Invisible work (is as important as visible)

Designers experience measuring, and rating by its visual part of the portfolio is a widespread practice. But when you think about it, designers (or other creatives) work contain out of so many different layers and only one part of it is actual visuals, and in some cases, there might not even be any visual part at all.

Visible part

As people, who generally care about making word more beautiful place (I hope so) we genuinely care that our work would be appealing from a visual perspective and it is something that we continuously do. We all know that feeling when we are happy and proud of our final work results. It’s rewarding to present beautiful, smart, reliable solutions for the problems we are trying to solve regularly by using our experience and skills.

This visible part of our work is our face and voice since the design was always about visual expression in one or another way. We follow designers and artists for their style, looking for unique or trendy ways to present our ideas.

Ok, but what is the problem here?

The problem is that invisible work still quite often isn’t considered as the part of designers work. And it’s not just by the clients but by the designers themselves. It is very possible that the client would be amazed to see “market research” in the contract and designer would most likely call a full day of managing work and documentation a useless day.

Invisible part

What is that invisible work at all?

It might be all kind of activity that needs to be done that does not involve actually opening the programs and starting to work on the design of the particular project.

In the recent meet-up that I attended, designer and researcher Meryl Vedros presented to us her approach to work. She was telling one of her stories from the time when she used to work for Pentagram and had to create branding for a Thai company. Meryl recalled her frustration while browsing on Pinterest to find pictures for the mood-board that would represent Thailand and It’s culture and later would be used to design the brand. She thought “how can I design a brand for a Thai company if I never been to Thailand, I don’t know what Thailand is about!”. And it sounds like entirely fair point she made.
So, after she left the company and started freelancing, she got her first request to design Cuba coffee brand. And what she did, she asked the client to invite her to Cuba, visit coffee plantations of that company to see how that coffee is made, meet the people who work there, meet the people who would buy that coffee later and find design inspiration.

Research

I know, that would be amazing to travel the world for each project. But my main point here is that research is a big part of designers work that is quite often don’t even considered as designers work.
It might be market research, target audience studies, surveys, mood/storyboards, user flows, user personas, browsing, you name it. A designer can define what is necessary to make the project meet the goals.

User experience design

If you are working as a user experience designer, it’s very possible that you won’t even have your visual portfolio.

Leading

What about leading and supporting other designers on your team? It doesn’t produce any direct results from you, but it helps to deliver results for other designers which is even cooler.

Managing

Replying emails, gathering feedback, discussing, scheduling meetings and then attending them might not be a super fun part but most of the time just necessary and might be very time-consuming.

Learning

Reading Medium.com about “Invisible work” for example or attending a conference is a part of your professional education which can’t be ignored.

Freelance work

Freelancers job quite often is like an agency with one person. It won’t only consist out of designing but will also involve clients search, managing contracts and payments, meetings with the clients, emails and much more. All this stuff might take even more time than the actual work that needs to be done.

Looking for inspiration

You probably would call it random browsing when it comes to looking for examples, matching fonts or colours. Sometimes we spend hours trying to find inspiration in different ways.

There can be much more invisible work examples, and there was just a couple from the top of my mind. I believe that in each and every designer work there is plenty of invisible work which most of the time isn’t addressed.

My personal error

I am no different when it comes to difficulties understanding that when I am replying emails, interacting with other designers or other peers, attending meetings, drawing sketches, thinking about possible solutions, sometimes feel like “oh damn it, I didn’t even have time to do any work today”. And I think this is built in very deep inside. I am working on changing this approach every day, and I understand that it takes time.
I want to encourage you to keep an eye on yourself and try to change that too. The best part that with this approach you can change the way you see not only your work but also work of other creatives and understand that it’s not just the final result that matters but why and how it was achieved.

In short conclusion

Your invisible work is as important as visible. Trust me.