My First Big Mistake

A junior designer’s first year out is a huge learning curve. But there‘s nothing wrong with making mistakes if you can learn from them.

We asked seven Shillington teachers around the world to share the first real error they made as young designers fresh out of school, and what it taught them.

Ed Baptist
Full-Time Teacher
Manchester

My very first day of work after I graduated, I was freelancing at a really high-end retouching studio and was supposed to be putting their portfolio together. I turned up to find that there was no mouse! Just a graphics tablet I’d never used before. I had a mini-panic, then pulled myself together and figured it out. But I probably lost half a day.

Lesson learned? Don’t be afraid to ask for help. You’re a junior. No one expects you to know everything. Everyone fails, so fail faster — then you can learn quicker.

Glen Swart
Full-Time Teacher
London

I overcomplicated my birthday invite in my first year as a designer. It was a big mistake! It was folded like a paper origami fortune teller, and each fold hid info about the party. But no one thought to unfold it entirely. So I had a constant flow of texts wanting to know the venue, date and time. Some people didn’t interact with it at all and just thought I’d sent them something I made! The stock was also too thick and being black had terrible white tear marks along the folds. Epic fail.

Holly Karlsson
Director
New York

I was working as a junior designer at an advertising agency in London, and I was finalising a government ad campaign that was to be printed nationwide. I wanted to ensure all the elements were aligned properly and I decided, under pressure and in a rush, to use a thin lined box over the ad to help me align the elements. You guessed it — it was sent to print with the box still on the ad! Epic fail.

My lesson? Never rush preparing a design for production.

Also, always use the align palette! We all make mistakes — we just need to learn from each one.

Rebecca Hulme
Full-Time Teacher
Melbourne

As a young designer I made the mistake of showing my client some unfinished digital WIP files of an identity that I was working on. He was absolutely stoked with the outcome, however — alas! — he mistook my draft for a final.

After he approved my direction, I spent hours crafting the final logo. I meticulously corrected all of the beautiful terminals, carefully kerned, delicately positioned, and sent off the final files, only to have my client call two weeks later to ask me where the “other logo” was. Turns out he preferred the outcome sans-finesse!

Lesson learnt. Clients sometimes don’t “imagine” like a creative might.

Anything digitally crafted that I show my clients now is as close to perfect as I can make it, and any concepts will most likely be sketched up by hand. Presenting sketches helps to tell the story without the client jumping to any swift conclusions.

Kenny Phillips
Full-Time Teacher
New York

Almost immediately after graduating I did a freelance project for The Shriver Report. The job was to create a series of 40-something title cards for a photography exhibition being held in Washington D.C.

The name of the person who funded the project had to appear on all of the cards. Instead of copying and pasting the text from the original text document, I typed out some of the text myself when I was designing. Subsequently, the name of the funder was wrong on all 40-something cards! This could have been avoided if I followed best practice for laying out text, and had copied and pasted out of the original document from the copywriter.

Brenton Craig
Part-Time Teacher
Brisbane

While I was working as a junior designer at an ad agency, the studio manager allowed me to do my own freelance work in my downtime. I accidentally purchased a bunch of stock images while being logged into the agency account and not my own. But I didn’t realise I had done so until the accounts guy came up to me a few weeks later and asked what job code to charge the images to. I lied and said a client!

Peter Ogden
Full-Time Teacher
New York

A lot of my first mistakes happened in job interviews. The upside is that now I know what not to say in future interviews!

One memorable moment was presenting my portfolio to a couple of senior designers, and getting to one of my magazine projects and pointing out all that was wrong with it. “Don’t look too closely at the typesetting here…” They said that by drawing that kind of attention to my mistakes, that’s all they were able to focus on.

From that experience on, I’ve only ever pointed out the positives in the work I’m presenting. I’ve been offered a job for every interview since!