How to become a designer
A story of how a 13 year long chain of making random choices in life made sense at last. A story about becoming something.
The most frequent things Quora directs my way, are questions about how to quickly become a good illustrator, designer, hacker, ux-thing, whatever. The only denominator is that it has to happen fast.
Considering yourself to be good at something is hard. For a while now, people around me have been giving me the sense I’m not totally off, so I’ve started taking to it. Yes, I can design things, and it’s also not a completely bizarre experience for the users either. There — I said it. I’ve become a designer.
But it sure as hell didn’t happen overnight.
13 years ago
It all starts with a lie
In the glorious year 2000, the boss of my very boring job asked me “Hey Rasmus, you can do websites, right?” (All in his head, confusing me with someone else, I guess). Answering the helpdesk phone of a backroom-driven ISP in a city where I didn’t know anyone but my girlfriend, I was okay with lying.
Yeah. I’ll do the company website.
I recall the following night as being very long. I neither knew the webdesign nor the design community which could’ve given me any advice. I basically didn’t know where to start. A trial version of Dreamweaver and looking through the huge, triangular, Adobe-style ‘Get Started’ folder was what I had. I got the site done in a couple of days (I was very embarrassed that it took so long), and it was the most fucked up mashup of off-the-shelf Flash buttons, jpgs with hotspots and text as images. Yes, text as images — how else would I apply dropshadow to all the text? - css wasn’t exactly up to snuff at the time.
It worked, he was happy. He thought some of it looked weird, but I obviously knew what I was doing, so he went back to crafting crooked business setups again.
Me? I kept on lying.
The first startup
Half a year later, I wasn’t answering phones anymore, but working as a designer in a cute little 2-man operation called Net4You. (Remember 2000? That was what companies were actually called. Omitting vowels came a couple of years later). We built e-commerce sites for small and medium sized businesses based on the Actinic platform. The other guy was buying bundles of licenses cheap, I was skinning it, we sold it expensive. Simple model, and of course I still didn’t have a clue what
I was building shopping experiences.
Considering the anxiety users are facing now pulling out their credit card, in 2000 it must have been insane. User tests? Naah.. I didn’t even know what checkout-flow meant. And I was doing two sites a week. Not thinking, just hacking.
I remember my boss being really impressed with me — within the first month of some new Actinic release, I was the top poster at Actinic’s knowledge base forum. He thought I was a really engaged young man. I just needed some fucking help. I’d just encountered php, and still only pretending to understand html, it wasn’t a pleasant experience. But well, fake it ‘til you make it was how I got by. And I did get by.
Getting acquainted with Bulgaria and Save For Web...
My boss being a real mercenary business-hacker (Serial entrepeneur, but without heart. I don’t know if there’s a term for it), he saw some potential in Bulgaria. He’d seen the boom in the Polish economy after their entry into the European Union and with Bulgaria looking to make the same move within the next couple of years he was desperate to start a business there. Any business!
This e-commerce setup seemed real smart to him, and I was obviously a real talent, so he sent me there to start the branch in Sofia. He’d already hired a webdesigner, but I was to train her. She was 10 years older than me, and had her own website. She did call it her “portfolio”, though and was obviously mistaking photography with webdesign. I’d do just fine.
It was a real crammed office in Sofia, the dirtiest city I’ve ever seen. Nelly Borgova was an experienced webdesigner, and I was to teach her things. It can’t have taken her more than a couple of hours to figure me out, but she was just happy to have a job for a Western European entrepeneur — this was her chance out of a sticky job situation in Sofia (The real estate market was already booming but the wages were not following suit. She and her husband both had full-time jobs, yet they shared a 3-room apartment with another couple).
Wow, you really spend a lot of time saving images, huh?
I remember this situation very specifically. I had seen the “Save for web and devices…” dialog before, but never put much thought to why it was there. It looked very confusing. Nelly was handpicking colors for every little image file she saved. It took forever. So, she spent the afternoon talking to me about optimizing websites. Smiling sympathetically with the you have so much to learn look on her face. Things started becoming real.
I did what I had set out to do, and shortly after I left Bulgaria. I learned that honesty and asking other designers for help would accellerate learning in a way I had never imagined. More than pretending did. I also learned I actually had something to offer.
I started out as a freelancer and moved back to my hometown Copenhagen.
9 years ago
I didn’t get into the school I wanted to. Was ready to abandon ship. Turned out I landed just where I needed to.
I can’t even remember the application I made for the first application round to The Royal Danish Academy of Design — but I remember the second round being 2 full days of drawing. I had never held a pencil in my hand for other than writing purposes. I still have a little lump on my finger from where my pencil rested for those two full days. True story.
