Why Design?

Whether you’re ready to make the big decision of where you will spend your life buckled up in a dorm room or you’re already there and looking forward to pulling all-nighters during finals week, trying to figure out what you want to do with the rest of your life can be stressful. Making the right decision sooner than later can have a big impact on the direction and success of your career. If you find your imagination constantly filling with crazy ideas about the next big thing, or you’re obsessed about visual pixel-perfection, then hopefully this will help you decide if design is right for you.

Qualities of Designers

It’s important to understand that different people are built for different things. Some people spend their day patiently assisting in a pediatric ICU providing around-the-clock care for newborns, while others are given task-by-task direction assembling automobiles in a factory setting. Knowing what your strengths are and what you love doing can help inform this decision.

So, what does it take to be a designer? Here are some common qualities of my fellow designers and peers:

• Love and appreciate typography
• Geek out when tech companies release new products
• Show excitement to share the poster they just finished screen printing
• Tell others about a unique interaction pattern in a mobile app that makes them happy for the rest of the day
• Enjoy the tedious and eye-straining work of moving millions of pixels around over and over again to perfection
• Be inspired by other people’s designs to make their own better
• Work independently while being given little or no direction
• Understand the usefulness of constructive criticism and design critiques, without being defensive of their decisions
• Communicate effectively with others without letting emotions get in the way when opinions differ
• Perfect your designs over time through feedback and iteration
• Learn to design faster
• Take bigger risks and put yourself out there
• Stand up and lead conversations
• Observe how people interact with the world
• Obsess over visual balance, color, repetition, unity, rhythm, and space
• Communicate your ideas and designs effectively to non-designers

My personal experience of becoming a Product Designer at Facebook was driven largely by understanding specific strengths of other successful designers by observing their techniques and how they react in certain situations. I found the people that were really talented and compared their actions to my own, in turn trying to make myself better.

Types of Designers

Many different design buzzwords get thrown around, often times referring to the same job type, such as: product designer, UX designer, UI designer, interaction designer, visual designer, human-computer interaction (HCI), and more. They all technically have their specific differences, but to be really good and successful as a designer, you need to understand they all encapsulate the same qualities; you can’t have one without the other. The size, shape, and color of a visual design completely affects how one may interact with it, where having a good understanding of human-computer interaction can affect the overall experience of how one’s mind assumes the actions that can be taken on a particular user interface. They are all so inter-connected that the likelihood of success you’ll have with your product is much greater the more well-rounded you are. You don’t need to know how to code, but at a minimum you will want to understand it so working with your engineers is much more efficient. Understanding good prototyping software provides a huge benefit as well.

As mobile continues to take the world by storm, there is still a massive market and opportunity right now to make amazing experiences. Mobile device sales have not even come close to hitting their peak yet, but now excitement is being built into wearables and peripherals. Although I’m not fully convinced this is the next revolution as mobile phones were, there are definitely some magical moments that will be made. There are a few different avenues a designer can take, each tuning their focus on work a little bit differently:

• Independent — You are your own boss, working on your own app idea or getting freelance clients. There’s more freedom, but finances can get tight as they are not regularly guaranteed.
• Start-up — High risk, high reward. There’s a huge potential to making a ground-breaking product, which in turn can sell or IPO making your shares in the company very valuable. Although, if sleeping under your desk, never being able to move fast enough, or failure can be worrisome to you, think twice.
• Agency — You’re working for your clients and seemingly never moving fast enough to get work in and back out the door. You’re doing what your creative director tells you to, and you’re likely sleeping under your desk again and underpaid. But when you see your final product on TV at night, it’s a great feeling.
• Corporate — You may get the opportunity to design for over 1 billion people everyday. Learning how to dance around the political discussions and convince people why ideas are good can be tricky, but the impact you can have is huge while leveraging that insane budget. To me, the tech industry is by far the most passionate, intriguing, and rewarding financially and opportunistically.

Design Community

Unlike many industries, the design and tech industry has a strong sense of camaraderie. We are very passionate about what we do, to the point where we don’t really care whether it’s Tuesday or Friday, we just want to keep working on what we’re doing. We just zip up our hoodies and keep rocking to better our craft.

As you consider joining our community of people who make life changing products and other immersive experiences, know that you have the opportunity to influence billions of people’s daily lives. You can create better communication products, turn standard homes into smart homes, and even create the tool that will influence the political movement and election outcome of an entire country. The opportunity to make a footprint on the world is up to you.

I’ll leave you with a few more tidbits about the stereotypical designer:

• We love to live and work in a open and fun culture
• We love to communicate using stickers instead of words
• We love to be inspired
• We love to share what we’re working on
• We love to get together to have drinks
• We love to work through the wee hours of the night
• We love to drink great coffee
• We love to take really, really good photos

Brady Voss
Product Designer at Facebook
https://www.facebook.com/bvossss