👍🏼 Between Good and Great Designers

• There are different kinds of great designers: the speaker/writer/thought leader kind, and then there’re the invisible ones who do great work in behind but no one’s ever heard of them
• To be this invisible type of great designer: multiply skill set — write something, speak, share, do workshops
• Educate — your job as a designer is to educate the team about typography, empathy, culture & art, and everything
• Then people can have better conversations with business & engineers, then people will start asking how do they feel about emojis? Comic Sans? This line-height with that line-length? That font pairing? Those kinds of stuff

When you can make everyone talk just about design all day, isn’t that a great place to be?

• Be super vulnerable & open for feedback
• Know how to manage up & down, just try to be manager & see how things go, be project lead & assign things to people

Know and feel that being suck at something is okay

Force yourself to do something you suck at & you’ll be slightly better

• Find what you’re really really passionate about and do it, focus on 1–2 things you’re good at, and be better at it
• Find the unique intersection of your skills for example, UX of fashion, HCI design historian, font engineering, etc
• Bring people and great stories from your other backgrounds into UX, talk about them in the context of UX or whatever you do
• It also kinda happens naturally as the team grows bigger
• Being a speaker is tough & you’ll be horrible at it but it’s okay, everyone was terrible at their first speakings
• Trust yourself a bit more, ignore the infamous imposter syndrome

The feeling that you’re not never gonna be great — I think it’s good to feel just like that — I wish you’ll never be great, lol, so you can always improve

• Look for someone who seems to care, and can grow & learn together or find a competitor
• Talk to previous bosses, ask for feedback on career direction, what you’re good at, bad at
• Go to meetups, UX nights, Type Thursdays, because that’s where designers go to share & learn

with Marcin Wichary & Dustin Senos