A Design Adventure: The Beginning
By: Jovan Hermawan
Tags: Personal Experience, Design, Tips, Beginners Guide

Illustration by Febin Raj from https://www.behance.net/febinraj

If you are just like me, a newbie, yet already have a desire to pursue a career in design, you might want to stick around for some minutes and read about the start of my adventurous “game” of design. I made this post to share my own experience of beginning the design adventure which I hope can inspire other people who are also struggling in getting started for the career, just like me. Please note that this article is based on my personal experience and point of view, hence, it can be quite subjective.

Path Selection: The First Step

“The first step is always the hardest”

Taking the first step has always been the stage where most people fail to accomplish. It takes great courage and determination to face the challenge of starting something new, from committing in a relationship to picking and pursuing a career. Choosing a path which will decide the rest of our life might seem scary for everyone, which is why I have dealt with the same problem for some years.

Illustration by Tess Smith-Roberts from https://www.behance.net/tesssmithroberts

It took countless debates within myself to finally reach the answer to my future. Looking back, my biggest regret is that I was hesitating and wasting so much time in making every single decision. If I could press the reset button, just like in games, I would go back in time to yell “just do it!” at myself.

Frankly, what I think is holding back most people in reaching early career success is the excessive time they waste on picking the path they want and taking the next steps. It is good to put an adequate amount of time to research more about each career path, but doesn’t mean we have to get through every single detail. Instead of spending years not knowing what to do, doing pointless activities without short and long-term goals, I should have just trusted my guts and started doing things that could actually help me in the future. Instead of spending a lot of time arguing about future career prospects of each option and filling my head with more complications, I should have started creating some actual works that can be a great contribution to build my portfolio.

Skills Management: Levelling Up

Just like in most RPG games, each character has their own unique skills, the strategy is then to upgrade each skill to the maximum level, which is a strategy we might want to adapt for the next step after career path selection. A major difference between in game and real life is that we are not given the information about what exactly our special skills are. Hence, we first need to explore our own abilities. But how do we do that?

Image from https://www.behance.net/monikaprze1115

Grinding, a term commonly used in games to describe the process of engaging in repetitive gameplay in order to gain process. After deciding to be proficient in design, I worked repetitively on tens if not hundreds of design works and projects. Yes, it is as boring and exhausting as it sounds, even in games, grinding is not an activity which the players want to do. So, why do they keep doing that? The answer is simple, because in order to progress to the more challenging part of the game they HAVE to do the grinding.

The best way to progress is to gain experience, the best way to gain experience is to keep on trying. By doing a lot of design works and projects, I get to know and learn more about the unique traits and characteristics of my design. Some are really good, some are really bad. After figuring our own strengths, we can move onto the bigger yet more specific step, which is to level up our special skills. This step is similar to the previous one, I worked on more and more design related works. However, this time I am working mostly around improving my strengths I found from doing the previous grind.

Quality over quantity, most people would rather choose one with better quality than many with lower quality. However, in the step of ability enhancement, that is not the case. There is a study (source: https://jamesclear.com/repetitions) where a professor in University of Florida divided his film photography students into two groups. The first group will be scored solely on quantity (the more number of outcomes the higher the grade), and the second group will be scored solely on the quality of a single outcome. We might think that the second group would have better outcomes, because each student gets to focus on a single outcome and make it perfect. In fact, the first group did better on both the quality and quantity. This is because in making the first until the final outcome, the first group gained a lot of experience and enhanced their skills. Trial and error (a fundamental method of problem solving) is being implemented in doing their tasks, they would repetitively keep on doing various attempts which the results would tend to progressively become better as they learn from their previous errors/attempts. Meanwhile, the second group would just focus on creating and perfecting a single outcome without experiencing the errors.

In design, to get the best outcome, we need to keep gaining experience by attempting as many as we can, each attempt with different ways of working. Then, we evaluate our outcome after every attempt, where we would take a look at the good and the bad of each outcome, taking a note of the good, and fixing the bad for the next attempts.

Talent Utilisation: Unfair Advantage

Image from https://www.trainingjournal.com/articles/features/top-tactics-keeping-your-managerial-talent-happy

Other than unique skills, each game character would also have their own special talents. These talents that they have, would then be used in synergy with the special skills each character has. In real life, talent is also known as an unfair advantage. Unfair advantage is used to win over the other candidates at a particular aspect. For example, unfair advantage is the reason why a specific person is chosen to be a group leader.

Unfair advantage does not always have to be inborn, instead it can be achieved throughout our life. My university course is a mix between engineering and design. Hence, now that I am intending to pursue a design career path, my unfair advantage against other designers is that I have the knowledge of an engineer.

My next step is to utilise my unfair advantage to win myself against other designers. To be more precise, since I studied a lot of programming in my course, I get to implement the design directly into a program, which is a big plus compared to designers that solely work on the design. This is the reason why having other skills like drawing, painting, photography, etc., is also important in pursuing a career of design.

Unfair advantage also does not always have to be you, it can also be your environment or the people around you. Another unfair advantage of mine is that I have some close friends and seniors that are already very specialised and experienced in design. Hence I get to learn directly from them which helped me a lot in improving my design skills, some of them even guided me throughout my early stages of learning design.

In order to utilise our unfair advantages, we need to acknowledge and embrace them first. So, what are your advantages?

Extras: Final Touch

Co-op is a mode in some games where players can play with each other. In real life, we are always in the co-op mode. Especially in design, we might want to utilise the function of the co-op mode we are provided with. What I have always been doing throughout doing all the grinds and works in design is to show my workings to other people and ask for their feedback. Design is quite subjective, the feedback from each person can vary even on a single piece of design. At first, I was terrified of getting negative feedback and critiques from the people I asked. However, it is actually a great opportunity for me to learn faster, because every time I receive a critique, I learn a new thing and not dwell on the same mistakes. Of course the people I asked for feedback from are not random people with no prior design experience, instead they are mostly very experienced in design. This is also a good reason to ask for their feedback, because some of them might even give me specific advice and tips which they learnt through experience.

Lastly, it is nice to be in a community which has the same interest as you. This is how I find many experienced designers. Joining a community full of designers has improved my connection in the design world. We can also gain insights from other designers by reading a thread or forum about the problems they are facing and the solutions they are using to tackle each problem. However, the real deal is not to be just a viewer, we can also post our own problems, solutions, thoughts and views about design, from which we can get comments and feedback on our post.

If you are still confused on joining a community of design, please feel free to contact me through my email hermawan.jovan20@gmail.com

Now that we have covered my design journey, why don’t you write your own story by “grinding”, “levelling up”, and “utilising your unfair advantages.”