Things I wish I knew about design career
I remember these early days when I started my design career nearly a decade ago full of uncertainty and discomfort. I remember looking through a lot of unbelievably creative stuff on Behance and feeling such a looser. I would sit and torture myself with judging thoughts of not being able to make anything decent. And I think this is more true for people who decide to pursue the design career on their own, as a self-thought designer than for the one with the classical path (if there is such thing these days). I would look at these amazing examples of 10 best something logos, and 20 best another thing logos and I would think, these designers musth just have it. I would feel a lot of doubt in these first years of my career and I would feel like I was cheating everyone, including myself.
If only I knew at that time the things I know now, I would have used that time differently. And this is why I want to share few things I wish I knew about design career and design process with someone who might be in a similar situation.
There is no such thing as talent
When you look at these amazing people up in their design careers or those designers who are doing amazing works and living the times of their lives, people tend to give everything to talent. Oh, she is just a very talented person. It was given to her. And I would get annoyed by this.
The truth is, there is no such thing as talent. It’s just a lot of hours and hours of hard work, of hustle and sweat. People tend to forget to look a bit deeper under the hood and try to understand how much does it take to become that person. You can take the most “untalented” person, give him motivation and leave him practice and do the job day in and day out every day for a decade or so and you will see how “talented” he will become. Which leads me to another point.
What matters is the work you put every day
I like to believe that everyone of us has an idol, a hero who amazes us, who inspires us. I also tend to believe that these qualities that we see in these designers, artist or photographers we have ourselves, or at least we have a huge potential to gain. If you see these qualities, you must have them in you, because you do identify them in others.
So my advice if you want to get to a place of your dreams, or if you want to be like a person you admire what matters is the work, the hours you put in every single day, no matter the circumstances. What you need to do is to analyze your design heroes, look at what skills they have, look at what things they do every single day, and just repeat them yourself. Repeat these steps every single day, every day. The more you try, the more you practice, the better you will become. There is this famous saying “The journey, Not the destination matters…” and for many years I could not fully understand it until recent years it suddenly just made sense. If you’re not willing to sit by your computer every single day and try to create that interesting way to represent a calendar UI and come back to your computer tomorrow and repeat it, if this sounds scary to you, then you do need to reconsider if this is the right area for you.
Choose one area to develop yourself — or something close for that matter
I remember these early days when I was so incredibly excited to try and learn everything in digital design. I spread myself through a lot of different design areas going from print design to web design to video to 3D graphics. I was so amazed by all these things and I think I saw them as a challenge for myself. I just needed to know them all, to learn them all. It was just impossible to force myself and stay with one field in these early years. I wanted to “keep my options open” as people say and I would sit every day and learn a thing from one area, and then another thing from another area. I could not focus and I could not choose. While I think that being open and experimenting with things is incredibly important, especially in the early stage, I wish I have picked that one field a bit sooner and focused on it a bit more. While I still struggle to pick one thing at a time these days, I did manage to scope a lot of things out. Maybe one day I will manage to get to the “one and only”, who knows.
Good skills take time
I remember a year ago I was getting lost online, going through lot’s of great designer works and at some point I was trying to identify the patterns between them. The thing I have noticed was good drawing skills. Since I never had a chance to go to an art school and learn the drawing skills, I have identified this as a challenge to myself. “Learn to draw, Dovile” I would say to myself. I can’t remember exactly how I ended up with water colour as I have tried many different techniques, but I know that I was always struggling with good colour combinations, so I thought I would do watercolour. And watercolour is all about the colour blending and colour combinations working together or contrasting each other well. I thought it would help me to become a better designer. Now I’ve been doing it for almost a year and one lesson that I know for sure — good skills take time. Time not only master how the tool works but time to master the proportions and time to master the ideas for the drawings. And I believe the same can be applied to the design skills. Being able to create a good logo, that feels intuitive and feels very thoughtful takes time. Being able to create a very good animation that feels life-like and so amazingly cool (as one of my design heroes Eran Mendel) takes a lot of time.
So don’t beat yourself if something did not end up being as you wished, just sit down and try again. As at the end of the day what matters is the work you put in every single day to get from where you are to where you want to be.
