Questions and Answers at Design @ UC Riverside

In February, Design@UCR (design club) invited me and two other designers to come on as panelists via Zoom. We got a chance to talk about ourselves a little bit, as well as field any questions from the attendees.

All in all, it was a great time — great questions, and great responses all around. I thought it would be nice to put up a transcript of our time together — but for sake of brevity, I’m mostly putting in just mine (and even then, I’ve edited it down to make it shorter).

So we’re going to get to meet our panelists.

Hi everyone, it’s nice to join you guys here today. Yeah, I just reached out to [the board members] to see if I can help out. I graduated from Berkeley with a EECS degree—equivalent to a CSE degree here in Riverside. Computer Science and Engineering heavily focused on CS, and for a couple of years out, I did front-end development, so more focus on the UI.

I sound like an old person here now, but back in the day, design was not a thing. So between being an artist or a developer, I chose the one that could potentially make me some money. And it’s CS. So shortly after being a front -end developer, I got sucked into the design aspect. Back then, we use Photoshop for everything. And rather than creating a new environment every single time, I thought, why not just use Photoshop and stick with that? I think my second or third year out of college, I started doing more and more design… and have now been doing that ever since! (But nowadays, we use Figma and not so much Photoshop.)

I’m considered a Motion UX designer. I work at a company called DuckDuckGo. If you don’t know what that is, it’s very much like Google, except that we keep your searches private. And as a Motion UX designer, I just add a lot of different motion elements to things. If we have time afterwards, you guys want to see what I’m working on? I’d love to share some of that with you. So whether it’s icons or things like commercials… just animated. The tool I use for that is After Effects. So I got a whole workflow going for myself between Figma to After Effects. And again, if anyone is interested, I’m really down to show that.

What’s the most rewarding aspect of working as a designer? I’m assuming that’s tying into what you guys said about solving problems and just seeing satisfaction and out of doing that, if anybody wants to speak more on the rewarding aspect of design.

It’s the money. No, I’m just kidding. That’s not the most rewarding thing.

It’s really the ability to tackle problems… the art of thinking clearly about both the problem and the solution. I think the most rewarding part of that is that it just really applies to all of life. That if you just see life as one ginormous design problem and you break it down to different parts. For you guys [in college], maybe right now you’re just finishing finals... But eventually you’re gonna ask: what am I going to do as a career? What is my life purpose beyond just the career? And being able to think clearly…I think it’s one of the most rewarding things that, day in and day out, I get to practice using my mind on different skills, and then that actually applies to all facets of life.

Like, you just treat life as a challenge. How do we solve this? How do I go about tackling this? So it’s taking this ability of thinking clearly at work, and applying it to the rest of life. That’s really rewarding.

What is your day to day life look like in terms of work? If you guys want to speak more on your current job, your job title and its responsibilities?

I’ll address my week-to-week rhythm, because my single day isn’t all that terribly interesting. As a company, we’re at about 180… the way we break it down is that you have your functional team. For example, we have about 15 designers in my functional team. So every Monday we have our own design huddle, just kind of seeing how things are going and then we all have different product roles. So, I hardly ever work with another designer because depending on the project, I’m on a different product and they’re all kind of splintered into different other products. So every Monday, 10:00 a.m. PST, we have that design huddle where at least once a week we can just kind of be together and just talk shop and make fun of the developers. (Har har.)

We also have objective teams, comprised of different members from their own functional teams, that work on various objectives. I won’t go into those details here.. but that’s who we’d interface more with throughout the week.

Aside from specific meetings, we try to work asynchronously — all through Asana (our task manager and main mode of long-term communication). When we need some synchronous meetup, we’d hop onto Zoom.

Do you have any tips for someone who wants to get into this career field with no previous background or experience?

Yeah, funny enough, because I get asked this exact question a lot. I recorded a video and just posted on YouTube [which is now in its own Medium article].

I think design is one of the fields that you could actually get into if you’re willing to put in the work of building out a portfolio. And what I mean by this is if you’re able to find something that excites you, and something that has a clear benefit to what are you trying to show. Like, if you’re going to work for X Company… you’ll need to show them your chops. I think the mistake a lot of people make is they either try doing a side project that’s too big, like, “I’m going to redesign all of Facebook”… or the polar opposite, they redesign something too small. So it is kind of like finding that the right balance.

