What makes a great designer

Today we attended The Minds of Brilliant Designers panel discussion hosted by General Assembly Boston and organized by Creative Mornings Boston in collaboration with us, Ladies that UX Boston.

The panel included Kate Brigham of ezCater, Mike Puglielli of Mendix, Erin Braddock Pearson of LogMeIn and Brian Durkin of Well Crafted Systems.

There were a lot of great questions asked and even more interesting answers given. We took notes on the ones that stood out to us the most:

What makes a great designer?

1. Someone who asks a lot of questions to understand who our users are and what is the real problem we are solving for them.
2. Someone who understands the business and its levers.
3. Someone proactive, who seizes an opportunity. The type of person who does not wait to be handed a problem but rather someone who recognizes it and starts working on solving it.
4. Someone who approaches design with humility, transparency and curiosity.
5. The type of person with great soft skills who builds relationships across the disciplines within the company to successfully solve problems.
6. Someone who continuously works on getting better at effectively communicating their designs to stakeholders.
7. Someone who is coachable.
8. A great storyteller.
9. Someone who keeps pushing beyond their comfort zone and always seeks challenges.
10. The type of individual who shares work early and often & brings people into their thinking from across multiple disciplines.

How to stay in demand as a designer?

1. Sell your vision and imagination. That is something technological advancements will never be able to replace!
2. Be good at talking about your work and explaining how you got to any given solution.
3. Invest in building relationships across various areas of the business to expand your knowledge.

Few words of wisdom to us, designers:

“Do not measure your success by your design title.”

“Volume cures all problems.” It is important to recognize that not every design will be brilliant and producing as much work as possible is the key. Work really hard to become better at design!

“Don’t spread the peanut butter too thin.” Focus on where you want to spend your energy the most.

Thanks for reading!