I waited a month for the answer. I wasn’t among the 10% that got a seat. My ever-wonderful girlfriend, Rikke pushed me to enter a two-year foundation webdesign course instead. Seemed subpar — I knew where I wanted to be, and didn’t consider any other options. The next two years were very defining for me. More than I knew at the time.
The school wasn’t that good, in days we skimmed over subjects you could spend a lifetime pursuing. It was frustrating. But being in a room with 30 people trying to solve the same problem as me was groundbreaking. Suddenly, I could start comparing my skills to other peoples. Get inspired. Try things out for the sake of trying. Present my work. Get butchered in group presentation sessions.
The good thing that this school did, was to not care for the artistic side of things, it was all about being practical. Lecturing about html, css, Actionscript, design theory, design history, marketing stuff — all in a dry, practical manner, a lot of reading, not all that much reflection. No art, no fancy stuff. Just old-school lecturing and building things. Always wanting to do my best, I followed the courses, read the curriculum, and handed in my assignments. One of the old teachers there — a Jimi Hendrix-loving architect — kept lecturing us:
“If you don’t know the rules, you can’t break them right”. “How do you know what you’re doing is right, if you haven’t failed yet?”.
I was the age where education is something you attend, but what’s inside you is really what counts. I didn’t pay much attention, I wanted to create things. Create things that was better than what the teachers could tell me. Luckily these things stuck in my head, today they’re mantras for me, as should they be to any designer.
Same old teacher was also the one that got me an internship at the notorious Bauhaus in Dessau, Germany. Spent five months with architects doing graphic design support for a huge Urban Redevelopment Program. Main takeaway was not understanding the form follows function paradigm, but how to navigate around it, take it in with the critical mind you should have to any design theory you’re lectured with.
7 years ago
Arkena, the first real job
Not being able to keep up the networking activity required to keep my freelancing business afloat, I had to take on a student job at a startup called Arkena. No idea what I ventured into at the time, I just imagined if I can do it in Photoshop, I can do whatever these people want me to do.
Arkena is a danish Saas-business providing a lot of large Danish corporations with a video platform. Youtube for companies if you will. My initial job was skinning the platforms, tailoring the solutions to the different brand identities we were working with.
I think I worked with every major brand in Denmark and it was awesome. The requirements were high, and there was an endless pool of fun assignments.
UI-designer in the making
I was working intensely with the video player, and apart from the basic controls of starting and stopping a stream, there was a whole layer of meta-information and meta-controls needing to be displayed, yet not displayed. I was leaving the well-known domain of webdesign, and venturing into something else. Something more specific, something that felt way harder.
The user needs to see all the actions available, but the user needs to have undivided attention to the content, no distractions whatsoever.
Sounds familiar?
Slowly I got an understanding of users behavior and balancing that vs clients needs — and my gut-feeling grew stronger. I began challenging the status quo. Not giving a damn about legacy decisions. If something didn’t feel right, I would challenge it. Designs, tech, workflows, whatever. I was turning into a real little asshole.
Designing for democracy
Yeah, that’s maybe having too high thoughts about myself, but suddenly in all the madness of big corporate clients we got a gig for the Danish Parliament — creating an online tv platform enabling the public to see every meeting taking place in our government live, seeing past meetings, even a ´ little online editing suite where journalists and the like would be able to cut out the exact conversation they needed for their article, and build an embeddable player to take with them.
The requirements were straightforward, but this specific job was driven by such enthusiasm from all sides, and as I remember it, an insanely tight budget. It invovled everything from people crawling under the wooden floors of the parliament cabling up the machines that was to run this thing, to the product team engineering a dead-simple, extremely flexible player framework. It was one of those projects where all the right solutions came along because we had so little time. The exact right amount of pressure (a bit too much) combined with the exact right time constraint (way too little time) and the vivid enthusiasm from everyone involved made us build all the right solutions.
And for fucks sake, it mattered! That was key for me here. We were building something for the people. That always felt like the real objective, this was what made us work late nights and build great things. That’s how you always want to work, but with a 10-year old company and a room full of dads, that’s just not always how reality is, is it?
Educate, schmeducate
At the same time my second application run for The Royal Danish Academy of Design was successful and I began studying at their Interaction Design programme.
It wasn’t all that. In fact the programme was a huge disappointment. Of 500 students, only a handful seemed genuinely interested in challenging the digital world of design. And the professors seemed to have the same take on digital design I’d had five years prior — treating it like any other design process, only this time on a screen. I spent most of the time pursuing more artistic ventures with Arduino-based visualization things, real human interaction stuff — a trip to Tulln to build Tagtools — such things. I got into what I thought was the finest of schools, with an expensive mac and a wacom under my arm. And what I enjoyed most was soldering. (Apart from what I expect to be life-long friends, a huge network, and lots of beers). But education-wise, I was disappointed.
