When I started as a product designer at Facebook in 2015, I was intimidated.
Though I’d had a significant career as an art director, product designer, and visual designer, my main thought after my first few days was, “I hope they don’t find out that I suck at this stuff.” Most of my design background was in editorial and creative design, visual identity, and branding.
In other words, using design — in print, video, and apps — to tell stories. Facebook’s more systems-oriented design was rather unfamiliar to me. That first week or so, I wasn’t 100 percent sure what I was doing.
But I soon oriented myself and began to figure it out, just as I had everything else in my career.
Self-taught designer
I am a mostly self-taught designer. I studied at Pratt, where I learned some basic principles, but looking back at it now, it’s clear that I mostly taught myself. I feel like an old man saying this, but before the Internet, designers learned from their wider environment, including books, artwork, magazines, and other media. I have vivid and cherished memories of going to bookstores and flipping through book after book of design.
Some books had an outsize influence on me, including Designing the Editorial Experience, by Juliette Cezzar and Sue Apfelbaum, which explains the anatomy of editorial design, typography, layout, and scanability. How to See by George Nelson was similarly influential, as was Universal Principles of Design by William Lidwell, Kritina Holden, and Jill Butler.
Though I haven’t worked in the print medium for a while, I still call on the fundamentals I learned along the way and apply them to the work I’m doing now. One quick example: constraints. Editorial design operates within the constraints of the format, including the size of the page and the length of the text. This principle holds true for website and apps, it’s just that the constraints are different. Another example: the interplay of copy and visuals. This is fundamental to print, video, and many other graphics, but it’s just as fundamental online as it is in any other medium.
In addition to books, I also learned by observing the world around me. I engaged with anything and everything I could in the course of developing of my visual literacy. From photos to ads to magazine layouts to museum paintings, I sought out anything graphic, and over time I started to see. I paid attention. I got in tune with what I saw repeated, what I saw was working. I’d learned fundamentals like hierarchy and composition, but I consciously looked for them in context. I intentionally exposed myself to graphics, and I was then intentional about taking them in and storing them with the expectation of later recalling them and putting them to use. In this way, I started to get to solutions much faster.
In search of well-rounded designers
As I met my new peers at Facebook, I learned many had come from companies like Oracle and Intuit and, in the course of their careers, been exposed to much more systems design than I had. But despite my initial anxieties, it didn’t take me long to catch up with my colleagues. Now, with a few years under my belt, I’m fully caught up on systems design.
The result is that I’m now in a position to ask: What gets lost when we focus solely on systems design? How can I help preserve the culture of craft?
Now that I have been able to pick up a new visual language, I see an opportunity to boost the understanding of, what I consider are, core design principles amongst designers. Designers who may have learned computer science or human-computer interaction, but did not learn the key fundamentals of graphic design as I did.
As a product design manager, how I can continue to promote the practice of good visual craft by incorporating key design fundamentals in systems thinking? In what ways can we honor both design fundamentals and create well-rounded designers? The best part is that Facebook also sees this opportunity, and there’s now a major project on the horizon that’s devoted to the merging of the two.
It turns out, my different perspective didn’t set me back, it set me apart. It turns out, Facebook wants its designers to grow — and I’m helping in the effort.
This series promotes the practice of good visual craft in our post-UX world, when great design is expected but many product designers may not have learned the visual design fundamentals. Read Part 2.
