Working in CMF Design, Part 2
More of what you should know but weren’t taught in school.
This is a follow-up post to Working in CMF Design, Part 1. With so much to share about working in CMF design, we couldn’t possibly cover everything in one post.
So if you’re looking for:
More insights into the day-to-day of a CMF designer.
More advice on tangible, practical skills to have for a CMF design role.
More expert tips on getting into a CMF design career.
Then you’ve come to the right place.
In this post, we cover five more things to expect about working in CMF design:
Understand CMF production processes
Communicate CMF concepts with technical specifications
Craft cohesive narratives for concepts
Build rationale for design directions
Inspire audiences
Understand CMF production processes
If you want to be successful at executing your CMF designs on products, then you need to have working knowledge of how materials are processed, how colors are formulated and applied, and how finishes are done. A beautifully presented render of a design concept only conveys how a product might look like, but with an understanding of how its parts could be made, a render has potential to become a real physical product.
An understanding of production processes allows you to understand what’s possible, what are limitations and challenges in the machinery and processes used, and how one might work around them to achieve desired results.
Why else is this helpful?
This knowledge will serve you well when anticipating lead times for your design concepts, and time can often be a major factor in projects on the job.
What if you don’t have professional experience and industry knowledge yet? It’s ok! There is a solution.
For those just starting out in CMF design or exploring the career path, this is where internships and any exposure to vendor on-sites (through school partnerships, class field trips, friends who can connect you) really provide value. An insider look at how designs are brought to life through working with manufacturers is tremendously informative. Even with some schools offering classes on manufacturing techniques, this is difficult to understand without the experience of watching machines create and finish parts in real time.
With this knowledge as a foundation, a CMF designer is a far better designer, and better partner to their peers and to the vendors who help bring design concepts to life.
Communicate CMF concepts with technical specifications
One of the biggest misconceptions about CMF design is that it lacks process and involves people making predictions about color trends willy-nilly.
Is that an accurate statement? No.
Is there more to CMF design? Absolutely.
When CMF concepts are approved and ready to enter production phases, they need to be handed off to vendors to produce it in physical form. In order to do that, vendors need clear, specific instructions to guide them in the production process and to give you results that are aligned with your design.
Keep in mind that your vendor partners are experts in producing models and prototypes, but may not understand the design intent and quality you’re trying to achieve. Think about it this way: computers and machines create the parts of a built product - what kind of data would a technician use to have their machines produce the CMF you want?
The main takeaway here is: to communicate your CMF design clearly, you need quantifiable metrics that leave as little room as possible for interpretation.
Despite colors, materials, and finishes being described in all kinds of ways in everyday language, each of these can certainly be translated into much more technical, objective terms.
Colors can be translated into measurements of lightness, the amount of red versus green, or the amount of blue versus yellow (more of the L*a*b* color space in another post).
Materials have chemical names describing its contents and can be specified by type, by proportions of its compounds, and measurements of its physical qualities like hardness, elasticity, and strength.
Equally, finishes can be translated into measurements of glossiness, transparency, and roughness.
These metrics are all translatable into numeric data, so the more a designer understands how to communicate CMF with technical specs, the better off they are at ensuring good execution with vendors and controlling variables in the production process.
Craft cohesive narratives for concepts
Have you ever listened to someone present an idea and thought it wasn’t memorable or valuable? Have you listened to someone present an idea and walked away from it excited and thinking about it even more afterwards?
More often than not, the differences between the two scenarios are:
how relevant the idea is
how the idea was made applicable to a real, specific challenge
and how well the speaker presented the story, enabling the audience to empathize and understand the value the idea provides
An idea becomes sticky when it has a purpose and a story that resonate with an audience. Great CMF designers not only make sure their concepts are presented beautifully, but they also make sure there is human context around who the design is for, why its CMF palette was designed this way, where the design will live in the world and in someone’s life, how the CMF is adding value to its users and context.
The designer is the expert behind their work, but a meaningful design will go unnoticed without the support of good storytelling to help audiences (whether it be your design team, your client, a potential end user, an investor, or an executive at your organization) understand your concept, its value proposition, and its context.
Build rationale for design directions
In our previous point above, we covered the value of crafting narratives for audiences to understand the context behind design concepts. A designer takes their audience on a journey through the design decisions made in the process and allows the audience to empathize with the challenge and the need for a better solution.
But besides contextual information, what else can help answer the question: “why did you design it this way?”
The answer to this would be the rationale.
Your narrative and your rationale may sound almost like the same thing, but in this post, we focus on rationale as the logic you bring to the project – what is the reasoning behind the design decisions you made throughout the project?
Any design concept needs to be rooted to a challenge for it to be meaningful. Equally, if not more importantly, any design concept needs to have a strong rationale for it to be undisputed.
A design that has rationale should have audiences thinking: “yes, this design makes sense.”
For example, let’s say you were designing a handheld tool that would be used by construction workers. You’d want your design to be shaped by the work they do and the environments they work in.
So where does the rationale come in? This project should make you think:
Construction workers often use sharp and heavy-duty tools. How does my CMF design help guide users to hold it and operate it properly and confidently?
Construction workers often work in loud and visually chaotic environments. How does my CMF design mitigate hazards and encourage safety in such places?
Construction workers often deal with physically tough work conditions. How does my CMF design ensure robustness, durability, and performance?
Backing up your decisions with a backbone of logic, especially in CMF design, is where the magic happens and the value of design truly shines. This process ensures you are justifying your decisions with reliable data, research, and user insight and translating that into design solutions that truly make sense and resonate, functionally and aesthetically, with the intended user.
Inspire audiences
Much of what we covered up to this point has been focused more on execution and communication on the job. But what about the more exciting parts of CMF design?
We got you right here. Our last point may be less easy to measure and quantify as a success metric on the job, but important nonetheless.
Great CMF designers are not only great at executing CMF design and all the responsibilities associated with it, but they are also pros at inspiring people and bringing design visions to life with their CMF toolkit.
CMF designers are in a unique and privileged position to build excitement and visualize a shared vision for multiple stakeholders on a project. They have a knack for visualizing possibilities of a future product’s look and feel through moodboards and material samples, and storytelling that conveys a real human value in the project through research data and imagery.
CMF designers can also facilitate early project conversations through providing (pardon the pun) some color to projects that need a little boost – for stakeholders to understand, empathize, motivate, connect better to the project in ways that project planning and scoping may not be able to provide to teams early on.
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?
If you’d like to see more of this series in a Part 3, let us know!