After two years in school I caved in and accepted an offer from Arkena as a full-time employee. Shortly after however, Arkena was acquired with the result being the design decisions moving further away from me, when I was just getting to a point where I was looking for more influence.
4 years ago
Issuu, changing the world of publishing.
And me.
Looking for something else to fill the gap after Arkena, I was looking for jobs the same places as my friends; in agencies. I really wanted to work with Designit, they were addressing design from an angle that resembled the good parts of my education — researching, prototyping, iterative design.
I didn’t really understand what Issuu was doing, or what it would mean to be working there. But their job-ad was good, and the site describing the place sounded like something out of a dream. An intensive series of interviews went by, and on a beautiful day in May I started a job that would truly change my professional life.
50 million users (pfft! At the time, we scaled that thing madly), a horde of developers, and the best and most terrifying designer I had encountered.
Ruben
Of the five original founders of Issuu, Ruben had been in charge of the user experience from day 1, in a startup that had design and user experience as the deciding factor in every discussion. And he basically did everything by himself. He’s the kind of guy that believes so much in his own skills and gut feelings it gets annoying. What made it downright obnoxious was that the things he did was just that good. So good you wouldn’t question process or decisions much. Shit was just tight. But holy mother of all, I learned so much working with this dude. Things weren’t random, he wasn’t lucky, he is good, thorough and never, ever satisfied. I’ve heard people on stage attributing one certain character that changed them, brought them to the next level.
If I ever get to stand on a stage, I’ll talk about Ruben.
The main undertaking during my time at Issuu was the transformation from Issuu as a tool to the consumption platform it is today. It was massive. Turning the whole site upside down, building new flows, setting up communication platforms. In the middle of this process Issuu acquired Magma and we were joined by Sebastian Stockmarr, half a decade younger than me, way more experienced. Already a startup under his belt and loads of great projects in the making. Little a-hole. Sebastian played a huge part in organizing our effort, and in the period of five months where we all worked together — my oh my. I’ll always look back on that period. If you ever were to talk about a dream team, that was it.
I’ll be forever thankful for working that closely with two great guys so damn talented.
Wish I’d encountered this world earlier
This tale (that is ending soon, don’t worry) hasn’t had a single regret in it so far, but here’s one; I’m genuinely sad I didn’t learn of this world earlier. Silicon Valley, tech startups, San Francisco — these things. I just wasn’t aware of it, and now with a couple of beautiful kids, owning a flat — the decision is just not that easy. Loads of people around me don’t see my situation as a hinderance, but basically I guess it’s just not that important to me. Not anymore at least. Work adventures are easiest handled when you don’t have a bunch of people outside the office that you’d rather hang out with.
I would just have liked to try it, that’s all.
Leaving Issuu
Three years after I joined Issuu, the last of the founders had left, a new management team joined us based out of Palo Alto, times were changing. At the time we were just two designers, and after the long haul of relaunching Issuu I just wasn’t up for the rebuilding of a (now Transatlantic) design team. New great people were coming in, it seemed like the right time to move on, and luckily I was offered an opportunity to join another exciting company, Podio.
I was really sad to leave the people, the company and the industry. There are so many unsovled topics in the world of publishing, especially with magazines. Issuu marches on, and I’m still following them closely to see what new cool things emerges from that place.
4 months ago
Podio, changing the way the world works.
If you’re a designer in Copenhagen, Podio is just one of these companies you know about. From parties, design communities, meetups, open source projects, blogs — they have a real strong presence to them. I accredit it largely to a very engaged bunch of employees and the founders team still hanging around, making the noise they can and having very strong voices in the startup community here.
I’d been following the doings and doodles of Pete Lacey for quite some time, and with the prospects Podio (and Citrix as a whole) are facing in the coming years (yes, that’s jobs right there) it wasn’t a very hard sell, and I’m thrilled and honored to be part of this. The design team is huge and I’m surrounded by people excelling in movie effects, animation, illustration, graphic design, mobile design, etc. There’s always someone to turn to for discussing things, getting a new angle on my work and some new skills under my belt.
Just the other day I was discussing with Pete how I couldn’t rate any of my personal goals 100% achieved, and we laughed about it, walked back to our desks. Because no designers or developers I know would ever label anything 100% finished. Like having a hard time stating you’re actually good at something, labeling yourself as 100% whatever is hard. But why is that? I guess achieving 100% of something isn’t a success, it’s just acknowledging you couldn’t have taken this any further. Reaching 100% is just giving up.
The end
