Steal Stuff, Be Wasteful, and Do Your Own Thing.
The only way to make design clients happy.
Graphic design skills are timeless, but yours will be obsolete in 6 months.
Yeah, I’m talking to you. Isn’t that great, contradictory, frustrating news?
The worst part is that you probably already knew this. The design industry, its standards and requirements, and its top players are churning like category 5 rapids. Being a designer, especially if you strive to stay current while dragging along c-level execs and sales reps in your company, is a wild ride. The lows are not for the faint of heart, but the highs are like…actual highs… Which is pretty fun.
In the medical world, doctors and nurses are required to participate in continuing medical education to retain their licenses. They must be aware of the scientific community’s ever-expanding knowledge of the human body, of what drugs and treatment plans are available on the market, and even how their years of practice have affected their patients long-term.
As a designer, it’s your responsibility to research trends, learn new skills, and incorporate what you know into your work. Perhaps you don’t have lives in your hands as you work, but you do have genuine responsibilities.
As you develop your company’s market-facing communications, your work has a direct result on customer purchasing decisions. In a sense, you are on the front lines of the bloody relationship between consumers and stakeholders. If you’ve ever worked with C-levels in a multi-million dollar business, you know just how fierce the battle can be.
Whether you’re just entering the design world with a new degree, or you’re transitioning careers, there are several things you can do to keep your skills sharp, to experiment with and learn to recognize new trends, and to trickle new practices into your professional work, which will almost always feel like its behind the curve.
1. Steal Stuff
Just to demonstrate how committed I am to this first point, I’ll admit that this wasn’t my idea. It probably wasn’t Austin Kleon’s idea, but he wrote a great book about it,so I’ll give him credit here. The basic premise? Nothing is new under the sun.
As a designer in the professional world, your high-level job description is not that you’re an artist.
Instead, you are a communications specialist. And, more specifically, your job is to create pictures that make other people want to give your company money. If you want to be an artist, scroll down to step three. But at your job, you use your artistic skills to create visual assets that sell products.
So, now you’re a salesperson on a mission to attract attention to your product. Yippee! Design school was SO worth it…
Why does that matter? Because it makes you free to utilize any and every resource you have available to you to get your job done. And my oh my, are there a lot of resources:
- Dribbble
- Behance
- The Design Blog
- Designspiration
- Your Favorite Magazine
- Every Book Store
- AIGA
- Your friend’s Insta
- Everyone Else’s Insta
Ad infinitum
Take time every day to go on a stealing spree. That’s right — everything you can grab. Search it, save it, bookmark it, and re-create it.
If you read any blog or book about writing skills, you’ll notice one consistent piece of advice — reading a lot makes you a better writer. Why? Because you learn what works. You see, clear as day, what you need to do to become better, to reach your market, to drive the story.
It’s no different in design.
And the best part is everyone else is doing it. Including the people who are the top influencers in each one of those resources I’ve listed above. With a few exceptions like the people who make their livings by coming up with radically creative new stuff for their blogs (the 1% of the 1% of successful design influencers), every designer is doing this.
But that doesn’t fulfill the expectation that you push yourself to learn new skills and understand new trends, does it? No, it doesn’t. So here’s where the next steps come in.
2. Be Wasteful
I will move on, in the next section, to what you should be doing with your own personal time to make yourself a leading-edge designer. For now, we’re still focused on your 9–5’er. Want to get better at design while you’re being paid to do so, and get thanked for it every time?
Be wasteful.
Yep, you read that right. Let’s unpack it.
I used to be part of a team who worked closely with a client who had incredibly predictable design tastes. He was a marketing executive at a large company and he was, to put it lightly, a bit less than flexible. You know who I’m talking about.
As the design team developed concepts for web, print, and digital advertising, we could almost always pinpoint which designs our executive would favor. After a while, we were able to design to meet his fancy. If we needed to, we could do just that to move a project down the line more quickly. The problem? That’s a crazy fast way to kill innovation.
The solution, therefore, was to be intentionally wasteful. The design team would work on multiple concepts for every project. We would push boundaries, create surprises, and advocate for small changes. Undoubtedly, this took time and resources. But they were resources that the company had, and time we could afford.
The result? A natural balance arose. Among the radical, slightly new, and conservative concepts, we created tension and discussion. At times, it was clear that our new ideas solved a problem along the sales funnel that made the company’s communication more efficient.
And at other times, it was clear that our exec was in his role for a good reason; he understood where the company had come from and what the concrete value propositions and market differentiators were for our industry.
As you’ll experience through this process, there are a lot of emotions involved. You get excited about new ideas and frustrated with team-members who want to move slowly. When it seems like you could sprint forward and get to the next mile marker, the decision-makers choose to walk. And you end up throwing away 75% of your revolutionary ideas. Ouch.
Or, maybe not.
Here’s a quick quiz: If you’re not “throwing away” 75% of your design ideas, ask yourself 2 questions:
1. Am I Michael Beirut? (If yes, wow… Hi!)
2. Am I trying new things every day?
If yes, you probably are tossing a HUGE amount of your work. You get it.
If no, it’s time to play more, conceptualize more, and present more options for every assignment.
As you can see, I’m not asking you to be wasteful in the strictest sense of the term. Make great use of the time you’re paid for and steward your employer’s and clients’ resources well. Or you’ll get fired.
Instead, always push the boundaries, try new ideas, and push your team forward. You’ll find a balance naturally.
3. Do Your Own Thing
Finally, if you take none of the advice above, do this.
At all times, keep a personal project going on the side. This is your opportunity to push your skills, experiment with trends, and contribute to the community of influencers. Regardless of whether your passion is branding, illustration, web design, UX, or kittens, you must set aside personal time (read: any time off the clock) to work on projects that excite you.
Even if you can only make time for one project per month, those are 12 projects per year where you get to be commissioner, creative director, artist, and final approval committee. Sounds fun to me. And it is. This takes discipline, but I can assure you that the payout is incredibly rewarding.
As you research and conceptualize in steps one and two above, make a point to save the projects that inspire you. If you see a new illustration skill that you’d like to learn or a web concept that you think is indicative of the future of web design, save them! Then intentionally schedule time to work them out in your own concepts and to post them on your own instagram or bechance portfolio.
Or, set a personal goal for yourself. Maybe you want to get invited to Dribbble? Start to develop an identity for your personal work and put it out there. Begin looking for designers with invites to share and make a schedule to send out your portfolio.
Whatever it is that you want to do, be sure to do your own thing. This will serve you in several ways.
First, it’s cathartic. Did you love a concept that you developed for a client that got rejected? Take it home and build it out to completion. You might not be able to use this one for your portfolio, but you’ll get the benefit of completing something that’s meaningful to you.
Next, developing your own portfolio and experimenting with new trends will help you to understand how the design industry changes. When you do this for even just a year or two, you can look back at your experimental projects and seeing which concepts you were right about.
I can remember web concepts that I was fully convinced were the future of web design that are now obsolete. And I can also remember incorporating certain elements and changes that have now caught on. The personal research is priceless.
Finally, developing your own skills will have a trickle effect back to your job. When you experiment with new ideas in your personal work, especially if you succeed with them, you’ll have plenty experience when business communications catch up to those trends. Remember, designers are always ahead of the “market” on trends. Sometimes, they’re completely right and they hit it big. Other times, not so much.
So, stay humble and push yourself and your teams toward the future. Remember that there are always other designers to learn from and that the conservatives among your decision-making teams provide balance. Do these things, and your design career will remain fun, engaging, and fulfilling for you.
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