After months of work, dozens of projects with our customers, workshops with thousands of students and countless revisions, the new Career Innovation Toolkit is finally out: 10 years after the very first edition!
We wrote about it here.
The activity was co-designed together with Matteo Bandi, a designer based in London and specialized in user interaction and digital interfaces, especially for mobile apps and startups.
Matteo was a revelation. His ability to quickly ground, test and stress tools allowed us to achieve an unexpected result!
We carried out a real Design Thinking process together with him, analyzing the needs of the users, the innumerable application possibilities and drawing up innumerable prototypes. We started from the thousands of users and their feedback, from the learning made during digital and paper applications. We considered the constraints related to font size, the use of Sticky notes and their use in coaching, self-consulting and training modalities.
I thought I’d have Matteo tell us more details about the project with his own voice:
Why did you get interested in the project?
As a designer, especially in this creative industry, the mission of getting to know each other and being able to talk about oneself is a priority. However, the attempt to find support tools in this mission often ends quickly, with a myriad of tabs open in the browser, and usually disconnected from each other in both a formal and functional way.
The mission was precisely to create a new set of coordinated and optimized tools that supports individuals like yours truly. The opportunity to collaborate with Luigi, in particular in the hope of facilitating a design process aimed at easing usability, was a personal challenge and a pleasure that I accepted with enthusiasm!
Why that type of icons?
In the search for maximum simplicity, I wondered what the value of icons was in the previous version of the tools. Generally, the “icon” is used between formality and functionality to visually summarize a concept, making it quickly accessible. In the case of Personal Branding, the various “concepts” are innumerable and often complex and expressed in complex marketing jargon. I felt that attempting to support reading using to many icons could create the riskì, on the contrary, of adding complexity to the navigation of the tools.
The new icons, drastically reduced in number, have been designed with lighter visual traits and (I hope) less affected by the evolution of style trends. During the first exchanges of thought together with Luigi, the reflection on how these tools facilitate an extremely personal process (from which even the change from the use of “you” to “I” in the texts) influenced the creation of the new icons. For this very reason, instead of the previous abstract symbols, a pure human figure is introduced in the hope of reflecting the personal value of the tools.
Why those fonts?
The fonts were chosen for two reasons. The first is stylistic: the process of optimizing and simplifying the tools left me with the task of finding a solution to ensure the stylistic uniqueness of the various tools. The Lexend Exa Pro font (for titles) has an excellent balance between the decorative aspect and the abundant but geometric volume. DM Sans, used for text, was chosen for its readability without compromising its relaxed look.
The second reason is instead technical: both fonts are provided by the Google Fonts platform. Unsurprisingly though, it must be considered that the digital version of the tools exist on Google Slides, which obviously incorporates Google Fonts. Thanks to this integration, the tools can be shared, in an open and editable version, without the classic “font not installed” problem!
