Hi there–you are browsing the old Nordkapp website. New one will be out soon!
Thanks for visiting our brand spanking new website. This is a work in progress, an experiment without a version number. Things will change and evolve over time once we figure out what we want to do with this thing. One thing’s for sure—calling this a beta would be just lazy. We don’t wanna be like that, do we? "
"I'm coming back to our discussion last time about the reference rights to the project. When I asked for this, and you asked in return, what is the benefit for you, I couldn't yet answer properly. Now after giving it a careful consideration, I think it would be a good idea. Let me explain."
by Panu Korhonen Managing Director
From: panu@nordkapp.fi To: vice.president@company.fi Subject: Reference rights —- Hello, I’m happy to see that your service that we worked on together seems to be such a success! Please let us know, if there are any tweaks that you’d still need us to do. I’m coming back to our discussion last time about the reference rights […]
Recently, ex-New York Times Design Director Khoi Vinh wrote a solid point of view on why he's moved on from client services to designing a product. While I agree on a lot of things he writes about, I think there a shades of gray here that deserve to be pointed out.
by Sami Niemelä Creative Director, Nordkapp
There is no denying that design industry as a whole is in flux. Partly it’s the nature of the business—an eternal catchup with the most current “revolution”, fads, gadgets, technologies and their uses. In any case, as the internet technologies will get more and more commiditized and platformatized, there will be significantly less money to […]
Thinking out loud about design getting cluttered with methodologies and dogmas trying to overexplain each other. Why can't we just get along?
by Sami Niemelä Creative Director, Nordkapp
During the past decade, the design industry has gone through a tremendous change. First the Internet changed everything, while making parts of the industry obsolete, and then design became the golden boy of business world and vice versa. The change in the environments where the craft was applied, and not to mention the evolution of […]
A story about the daily life in a design consultancy, and when you should consider hiring one.
by Panu Korhonen Managing Director
Why hire a design consultancy? Designers in consultancies are always into something new. Their key competences are to acquire, digest, combine, create, and deliver new. People, who love this and are good at this, work in design consultancies like Nordkapp. Therefore, hiring a design consultancy is a good choice when you create new business, new producs or services, new releases – anything new.
For future reference and for easier reading through the whole "UX leadership insights" series, I'll compile the links to individual articles here.
by Panu Korhonen Managing Director
UX leadership insight #1: Clear design drivers UX leadership insight #2: Vague or specific? UX leadership insight #3: Pick your battles UX leadership insight #4: Appropriately radical UX leadership insight #5: Split it UX leadership insight #6: Milestones are good for you UX leadership insight #7: Difficulty of UX design reviews UX leadership insight #8: […]
This is my last post in this series of design leadership. I have saved the most personal one as last.
by Panu Korhonen Managing Director
(See my earlier posts for introduction to the series.) The last design leadership insight is about you. Simply, take care of yourself. Most of the time you need to worry about other people: users, designers, stakeholders, managers. If you only do that, you will exhaust yourself. Get your weekly rest. Do something else than work […]
In a large project, there will always be some churn in the design team. Some designers will eventually leave, and there will be some new members that join the team during the process. Sometimes, when there are schedule pressure in the project, you can try to catch up by adding a couple of extra designers to the project. New hires, freelancers, agencies - there are always people available (if you have deep pockets).
by Panu Korhonen Managing Director
(See my earlier posts for introduction to the series.) In a large design project you will have vast amount of tacit knowledge that is never written down. You may have documents describing the original design drivers or goals of the project. However, the interpretation of those drivers take place during the design process. People who […]
A few weeks back our client SuomiTV released a web tv designed by us, and built by Soprano Brain Alliance on top of Brightcove's technology. For us, it was business as usual, until we heard we'd broken a world record in process.
by Sami Niemelä Creative Director, Nordkapp
Bit of a background— at Nordkapp, we work with a fairly systematic process/framework which we apply to each project we do. SuomiTV was no exception—we started with a competitor analysis, which we then turned into some obvious opportunities and design drivers. After presenting the findings to our client, we proceeded to synthesize these findings into […]
As with many other natural phenomena, the skills of designers follow a bell curve. There are always a few super productive ones, lots of in-between, and then some at the tail of the curve. Factors that determine the productivity and quality of design work include training, experience, or simply - if I dare to say aloud - talent.
by Panu Korhonen Managing Director
(See my earlier posts for introduction to the series.)
How should the teams for design be built? There are thousands of handbooks how to build effective teams, so let’s not get into the generics. There’s one specific aspect of design teamwork that I would like to emphasize, and that is the collaboration of interaction design and visual design.
by Panu Korhonen Managing Director
(See my earlier posts for introduction to the series.) I may have mentioned before, that in a process where interaction designer creates wireframes and then hands them over to a visual designer for decoration, the result often is — decorated boxes. Creating something more, something that is novel, meaningful, effective, fluid, dynamic, alive, and mesmerizing, […]
Visit us at Kaisaniemenkatu 6 (5th floor), 00100 Helsinki, Finland.
Our banking details: Swift OKOYFIHH / Iban FI5657803820035466 VAT ID 2089524-3
Electronic invoicing: OKOYFIHH / FINVOICE - FI5657803820035466
Our billing address is Nordkapp Creative Oy, Ostolaskut 4647D, PL 72, 00521 Helsinki
