Reflections on my 10th year as a designer
By: Luis Ouriach
Tags: Design Thinking, Career, Design, Designer, Thought Leadership

5) Proving your worth is hard

I’ve already explained that getting your foot in the door is a mean feat, but the bit before this is also pretty hard —showing off your skills.

Most of the work I have done in my career now doesn’t exist. Yes, that’s true. Either the company has folded, the projects cancelled, or you’ve signed a non disclosure agreement, meaning building a portfolio is preeeeeeetty hard.

The discussion on this thread is enough to scare anyone away:

But it doesn’t have to be scary! There are enough articles about writing portfolios that you could spend the rest of your life drowning in advice — I’ve even written one — but ultimately we need to communicate why we are appropriate for the job we’re applying for.

What this means is that in the 30 seconds a hiring manager takes to look at your CV / resume / portfolio, they need to understand that you will make an impact at their business.

Impact? Yes, think in actions. For example, having a bullet point of “increased conversions on our sign up form by 10%” on your application is something I can immediately be impressed by. Make the hiring manager nod in approval by offering actionable insights you can discuss, rather than statements such as “worked on the website” — this doesn’t tell anyone anything about what you actually did.

On the design case study side, the simplest thing we need to be demonstrating is…our impact. “Wait, you’ve already said that!” I can hear you cry, but it’s important.

Let people know:

Who worked on the project

What you built

Why you built it

When it was built

Where it was marketed / showcased

How you had impact

Following this format should hopefully allow you to keep your work concise enough to tell a story, and not long enough to send the person reading it to sleep; much like this article.

6) You can’t please everyone

People will like you, people will dislike you.

I’ve made lots of friends in my career, and some people have not enjoyed working with me. Why? This is human nature, and we need to understand that we can’t be best friends with everyone we work with, but we can be professional.

The same advice goes for your design work — your taste will not be matched by stakeholders and it will be very hard to let go of great ideas if others aren’t in agreement that the hot pink you chose for the buttons doesn’t pop enough.

So how do we navigate this? My top line advice for every single designer on the planet is:

Don’t be attached to your ideas, your designs are just pixels on a screen

Removing our emotional attachment to ideas means that we can firstly get on with our lives but most importantly, put the goal of the project at the front of our decision making processes.

If we approach design jobs rationally and without a “I’m the designer who knows everything” attitude, we can encourage a much wider culture of design across the business, reduce the design gatekeeping and generally promote better ideas as a whole.

7) Your grass is green enough

Do you know how lucky we are that we get to design for a living?

The answer is —incredibly.

With that in mind, it’s important to frequently appreciate what you have. The industry has a habit of showing off new shiny things and we can easily be distracted by this and ignore just how sweet we have it.

I‘ve been in jobs before and applied for others in the evenings just to see what happens, rather than trying to make my current job work better for me and the team. It’s this ease at which we look elsewhere for satisfaction that makes it hard to build reliable and efficient teams. Being transparent with our managers about any gripes we have is the only way the business can move forward, rather than jumping ship at the first sight of hard work.

8) Privilege is real

Related to the previous point, it’s alarming how much privilege has an impact on recruiting in our industry.

It took me many many years before I realised that a lot of high flying people are in that position because of an inherited network, or because they went to a specific university, or because maybe they are just white and male with a loud voice.

The industry needs to work hard to anonymise our hiring, so that we’re on a level playing field regardless of whether we work at a super shiny company or a small agency, or whether we have a certain look, or name, or follow a particular sports team.

9) Work is not your family

Companies have a habit of luring us in with snacks, and perks, and sofas, and table tennis, and beers to the point where we realise we’re spending more time at work than at home.

It doesn’t take a genius to realise that this isn’t wholly great for our overall mental health and work / life balance.

The sad fact is that we are replacable, and the amount of time we overinvest in our work is not paid back when we leave that position, so make sure you try to strike that healthy balance between staring at your laptop in the office and hanging out with your friends and family, going on vacation, and generally not burining your retinas out from too much screen action.

10) Become an asset

I’m not talking about assets in the component sense, but a reliable source of knowledge in the workplace.

A reliable whatnow? What I mean is that the more we invest in becoming a go-to person for answers to questions, the more we build an internal reputation as an expert, and the more valuable we become to that company.

Most of my jobs have been as a solo designer in a business, and this means that unless got on the level of my non-design colleagues, I was talking a different language to everyone in the business.

Spend a significant amount of time hanging out with sales, marketing, operations, heck even the CEO if you can. You will slowly but surely develop a much deeper understanding of what it means to have real impact on a business, rather than the person who delivers mockups once every 2 weeks.

Investing that time in the non-design side of your work will pay off tenfold when the company wants to grow and they need to turn to a creative person for advice on how that should happen.

Slide your chair up to the table, my friends.