Kerning from the best — 5 minutes with Lilu Guzman
Kerning From the Best is an article series where I’m having quick chats with remote and freelance designers from around the world to learn more about what makes them tick.
This month’s edition features Lilu Guzman, a remote designer who travels across the globe, but has 3 main homes — Toronto, Mexico City, and Berlin — where she likes to keep her clothes.
Enjoy!
What does a typical morning look like for you?
I get up early but not crazy early. I’m a nomad so it depends on what part of the world I am in. In the American continent I usually get up around 8 am.
I make my coffee: Black, French press, and I either sit and read the news on my phone or I go straight to my computer for a combination of news and work email.
Usually, I have meetings and communicate with colleagues and clients through Slack in the morning. Mornings are the most productive time of my day, everything that has to be organized gets organized.
Evenings are the most creative, and it is when I explore and work with users or draft products.
What has been your design journey?
This is interesting because I didn’t know I was a designer, but I always liked to experiment with my toys, find new ways of using them, and sometimes destroying them but I had a great time exploring the possibilities of the objects.
Later on I started creating things on the web, my own websites with animated gifs as backgrounds, my newspaper in high school, an ambitious digitalization project in university.
My formal education is in Communication (Research and teaching) but I had my first job as a research assistant at a university digital lab, where my role evolved to Information Architect. I did something similar for a government office after the H1N1 crisis to train medical teams, and then I worked at an international creative agency as UX designer and UX manager later on.
I felt like I still had to learn about the people I design for, so I went full time nomadic in December 2014 and since then I have been designing from Berlin, Tokyo or Vancouver in the same year.
What do you find yourself having to repeatedly convince others of?
As a designer it is hard enough to convince others that my work can not be done by anyone and that design is not putting colors into predefined requirements.
But the thing that I always have to convince people of is that my experience is valid (this is a very personal opinion). I grew up in Mexico City, and when I exposed myself to the rest of the world sometimes the 13 years of experience I have was dismissed due to the fact that that experience wasn’t in English or in a so called 1st world country.
That, combined with the fact that a lot of the value I provide as a UX designer comes from the ability to explain, unpack a problem, and provide valuable insights… that people sometimes don’t hear because they hear an accent.
The real issue here is that in addition to proving myself as a designer (which is naturally part of my job), I have to prove my value because of the color of my skin and the sound of my voice.
Non-white-non-male voices are valid and we should not have to convince anyone of that, but we do.
Do you have a mantra?
I don’t know if this is a mantra but I want all the voices to be heard and that design doesn’t only happen from a western-male perspective.
Where do you want to go?
I want to work solving the real problems of the world, understand culture through design, include the diversity of voices that exist in the world in the designs that me or my team create.
And I want to work with people that feel uncomfortable about how things traditionally work.
Who do you look up to?
My mom is one of the most resilient people I know and the fact that she came from a remote place (the real definition of remote. Literally four wooden houses with no electricity or civilization nearby) to where she is now and who she is, as a person, is pretty inspiring.
What’s your remote setup?
13” MacBook Pro, currently shopping for an iPad Pro to use as my second portable monitor and toy. I find my iPhone X pretty key in my operation (can take a meeting anywhere) and a vertical mouse I shopped for on Amazon to relive my wrist pain.
One thing that happens when you are a nomad is that you can get inspired by new spaces and objects all the time! I repurpose objects people have in the houses where I stay to make my setup more comfortable.
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