How an MFA in Poetry Prepared Me for a Career in UX Design
For many, a postgraduate degree in poetry is a mystery.
After finding out why I was in Baltimore, strangers would often ask, “An MFA in Poetry? What does that even entail?”
Workshops, mostly. Each week the seven other poets in my cohort and I would write and present a first draft of a poem. For two hours, we took turns giving and receiving feedback, compiling what we heard from one another into a second, third, or fourth draft.
Occasionally, we’d bring a later draft of the same poem a few weeks or even a semester later. Often, it was unrecognizable.
That’s because one of the first things you learn in creative writing is to kill your darlings.
It sounds cruel–and in some ways, it is. A first draft can feel like gold, like it poured from somewhere inside you, almost ethereal, untouched.
Unable to wait, I found myself texting screenshots of poems I’d written to my closest friends in the program.
Look, I’d insist, this is the best thing I’ll ever write.
The problem with writing the best thing you’ll ever write is that you still have to revise. If you fall in love with a line of a poem you’ve written, you must also understand that someday, after a dozen drafts, that may be the one line that doesn’t work anymore.
A poem can outgrow its best lines just like a design can outgrow an early prototype’s best features.
And when that outgrowing occurs, you have to be ready to kill your darlings.
Of course, what we were doing was creative writing’s version of iterating. Talking to a friend after completing my first start-to-finish UX project, I expressed frustration at returning, once again, to hating my portfolio website’s design.
You have to remember, she said, it’s an iterative process. You’ll probably rework it one hundred more times as you learn.
It clicked for me, then, what poetry and design have in common. It was something I’d spent ten years learning: that getting too attached to the present means you won’t make room for the future.
I want to share an example of killing your darlings in the design process. This was the landing page for my portfolio website:
When you hovered over any of the files, they flipped open like the first one shows. I drew these files by hand, which took a lot of time, and inspired me to add more hand-drawn elements to my site.
After talking to a friend and mentor, he suggested the landing page was unnecessary — that the About page could also serve as the landing. I disagreed, dug my heels in, and defended my file folder drawings as essential to my personal brand. They had inspired the design of the entire site! And they were interactive!
A week or so later, I took a screenshot of the landing page — my darling — then deleted it. Now, my portfolio site opens to the about page, like my friend suggested:
This is just one example of what killing your darlings might look like in design — or how you may become attached to features which, in one iteration, seemed essential.
There are other things I learned in my MFA that come to mind during the design process–how to separate your ego from your work, how to sort through feedback to find what’s useful, the importance of consuming what your peers create, the beauty of white space.
But the most important thing — the thing we all have to keep in mind, have to keep on a Post-It note above our desks — is to kill your darlings.
Or, do what I do, and save a screenshot of your darlings to a desktop folder, a darlings graveyard, where they’ll stay until you forget how proud you were to have created them.
