Career Transitions: Making It In UX As A Graphic Designer

Published in

KlickUX

5 min readMay 11, 2018

If you’re a graphic designer or have a creative background looking to move into UX, it can feel very overwhelming. With a ton of resources out there, knowing where to start can become challenging. As a Graphic Designer turned UX Designer, I can totally relate with some of the challenges in transitioning. So to help make the switch, I’m going to walk you through some pointers on how you can apply your skills as a visual communicator in the User Experience sphere.

Before I start, a little about myself. I graduated from Art school with a degree in Graphic Design. From there I spent a good 3 years finding my place in the advertising world. I started as a junior designer working on print ads (posters and banner ads) and slowly made my way up to Art Director, and that’s when I joined Klick Health. My first year and a half saw me working on everything from websites to apps to campaigns and the occasional banner ads. It was a great learning experience and designing visuals was fun, but I wanted to create deeper experiences. Long story short, after closely collaborating with our amazing UX team I’m now well into my third year at Klick and a proud member of our ever growing UX department.

So you can imagine starting out, there was a significant knowledge gap and a steep learning curve. But it was never a daunting task and here’s why. As a graphic designer, you possess an unique set of skills that have a direct and positive impact in the field of User Experience. How you approach a problem and present your solutions as a Graphic designer is similar to User Experience with a slight shift in mindset.

You see, as a graphic designer you focus on visual communication and appealing to your audience’s emotions. It could be designing a poster, brochure, even a small website. But your task is to develop the image of a brand. As an UX designer, you look at the overall experience of a person/user using your product (a website or app) or interacting with your brand. The focus is to make these products easy and a pleasure to use, and being visually pleasing is just one part of a bigger whole.

Here are 4 skills that you already possess and how to utilize them in UX:

Design Thinking/Ideating

As a designer, you create visuals/artifacts that need to connect with your target audience/persona, are visually impactful, and tell the brand story. This requires creative and critical thinking to design out-of-the-box solutions to problems facing businesses and their intended users/markets. In UX you can apply the same creative and critical thinking skills for a problem solving methodology called Design Thinking. This is a human-centered, iterative approach to developing solutions for ill-defined and complex problems/projects.

Skills:

Conducting user research to develop an empathy for your user’s problems
Synthesising your research to define core problems and priorities
Generating ideas based on your research and creating a prototype of your design
Testing your product for validation and identifying if you’ve resolved business and user needs

There are many resources out there on Design Thinking. Some of the more prominent ones are:

Hierarchy

Understanding the structure and order of information is critical to any design. Without a set visual hierarchy your content may become ineffective at delivering its intended message or importance. You wouldn’t design a website where all the copy was the same size- your users wouldn’t be able to tell the difference between legal copy and a brand message. As a Graphic Designer you have a deep understanding of reading patterns and how information is visually organized to avoid any difficulty in comprehension. Similarly in UX, you need to understand how content is presented and used. In doing so you begin to:

Organise and prioritise brand messaging based a business’s value proposition
Control the flow of user interactions
Develop the site architecture and navigation

Without this kind of structure, a user would have difficulty using your product or solutions. Some good reads on this topic are:

Grid Systems by Joseph Muller Brockman (Book)
Information Architecture: For the Web and Beyond by Jorge Arango, Louis Rosenfeld, and Peter Morville (Book)

Prototyping & Testing

Always Always Always test your designs!! When printing a poster, you always do a dry run to see if the colors match the way you intended (if you don’t do this already it’d be a good idea to start now!). Similarly in UX you want to see if the solutions you create not only match user expectations but also create a positive brand experience. This involves:

Creating a prototype of your solution. It could be in various states: low, medium or high fidelity depending on any time and budget constraints
Testing your prototype with at least 5 users
Conducting impromptu gorilla tests or a fully moderated test within a group setting

Prototyping and Testing your designs is a vital part of the iterative process. Doing it makes a world of difference between what you think works and what actually works. Some good articles on this are:

Visual Presentation

Graphic Designers specialise in effective visual communication. In UX, visual presentation is key to articulating your research, insights, and solutions with your internal/external stakeholders. Without it you run the risk of your concepts being misinterpreted or not being fully implemented. As a visual communicator in the UX realm, you can see your skills being used for:

Creating wireframes and other documentation detailing the aesthetics and functionality of an app or website
Organising the information architecture for any solution
Crafting Design Systems to visualise brand components such as styles guides, functionality, even snippets of code

You may imagine the best experience in the world but if you can’t translate it to your stakeholders you lose out creating a usable product. Here are some links to get you thinking about presentation:

The road to becoming an User Experience Designer takes time but is extremely rewarding. The more time you spend discovering/(re)learning problems from the perspective of the actual users/humans, you begin to develop a deep appreciation for how design can have a positive impact in a person’s life. I hope you find these tips helpful as you transition into UX. I want to leave you with one final thought. As a designer always look for feedback. Without it, you’ll never know if what you’re doing works, and without that you’ll never be able to grow into your role. Feedback comes in many forms, be it design related, how you manage yourself in a presentation, even small things like how your design looks. The more you open yourself up to understanding how you and your work are perceived, the faster you’ll begin to grow and become an expert in your own practice.

Career Transitions: Making It In UX As A Graphic Designer

Written by Arslan Shahid