Lateral Movement: How to grow your skillset as a designer by capitalizing on your intuition
I’ve undergone something of a career change recently. I’m still a designer, and still at RocketReach, but an opening presented itself in the marketing arm at RocketReach, and nothing excited me more than the prospect of diving right in.
Here I am, a marketing design generalist, trying to make awesome stuff with new coworkers under new directives. Sure, the prospect has been daunting, and I’d be lying if I said I never doubted myself, but I’m reasonably happy with how things have gone so far. I chalk so much of that up to sticking with the lessons I’ve learned as a designer and capitalizing on my intuition.
I’m specifically going to touch on four lessons in this article. These have held true in product design, marketing design, and everything in between.
Seek Feedback Constantly
One of the factors that makes a product truly great is its designers capability to constantly seek feedback. Whether it is checking your assumptions with user interviews, conferring with stakeholders to ensure you’re fulfilling the product’s end goal, or conducting a round of user testing before the expensive development phase, feedback ensures you’re designing something that your users and your company actually want.
The same is true for marketing, but in a different way. Since I’ve joined the team I’ve made sure to constantly ask for feedback, not only on my output and deliverables, but also on my style of working with others. This allows me to almost create a user persona for my Marketing stakeholders so that in the future I can intuit their needs better, and produce work that caters more to what they’re looking for.
Learn New Techniques
No matter what your particular design discipline is, it’s always important to stay on the cutting edge of the industry. Keeping an eye on new tools, techniques, and industry standards ensures your continued relevance to your new team. It also helps to bring something new to the table that maybe they haven’t seen before, which is good for the entire team.
Find blogs that are relevant to your area of design. Look for organizations, medium articles, tutorials, or conferences that focus on your area of expertise.
Steal From the Best (Not Just Those Around You)
I did a full writeup of this concept in another article, which I’ll link here. The gist of it is that you have a whole world of design to take inspiration from, and so taking inspiration only from the immediate sources closes off potentially valuable new ideas you could bring to your industry.
A specific example here is that as a motion graphics designer, I’m always on the lookout for new transition and motion ideas. As a person who consumes a reasonable amount of media, there’s such a variety of different styles I can draw from. Sometimes I’ll see a really cool transition in a candy commercial, or in the corner of the screen on a football game broadcast, and I’ll just attempt to recreate that specific easing and timing in After Effects. Then I’ve got a wider set of options in my toolkit when it comes to future work projects.
Wasting time recreating the same things over and over again benefits no one.
Template, Template, Template
I’ve found speed to be of the essence when it comes to marketing. As a result, I find it extremely useful to template your work whenever you can. Modern design implements like Figma and After Effects offer components and precompositions respectively to allow you to build templates that you can work off of later. By building your initial templates to scale in the future, you not only speed up your own workflow, but you also make it easier for another designer to join the team and onboard with a set of functional templates right off the bat. Design debt in marketing may not manifest the same way it does in UX, but wasting time recreating the same things over and over again benefits no one.
Conclusion
I’m really thankful for my ‘second career’ as a marketing designer. It’s allowed me to experiment with a variety of techniques and learn new skills. I never thought I’d be the guy at the company event toting around a camera and microphone setup, but here I am.
I hope to shed more light on how those skills are coming along in upcoming articles.
