10 Years of Professional Design Practice

This summer (2024) I realized I have been practicing design on a professional level for 10 years. Wow! That’s some mileage. By professional I meant when I started working as a designer on a regular and consistent basis, and getting paid for it. So, with this realization came some moments of reflection, and with these reflections came insights I have gathered along the way from 6 different jobs.

Insights Gathered

1. The only way to reach good design is by iterating your way to it. It’s in the making, questioning, wandering, playing, and digging well beneath the surface that you unearth the elegant design solution. You cannot plan your way to simple and intuitive design.
2. Anyone is capable of doing great work, though an environment with a high level of craft, taste, and quality increases the probability of producing something great.
3. The craftsperson, aka individual contributor, is a dying breed in the industry. In an age of product blandness and generative artificial intelligence, high quality craftspeople are needed more than ever to breathe soul and beauty into the products we experience daily.
4. Train to improve your skill set. Seek challenges that will push you to and past your limit. If you are not good enough, you will get cut from the team. It’s nothing personal, no hard feelings.
5. Approach your skill development with the mindset of an elite athlete and craftsperson. Seek out people you admire to coach and give you feedback.
6. Listen with your eyes, look with your ears. The natural and the created world has all the inspiration you need, just listen and look.
7. Taste is developed and nurtured over time, and it all starts with learning to see.
8. Give your mind time to wander around, to cook from its own garden, to drink from its own stream of thoughts. It would surprise you the power it has to boost you to greatness.
9. Design foundations are foundational for a reason. When you are in a pickle solving a design problem, go back to the foundations of visual and interaction design, information architecture, user environment design, mental models, etc.
10. Storytelling is how you sell ideas, so learn and work with the different materials, like sketching, high fidelity diagrams, animation, video, coding, etc, to help you best express your ideas.
11. A prototype grounds conversations from abstract arguments to focused discussions. It’s the picture that’s worth a thousand words.
12. Design tools are good, but they cannot turn a bad design into a good design.
13. Understand the materials used to build the final output of your work. If the final output is on the web, get familiar with web interface technologies (HTML, CSS, JS), if it’s on Apple Platform, get familiar with Apple interface technologies (Swift), etc.
14. Question the so-called best practices. Understand the “why” behind them, then apply as needed to your design problem. Remember they are just heuristics and should be negotiable.
15. Teaching is a good tool for learning and understanding.
16. Fight for focused and long stretches of uninterrupted time. You cannot consistently do good work if you are constantly distracted.
17. Small teams move faster and can deliver faster when shielded from processes and bureaucracy.
18. Teams empowered to explore the right execution to the organization’s vision can move mountains. Why hire talented people only to tell them what to do?!
19. Technology should always be in service of the vision, not the other way round. Although they can always inspire one another, pushing the envelope beyond what is possible into what is magical.
20. When prioritizing, cut scope not quality. Say no, not yes to half-baked solutions.
21. The world is wide enough to contribute something meaningful. If one path is not working, switch lanes, take a detour, take the path less traveled or even dare to—blaze your own trail.