Working in CMF Design, Part 1
Because sometimes, you don’t get told these things until you’re already on the job.
If you’re a design student or a design professional just starting out, you might be overwhelmed by what looks like a bunch of skills that you never knew you needed at that internship or full-time role. Some of those things might simply be avoided if you had gotten practical advice – on non-design skills to have, what to really expect on the job, and how to go about your day-to-day responsibilities as a designer.
There are a handful of things that we haven’t seen discussed or written about that end up mattering a whole lot working as a CMF designer.
What’s more – these tidbits are likely not going to be found on CMF design job postings, and setting realistic expectations for a CMF design role or CMF design career is half the work when setting yourself up for success. To do that, you need insider experience to inform you of everything else they may not have taught you in school. Easier said than done? Maybe, but the tips in this section can help you get there.
In this post, you’ll also start to see how these might translate into practical skills you would need to succeed in a CMF design role.
Here are five things you can expect about working in CMF Design:
Establish targets and matching production samples
Communicate with model shops and manufacturers
Travel for factory and vendor on-sites
Research and apply relevant trends
Build presentation decks for your design work-in-progress
Establish targets and matching production samples
It’s no secret that CMF design is a very physical and visual design specialty. Working in CMF design can also be very technical, but people often overlook it because it happens behind the scenes, before most physical samples are produced and finalized for an audience to review. Much of this process involves establishing targets and matching production samples to targets, which we’ll break down here:
What are targets?
Targets in CMF design are exactly what they sound like: the result that you want to aim for.
In CMF, the target is usually in the form of a material sample that shows the desired color and/or material finish that you want to achieve in the final product. Sometimes, in very early stages of a project, a target may simply be a Pantone color swatch, or an existing product that happens to have the CMF that you’re looking for. Also, there may be times that the target only shows the correct color but not the correct finish, and vice versa. In an ideal scenario, a target would show the desired color, material, and finish all together in one sample for accuracy.
Why are targets important?
Targets represent the CMF that illustrate the end goal for CMF on a project, before it enters the production phases. Depending on how the project progresses, targets may be used as early representations of the look and feel of the product, especially when presenting design concepts to cross-functional partners.
What happens after CMF targets are created?
After establishing CMF targets, a process called “CMF matching” begins. This is where a designer uses targets to communicate CMF design intent with model shops or production vendors, and the vendor then creates parts for the product, using the targets as CMF reference in order for them to match CMF on the new parts accurately.
Easier said than done, because much of the time is spent in the revisions that happen in the CMF matching process. Usually, revisions are needed when the vendor doesn’t match well to the CMF target on their parts or when the vendor doesn’t produce the CMF part at the quality level needed.
Communicate with model shops and manufacturers
Picture this: you have a set of CMF targets you created, and you need to have a model shop create a high-fidelity model of your project, using your targets to apply CMF to specific parts of the model. So you email the model shop’s sales team and tell them what you want. Straightforward enough, right?
Now imagine your instructions for your CMF targets being passed from the model shop’s sales team to the project manager, then to specialists who will each be in charge of a specific portion of the project: tooling, injection molding plastics, machining metal parts, mixing and spraying paint, assembling parts. It’s almost like playing a game of telephone, except the message you send out has multiple components and needs to be filtered based on what each person needs to hear to get the job done.
Your instructions will be sliced and diced because many people will be involved in the making of the model at different phases of the project, and not everyone will have the same level of visibility into the project.
As a CMF designer, communicating clearly, using as much plain language and quantitative metrics as possible, to describe your design intentions will help you deliver results in partnership with vendors and colleagues alike.
Travel for factory and vendor on-sites
When most people hear “color and material design,” they think of a designer reviewing color chips and rendering CMF on the computer.
The truth is, CMF design doesn’t just involve selecting colors and deciding whether they look good together on a product.
In fact, great CMF design can have a very real impact on the making of a product, and that requires a designer to ensure the CMF design is executed well. And that means ensuring that the CMF process is compatible with how the product needs to be built and how its parts need to be fabricated before assembly.
With the urgency of milestones and product builds to complete, traveling to work with partner vendors and factories may be required to expedite the process and ensure CMF is being executed well on production parts.
These trips may involve domestic or international travel, depending on where your vendor partners are based. Sometimes, a designer might spend a few days with a model shop to oversee CMF execution on appearance models that need to be delivered on a tight timeline. Other times, a designer might spend a week at a factory in Asia, understanding the machinery and process used to produce the specific CMF needed for a number of parts, and helping the vendor team make any necessary revisions to execute CMF for the next production milestone.
Research and apply relevant trends
Something else that is commonly associated with CMF designers is trend research. Most people think research in CMF involves identifying current design trends and translating them into CMF to apply on a product.
But in our experience, how you frame the narrative for a project’s CMF is just as important, if not more so, as the trend research itself. Trends are relevant. But only when you tie it to your work effectively.
Some projects require research on up and coming trends in color and graphics application. Other projects require deeper research in cultural changes impacting consumer behavior and how products need to be designed for those new user needs.
To successfully integrate trend research into your design work, the following must happen:
identify relevant trends that have an impact on the context and scope of your project
establish a design criteria that addresses the project scope AND the opportunities discovered through the trend research
The CMF design concepts offer solutions to the project scope AND user needs; each concept includes thoughtfully selected colors, materials, and finishes that together address the needs and opportunities of the project
In short, trend research is relevant only when you show how you incorporate them into your projects and why it relates to your product and end user.
The average CMF designer takes trends at face value and replicates it on a new product. Great CMF designers analyze trends to understand the underlying cultural and social factors that will impact human perception of products and how products need to be built for those needs.
Build presentation decks for your design work-in-progress
As a student, you’re taught to create presentations at the end of projects. It has a beginning, middle, and end. Your job is to tie together everything you’ve done through the course of the project, and prove that your research, your design ideations, and goals for the project all add up to the end result that is your final design proposal.
This is a good template for storytelling for a wide audience who haven’t seen your work from beginning to end.
Is that a good approach for design presentations on the job? We think maybe not.
In our experience, presentations as a design professional often don’t involve working on a single project til completion and then presenting the project in its entirety. Instead, presentations usually focus more on bite-sized pieces of a project.
Here are some real-life examples of CMF presentations on the job:
Presenting a range of new colorways for a next-generation product, and the trend research and rationale behind each of the color choices
Presenting a new CMF strategy for a product portfolio, including identifying unmet needs and how the new CMF vision would address these needs
Presenting final CMF selections for a mechanical part of a product, including the range of CMF candidates considered in the process, the testing and data used to qualify final CMF selections, and whether goals were met with each of the selections
The good news here is, you will rarely need to worry about presenting a single project from beginning to end.
What you do need to be prepared for, though, is pitching your work-in-progress on a more frequent basis, whether it’s to your design peers, manager, cross-functional partners outside of the design team, or client.
We hope you enjoyed this shortlist of Working in CMF Design.
We’d like to hear from you as well: as a student, what are you still curious about? As an intern, what is starting to resonate with you? As a design professional, what would you like to see being discussed more?
We’ll be coming out with a follow up post to Working in CMF Design. Stay tuned for Part 2!