the team. If it sounds like: “We just want to do the development, and make it work,” then the designer is not needed. If the goal: “We want to make a full-fledged product in the allotted time,” then the answer is obvious. Design (as well as development) is a full-fledged part of a full-fledged product. Moreover, design is what the user interacts with within UX. So the success of the product depends on it.
Imagine: you are on a hackathon, around a bunch of teams with top designers. You don't have it
Where immediately run for help? Are there any resources where you can get inspired, steal pictures (Shutterstock not to offer), ready-made guidelines / designs?
Hackathons are often visited without a designer - the True Crime team is just one of them. According to the participants, spending time on rendering a presentation in a short time is not entirely effective. It makes sense to think through its logical structure and concisely present your project - this will help to consistently reveal the most necessary information for the jury.
The Digital Breakthrough team does not recommend going to hackathons without designers, but to the brave frenzy, as they say ... We asked the True Crime guys to advise resources that help them cope without a designer - keep links!
Alexander Streltsov: “The design template itself can be searched on the Internet, but it will take time to select and adapt to your theme. Therefore, I’ll advise several resources where you can get free icons and images (in some cases, attribution). ”Without photo stocks , of course, nowhere. One of the most appropriate is the free Unsplash stock. There, the photos come across beautiful and high-quality and it is not at all embarrassing to use them in presentations.
True Crime icons are always taken from three sites:
- TheNounProject . The motto of this resource is “Icons for Everything.” And, perhaps, there really can be found something suitable for any design.
- Iconfinder - an incredibly large selection of different icons is also presented here.
- Flaticon is a huge collection of quality graphics.
Also, it is always useful to follow the current trends in design - the Awwwards and Behance sites will perfectly help in this, where they conduct design competitions daily and give users the best of work.
Member of the Mood In Mute team, Alexander Tseluyko, in cases where you need to do something without a designer, uses the Material Design program. In it you can paint business algorithms, design screens / pages, write out on which screens what information and acceptable actions should be. He does all this either on the basis of material (angular material, quasar, vuetify, etc.), at the same time looking for pictures in google. In extreme cases, it uses Photoshop or Blur and “finishes” the colors so that the pictures fit the general style of material and the selected color palette.
As a result, we get several pages with the components of one of the libraries listed above, at which point Alexander is revising the interface to reduce clicks: “This is an opportunity to make at least an average design, and not light green-purple horror with a bright red font on a bright blue background. Within the framework of the hackathon, you should not try to become a designer and give birth to something beautiful - often in such cases the brainchild will be able to please only its author , ”comments Alexander.
You will say: why a designer, if there are templates in Power Point. Maybe there are tricks in the obvious presentation designers, a la PP or Keynote?
All people who at least once participated in a hackathon have a certain set of cheating tricks that help them not only quickly and tastefully make a presentation of the project, but also show off to the jury members the concise presentation and fresh presentation of the idea.
According to Alexander Streltsov , the fastest and most convenient tool for presentations is Google slides. It’s enough just to have some sense of taste recognized by colleagues and follow the style of your template. At the same time, it’s not at all necessary to be a designer and work miracles - for you, innovation has long been done for you
Alexander Tseluyko believes that the most important thing is not to work on design, but on the logical structure of the presentation. And here no templates will certainly help you. An interesting feature that the team uses is that they try to “predict” questions from the jury members and visualize the answers to them in a presentation in advance. It is important to understand that among experts, everyone is interested in some particular parts of the project, so it will be right if you throw out certain aspects of the prototype on different slides. For example, one judge will be more interested in the architecture of the project, and another - an estimate on it. During the main pitch, these slides will not be shown, but when the jury starts asking questions, you will be fully equipped and will be able to visually demonstrate everything.
Does it make sense to say that at hackathons you can win with a zero idea, but with a beautiful presentation?
Often heard the opinion that at the hackathons everyone does not care about the idea if its visualization is lame. Alexander Streltsov agrees with this, who emphasizes that beautiful visualization in combination with a correctly presented idea, reasonable value and preliminary answers to possible criticism is an a priori bid for victory.
Alexander Tseluyko believes that everything depends on the hackathon himself. Speaking specifically about the “Digital Breakthrough”, the regional stage showed that a beautiful presentation, coupled with a good speaker, is much higher than the presence of a unique but poorly presented idea.
Let's say there are two commands:Artem Pokrasenko : “A provocative question, the answer to which primarily depends on the panel of judges. Depending on what goals the organizers set themselves and what they want to achieve. With a beautiful presentation, I think it won’t work out, but a well-developed architecture and design of the project are sometimes more important than the written code. The code can always be added, but on square wheels you can’t get far. ”
The first developed and demonstrated unique encryption, but at the time of the presentation, all participants began to stutter, forget words, etc.
And there is a second team that simply introduced their company and talked about their capabilities and how they worked on the task. At the same time, they do not represent any solution. But their presentation is listened in the same breath, and experienced managers throughout the hackathon closely communicated with the organizers, judges and experts.
So - the second team will win.
Write in the comments what life hacks of beautiful presentations you have. Do you need a designer for a sweet, expensive and attractive presentation?