When hiring designers, look for their worst projects

I was having a conversation the other day with Aveejeet Palit, who heads research at Moonraft. We got talking about the difficulty involving hiring good designers. In a way what he was implying was that good designers, when asked in a interview to show their best work, often scramble through their portfolio, almost gazing past some terrible work — even murmuring, “oh that was horrible” — and finally cough up their best. Which is mostly, as Palit pointed out, their personal projects, something he was very interested in seeing to be able to gauge their skills.

But the truth of the matter is, design happens only when there is a constraint. You need it, so you can ‘design’ your way out of it. It happens when you are limited in your ability to go wild and still be able to pull it off. It’s when you are able to dream of next level interactions but hold them back because you know your target audience. It’s when you intentionally make bad looking visuals as per the business objective so people focus on what’s important. It’s when you are told, “that’s great, but we don’t have the time or the budget for it”.

That’s what Designers do: they design ‘a solution’ for ‘a problem’. Personal projects that designers are usually the most proud of are actually what Artists do. They express themselves creatively to showcase a perspective: self expression, without constraint. Personal projects are works of art, but therefore have no design-level attention. That’s art, not design.

You could use this very idea, therefore, to just filter out the good ones from the not-so-good ones. If asked to show their best work, if they more often than not showcase personal projects you probably know what that means.

Effectively a good designer might always be willing to showcase a bad project as their best work, because they are very well aware of the constraints and limitations they had. A good designer knows how to sell their design with logic and understanding. A good designer listens and empathises with the business goal. A good designer knows how to write a good story on a bad project. A good designer understands and manages expectation.

A bad project helps them shape those things. The fine line that separates the average designers from the good or even awesome ones are the number of bad projects they’ve been through. Those awesome designers have worked on a lot of terrible projects, because they took a great round of beating and teeth grinding on the path to learning. They become more rounded from the pride they take in learning from them. It’s what makes them who they are; better than the rest. Bad projects, make good work that make awesome designers.