At the same time, you’d want to do it within a short time span because as college students, you are limited by time. And if you’re like me, you may not have endurance to keep pushing the same designs for more than two weeks. Your perseverance will give out. So you need to find something small enough where you can do it (enjoyably!) and find a clear cut-off, like I’m going to do as best as I can in two weeks.

And finally, you just need to start building out your portfolio and know what exactly you’re trying to portray through your portfolio. Because a lot of the portfolios I see, it just looks like, okay, they try to throw something together, but it’s not clear like what you’re trying to demonstrate…

What would you say was the most impactful thing change that you did in the past to land the career you have now?

The impactful thing or change that we did, is that the question? Yeah. Yeah, I saw that question, and I was trying to isolate it into something bite size, but maybe not so well, this turning to me, too, but because I work with, you know, I also go to like a Church, and I have different designers from different varying levels.

As I deal with designers of varying levels, I think of two qualities that are essential. First, it’s gotta be grit. I think a lot of designers lack is the grit to just be able to reiterate and reiterate and reiterate. And I think the reason why is that for many of them — like it was for me—they were the “better artist” among their friends. So whenever they designed something, their friends are like, “Dude, that’s a great masterpiece!”

But then they go into the career of being a professional designer… and it’s definitely not like that. It’s almost like you’re trying to write an essay to be broadcasted to thousands of people. You are not going to take your English first draft (with no proofreading) and deliver it to the masses. In other words, you’re going to have a lot of feedback. And to be able to take that in and to push yourself, to reiterate on the feedback… what you’re doing is you’re pushing yourself for the best possible design. It’s the difference between your 10th or 20th iteration versus your first try. And that level of feedback between the first try to the 20th try… it’s going to be vastly different.

So, yeah, just on one level, the ability to have the grit, to just kind of push through on your own designs. And related to that —the ability to just take in feedback. Not everybody gives feedback the perfect way. In fact, it’s really hard to give perfect feedback. But as a listener receiving feedback, I think just being able to understand that this person is probably on your side (and not taking things too personally)… that both your goals are the same, because you both want the best outcome, whether it’s product or UI or web page. And so I think the ability to emotionally distance your personal feelings from the feedback that you hear… the ability to ask yourself, “What is the gem of feedback that’s being delivered here?”

And again, hopefully that person who’s giving the feedback is decent. But even if it’s not, just the idea that okay, something about this feedback is gold. Give me the gem. If you just take it like that, I think you will go a long way.

Any last words of advice, tips or resources that you would recommend for people that they can do now while they’re still in school?

Gosh, there are tons of resources out there, but rather than talking about those, I’d like to share about internal qualities that y’all can develop right now.

First: never compare yourself with others. Just know that there’s always going to be someone better than you at something. I’m sure Paul [the other panelist, working at Meta] can like destroy me in design now, and I’m going to be filled with imposter syndrome, you know, like, shoot, what am I doing my life? That’s just not productive.

Instead, you should compare your present self with your past — see how far you’ve progressed! I think that’s a lot more motivating. Plus, you’re able to see that you still have a lot more to learn (which is ok!) without feeling bad or insecure about it. By doing this, you’ll be at peace and still be curious on how to improve your craft.

Second: learning to articulate why you like something (and why you don’t). Some of you guys might be foodies, so you might be doing that with food already. But go through any websites and rather than just saying, man, Craigslist just looks like trash (which it does)… but to articulate why does Craigslist look like trash versus some other site? What are the elements on the Apple website that makes it look so attractive? Speaking of Apple, have you ever noticed that their CTA (call-to-action) button… it’s a really tiny button. Isn’t that interesting? Because a lot of other sites, their CTA buttons are humongous — I don’t know, but maybe Apple is more secure in themselves?

Anyways, point is, you need to learn how to articulate what you see and feel. That’s going to help you as a designer, because if you can’t articulate and express what makes something good, then you’re going to have a hard time. You can even start by doing thiswith your friends, with people in this club… analyze the site, try to break it down, etc. But yeah, what makes this not so good and what are some things that might be improved on?

Well, thank you guys for attending our panel. Thank you to our panelists for the great advice and answering everybody’s questions.