5 Essential Skills for CMF, Part 1
Whether acquired through experience or not, developing these CMF muscles will set you up for success
Are you ready to level up your industrial design career? If you work with, or professionally specialize in CMF design, you'll need to have a strong foundation with the help of some CMF-friendly skills.
Each CMF design role in any given company, team, or project can be unique and may require certain skills more heavily than others.
For example, an organization that produces a new range of consumer products on a seasonal basis may require designers that know how to gather and synthesize trend research and design CMF palettes for strong storytelling and marketing, and attract their target audience.
Compare this to a company that produces a new product every five years, and you’ll likely find designers whose skills skew more heavily towards having deep technical knowledge and material development expertise, while focusing on longer term innovation and production.
Imagine a pie graph representing all the necessary skills you need for any design job. In any given job, it’s about which pieces of the pie need to be larger and more important to utilize than others. But all the pieces are needed to complete the job.
In our experience, there are a handful of skills that make a great CMF designer and a well-rounded design team member. We’ll cover the 5 skills, which include:
Material mastery
Color expertise
Problem solving skills
Attention to detail
Visual communication skills
Material Mastery
Material selection is key in industrial design and CMF design. It significantly helps to have a deep knowledge of different materials, their properties, and how they can be used in various applications. But don’t worry if you’re just starting out in the field - this knowledge is learned and acquired over time, through experience.
When you do learn new things about materials you’re working with on a project, that knowledge enables you to effectively choose, specify, and develop different materials to create products that meet both functional and aesthetic requirements.
An understanding of different materials, their properties, and how they can be used in various contexts and applications is crucial in making informed decisions about material selection. This can impact factors such as the durability, cost, weight, and environmental impact of a product.
Material mastery is also essential in creating designs that are feasible from a manufacturing perspective, designs that can be successfully produced and assembled. Without this skill, a designer's work may be limited to living in “concept limbo,” and the final product may not meet the desired expectations, whether they be in user experience, financial profit, durability, or marketability.
Color Expertise
As a color specialist, having a more in-depth understanding of colors than the average person is just the tip of the iceberg. Yes, there is color psychology, color analysis, color matching, and color theory to know about, but there are also the more technical and business sides of this skill to know about.
Color expertise enables designers to effectively communicate their color choices and decisions to clients and stakeholders, and to address any color-related challenges that may arise during the design process. These challenges may be related to cultural associations with certain colors, a material that requires additional treatments or chemical additives to create the desired color, or even adjusting color for it to give customers a specific impression, i.e. more durable, more safe, or more clean.
There is technical language in color to know. Measurable aspects of color, such as color spaces and color modes (do you know your RGB from your CMYK and CIELAB?), as well as the terminology and metrics to describe what color you want to create, are directly related to the manufacturing process needed to reproduce these colors on the projects you work on.
In less technical terms, color plays a significant role in shaping the aesthetic and emotional impact of a product. It can also convey brand identity and influence consumer behavior. Having a strong understanding of color also allows designers to consider color accessibility and to create designs that are inclusive and accessible to more people.
In short, color expertise is essential in creating designs that are aesthetically pleasing, emotionally impactful, and communicate the intended message effectively.
Problem-Solving Skills
Industrial design is all about solving problems. You need to have a creative and analytical approach to design challenges, especially when it comes to finding solutions that balance form, function, and cost.
Whether it's finding a solution to a functional issue, creating a design that meets a specific set of requirements, or addressing a complex user experience design challenge, problem solving is at the core of the design process. Whether you’re an industrial designer or a CMF designer, these challenges are the same. As a CMF designer, though, you are solving problems through CMF-focused solutions.
Imagine a variety of problems that require creative, analytical, and critical thinking skills. Effective problem solving skills allow you to approach these challenges in a systematic and structured manner, and to find innovative solutions that meet the needs of clients, stakeholders, and end-users. As a CMF designer, you are doing this through designing an appropriate color palette, finding a new material solution, or adjusting the finish of the product’s components to make it more comfortable to use.
Attention to Detail
The devil is in the details. Have you ever owned a product that you discovered had an annoying detail, got damaged too easily, or wore out too quickly? Did you ever think, “hm, if I got a say in designing this product, I would make it so much better?”
Often times, knowing a product intimately gives you insight into how the littlest details can make a big difference in the overall design and impact its success with the end user. It is the details are essential in ensuring that the final product meets the desired standards of quality, functionality, and aesthetics.
A CMF designer likely has a keen eye for detail, ensuring that quality of the color, material, and finishes selected are appropriate, feasible, and manufacturable for the project.
Additionally, this skill is important in the design process from start to finish. Designers who pay attention to details in design reviews are able to identify and address any inaccuracies or inconsistencies in the design, and ensure that the final product is free from errors, whether it’s catching incorrectly specified paint color, validating material performance, or ensuring the right texture is being applied to a part.
Visual Communication Skills
Visual communication is something all designers know how to do effectively. After all, most of us probably gravitated to the design field because we connected with all the great visual qualities of design that the design world has to offer.
But why is it important for us to cover it here?
Visual communication is essential in conveying the design concept and intent to clients, stakeholders, and manufacturers. Industrial designers often work with complex designs that require clear and effective communication in order to ensure that the final product meets the desired specifications.
Industrial designers, and CMF designers especially, do not always have an audience of other designers, so speaking in plain, simple, layperson’s terms is often the most effective way to demonstrate the value of your design ideas. Complementing that with visuals of your design ideas support that communication by helping your audiences imagine these ideas before they become reality.
Visual communication skills allow industrial designers to present their designs in a clear, concise, and visually appealing manner. This can include creating sketches, renderings, animations, and prototypes that effectively communicate the design concept, form, function, and user experience. For the CMF designer, these are a great help in showing the CMF vision of the product look and feel.
Additionally, visual communication skills are important when it comes to communicating the design to manufacturers. Industrial designers who have strong visual communication skills are able to create detailed drawings, specifications, and assembly instructions that ensure that the final product is produced and assembled correctly.
The main point here is, your designs are valuable and need to be communicated effectively for audience to understand. Make sure your sketches, renders, and drawings are clear, concise, and convey your message.
In conclusion, developing good skills are essential for success in industrial design. Those just starting out in the professional world of CMF may not have all these skills under their belt yet, but being aware of opportunities to develop them, whether it’s attention to detail, visual communication, or problem-solving, will all play a critical role in growing your experience and domain expertise.
Having these skills also opens up new opportunities for designers to work on increasingly complex and exciting projects, collaborate with other professionals, and grow their portfolio. What’s more, continuing to develop and refine these skills can help designers stay competitive in a rapidly evolving industry when it comes to awareness of new technologies and design trends.