What’s In A Title?

User-Experience Designers, Product Designers, Visual Designers, Multidisciplinary Designers and the list goes on…If you’re a designer like me who sometimes question the title attached to your career, read on.

I’ve been in deep thought over the past week, trying to figure out what title best represents the type of work I do and how to portray myself in the most accurate light possible to potential clients (I am a freelance designer) and agencies for open short-term contract positions. While sitting there and asking my best friend, Google, the different job descriptions and responsibilities/tasks of each individual designer, I found a lot of similarities between designer titles and job responsibilities.

Being a self-taught designer with no former training in design of any kind, I started in the glorious world of design through freelancing in my parents’ basement at the age of 18 and building my skill-set,experience and clientele from there and I was simply known as “freelancer”. A couple years in, I got hired as an Interactive Designer at a Media Agency then later on, became Lead UI/UX Designer for a startup (doesn’t really count for Lead when you think about me being the one lonely solo designer).

Throughout all these years of experiences and being tasked with different responsibilities, I’ve constantly had to wear many hats, doing everything from research, wire-framing and prototyping to designing. This made me think that the best title to market myself as a designer was to go as a “UI/UX Designer”, it was the only thing that made sense to me at that time. I tirelessly kept up with reading up on User Experience methodologies and everything related to product designing so I feel like I actually deserve that title but despite all that, I still feel like an imposter to this day.

So what’s in a title?

This is something that I arrived to after voicing my thoughts out in one of the slack community I’m in. (shoutout to Spec Network,whoo).

Asking the slack channel what everyone’s thoughts on terms like visual designer, product designer and multidisciplinary designer and my dilemma on being presented contradictory answers led me to receiving responses like these: (Clipped version of the conversation)

So a quick takeaway from this conversation flow is to know that, if you’re like me, don’t let a user-title question your ability as a designer, or keep you from applying to a job that you feel under-qualified for. You come with all kinds of skills that will be put to good use at different times in your career and you shouldn’t restrict yourself or feel tied-down with imposter syndrome. The job listing and what you’re doing in that role is what matters.
Keep learning and keep doing you.

To close, here’s my new user-title.

I’ve received a couple of feedback from my first post ever written here and I’m trying to apply those feedback by keeping up with writing more to express my thoughts and opinions so I can get better at writing.
Thanks for taking the time to check this out, you’re awesome.
You can connect with me on dribbble or twitter.