Yes! You Can Also Be a Designer.
Being born and bought up in a middle-class family in India, that too in the ’90s, it's obvious that I am an Engineer, to be very precise a Chemical Engineer (not by choice). So if you ask me how I ended up being a designer I would simply say I had it in me, I am kidding of course.
To be honest, what I can remember, from a very young age me and my elder brother loved drawing and sketching or maybe I just did it because me being the younger one I just loved to follow around my brother in whatever he does. But as we grew up, I realized that I enjoyed art, be it a drawing class or be an art and craft class I really pushed myself to be the best.
Yes, I know I have not answered how I ended up being a designer. For this allow me first to let you know who is a designer. According to me in simple language, a designer is someone who solves a problem, don't confuse the terms “Artist” and “Designer”. An Artist is someone who makes a piece of art according to his concent of beautiful. But here the term “beautiful” is very subjective because I may like the art and say its beautiful but anyone may argue and contradict my view because we are individuals and our point of view may not always sync. On the other hand, a Designer is not someone whose only task is to make things “beautiful”. Along with making things look good a designer's most important task is to solve a problem keeping it in mind that the solution is not only for a specific individual but for mass.
I guess this made it clear “Who a Designer is?” , now let me tell you how I ended up being a designer. Being bought up in a middle-class family with strict parents had a great influence on me to become who I am, as a designer today. Here I would like to add the Hindi term “Jugaad” meaning simple life hacks, which is fairly relevant to my interest. While growing up, though my parents could afford to buy me a new set of the video game, just to teach me the value of money they would deliberately deny buying a new one. Being obsessed with video games, somehow I had to fix my old game set by many “Jugaad” such as placing a piece of paper under the keys to replace the missing spring. Most of the 90’s kids can relate with such kinds of Jugaad. So what I am trying to say is from there I developed the problem-solving skills which continued to flourish when I joined my Junior College, where we were not allowed to keep cell phones with us. To maintain that rule our hostel warden used to check our hostel rooms regularly and to save me from being caught I came up with my first design which is a simple pouch made of cloth and stick it flat under my table using super glue. I called it a design because I had come up with various iterations to achieve the final product such as first I used hardboard where the problem was when the phone vibrates it used to produce a lot of sounds and hence it was not suitable, then I made the pouch using plastic and here the problem was it was too slippery and the phone use to fall whenever it vibrates. So after much trial and error, I finally made a pouch using a piece of cloth and it was just perfect as it absorbed the vibration and there were no vibration noises and it was not at all slippery and it served the purpose and soon the whole of our hostel adopted it. And look I became a designer and I had no idea. Like I said I loved to do art but I was not a designer until I solved a problem.
If you are still here, I am just amazed to know how much people are interested in others life. Since you guys are here, so let me continue with my career as a designer. I graduated as an Engineer in 2015 and the fun fact I didn't get placed in any of the companies that came to our college and really thank god for it every day, But as you know, it's not a pleasant experience to see your peers getting into companies and starting their career and you sit around at home doing nothing. As I look back now it was actually a good experience I got time to think about what I actually want to do with my life. And when you have a lot of time to spare you finally end up doing things you love and hence in my case, I started drawing and sketching again. Luckily enough few of my brother’s friends had a startup set up at that time and they noticed my art and sketches and asked me to join them and hence I started my career as a Graphic Designer which at that point of time I had no idea what is the meaning of that designation but I am really thankful to my mentor over there Mr.Sudipta Debakar Bora who was the Head of Design guided me in every step and taught me all the basics of UI/UX Designing. So practically speaking I would say he was the one who introduced me to design and taught me what designing really is.
I worked in my first job for almost 2 years and for some unfortunate reason they shut down the startup. And getting my second job, to be honest, was pretty easy for me. I was hired as a UI Designer in VIVO (ya, that mobile manufacturing company) and I worked there for almost 7months but had to leave that company as I was a new designer I had a lot to learn and that opportunity of learning over there was missing and I was quite not satisfied with the kind of work I was offered to do. A tip for any aspiring designer, never work in an organization where they don't value design and always look for a mentor to learn from. A good mentor can literally change your career, like Ms. Writika Bhaskar she is my current organization’s UX Design Lead and my supervisor, what an amazing person she is. I joined this organization almost two months back and the number of lessons she taught me was more than what I learned in the past one year. She is a kind of person who won't simply tell you that you are doing something wrong but why it’s wrong and how we can fix that. Again a tip for you aspiring designers, never simply take no for an answer always try to know why they said no, the number of lessons you will learn from this practice is just huge.
Now you all might be wondering why I am telling you all these. I am writing this article simply to motivate all young and aspiring designers out there to help them to get started with their career. So let me share a few notes about what I have learned so far in my career as a designer.
1. You don’t need a design degree to be a good designer, this is 2018 and you can pursue anything you want to, but be true to yourself.
2. Don’t simply copy other’s work try to understand the logic behind it by this point I am not telling that we should not take inspiration from others work but as a community, we need to help our fellow designers to grow. So whenever you are using someone’s work for inspiration don't forget to tag them.
3. Don’t be afraid to make mistakes we are human beings, not robots to be perfect in everything we do but the catch is we only learn from our mistakes. Like Writika said, “design is something which we can always make better over iterations”. So go ahead make mistakes but don't forget to learn from them.
4. Always try to evolve since the technology is advancing at a rapid rate we as designers should be able to cope up with it. So my advice will be, try reading at least one article every day related to design and technology.
5. Lastly again as I mentioned previously never simply take no for an answer, always try to know the reason behind that no. You 'll be amazed to know how much you can learn from this practice.
Life is unpredictable so go ahead take a leap of faith and do what you enjoy doing don't live your life only for others I am not being a selfish here what I believe is, “ learn to love yourself and you 'll automatically learn to love others ”. And life is a canvas fill it with your own colors.
Be creative and happy designing. Cheers!
