This week we moved away from looking at what you need to get a job with a business and looked instead at freelancing and self-employment options as a designer. As a designer I am lucky enough to have the option of either working as part of a design agency, design consultancy, product team or alternatively I could look at working for myself. Working for yourself requires other skills alongside design, it is likely you will still use your portfolio to show off your design skills but this may not be all you need to get work. Our next project for this module is a tender proposal document and this is one of the skills a freelancer will need to master. Projects that are put out to tender are often well-paid and offer a guaranteed fixed term of work for a freelancer. A proposal document is where you outline how you intend to meet the requirements of the tender and how much you are going to charge. You outline in detail what you are going to do, what deliverables you will produce, what you need from the other party and how much you will charge broken down to itemise for each part of the job you are charging for.
While I am not sure whether or not I would like to work for myself in the future, it is very interesting to look at some of the skills I would need to acquire to do so. I feel as if covering this makes me better informed and therefore better able to analyse my position and make a judgement at any stage if freelancing would be the right direction for me.
Recently while browsing through my phone or email newsletters form sites like Medium, I have noticed more articles coming through talking about Bento UI or Bento Box design. I was interested to know more about this trend and see if it was something that could inspire my own designs.
I had heard of Bento Boxes before they are lunch boxes originating in Japan and store different food items in a selection of differently sized sections within the box itself. I had not come across the term in reference to UI design before and this is what attracted my attention.
A Bento Box:
Source: https://japanesedesigns.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2021/09/45727-zscpix.jpg (Last Accessed 29/12/23)
I started by looking at this article on Medium: https://bootcamp.uxdesign.cc/web-design-trend-bento-box-95814d99ac62
This article explained the origins of the Bento UI trend and what it is people are talking about when they talk about Bento UI design.
Beneath the Japanese inspired name Bento UI is actually a very simple design concept, it starts with using a grid as its underlying structure and filling that grid with UI elements of differing sizes, usually it is lots of different sized square or rectangular sections (cards) that fill the underlying grid. These cards then hold the content of the webpages or app screens being built.
Below you can see an example of a Bento UI from an Apple promotional video.
Source: https://bootcamp.uxdesign.cc/web-design-trend-bento-box-95814d99ac62 (Last Accessed 29/12/23)
There is a couple of possibilities of where the Bento UI originated one is that it came from the Apple promotional videos like the example I have included above. Others suggest Microsoft’s Metro Design Language which they launched with Windows Phone 7. As one of the few people to have actually owned a phone running the Windows Phone 7, I am familiar with that design and I always liked it, the way there was different sized tiles to link to apps and features with larger tile for apps that were used more frequently and smaller for apps that were used less. While I have now converted to using Android OS which uses a similar layout to IOS, I do remember when I first swapped missing the Bento UI style of the Windows Phone and wondering why the messier UI of Android and IOS had been preferred. It may have had a lot to do with the popularity of the iPhone and mainly Samsung equivalents that their layout became the standard for mobile UIs but with the rise in Bento UI as a trend now, I do wonder if Windows Phone OS had got something right.
Source: https://techcrunch.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/01/windows-phone-7.jpg?w=618 (Last Accessed 29/12/23)
While Windows Phone 7 died a good while ago, Bento UI is more popular than ever with its ability to work across multiple screen sizes it feels built for responsive design. Also, the fact that it is built on an underlying grid system means for websites at least it can be easily implemented using CSS grid.
I found the website https://bentogrids.com/ which is dedicated to showing the Bento UI trend being used in all sorts of different applications.
