Lovers Make the Best Designers
How Passion Transforms Craft
It has never been a better time to be a designer. The design industry offers a huge variety of career paths (PD, IxD, ID, CxD, GD, UX, UI, to cite a few). Coupled with all these options, is the fact that the professional world appreciates design more than ever. This makes it even more difficult to settle down and get to work. Because of all these options it’s understandable that a designer needs time to explore the field and develop certain skills. I certainly did. I also got stuck in that world of possibilities. The result was taking on projects that didn’t align with any long-term career path, and producing work that wasn’t as good as it should have been.
It’s likely you have no idea what you’re doing with you life. Sure, you have a job or school, but that’s probably the only stable aspect of your life. You don’t know where you want to be in 5 years, you live paycheck to paycheck, and the only future planning you do concerns spring break. This is typical. For most designers, exploring the profession is a right of passage — for better or worse. The problem is that many designers get stuck. They struggle to find a place within the design profession, but never stop to consider their place outside of design world. So, how do you get out of that trap? Fall in love, and let passion transform your craft.
Don’t misunderstand me. While floating through the voids of space and time, I made some interesting design work. But, the interesting work seemed to be more the result of luck rather than any active decision making on my part. If you’re still reading this, and floating through space, trying to figure out where you’re going and how you’ll get there. Here’s a tip: fall in love and make some babies. It worked for me.
At some point I made an important decision to commit to deeply loving my wife, to full-time marriage, and to making that relationship last. I became passionate about someone other than myself, and my life changed. Ironically, my career now had more weight than ever, and this new weight required me change the way I designed.
Below are 3 aspects of my design career that changed as a result of falling in love.
1. I became a more focused designer by taking on jobs that allowed me to create work that was important to me.
When you stop wooing the field of design your focus is different. Your family makes the future more important, so you evaluate your career with more context. Spring break becomes an afterthought, as you learn to say to “no” to work that doesn’t matter and “yes” to work that does. This means your work tends to be more focused and centered on the aspects of design that you are most interested in. Thus, you quickly become more experienced and better at those aspects of design. For me, it was designing in a startup environment.
2. I started making smarter design decisions by thinking about longterm consequences of my work.
Life is easy when you never have to think about the long-term repercussions of your decisions. Likewise design is easy when you’re only designing short-term solutions. When you’re trying to build something that might last several lifetimes you get better at thinking about the long term. As you get better about thinking through the long term, solving big design problems becomes easier. You’ll find yourself more capable of designing sustainable solutions to macro and micro projects. At this point, I had to stop freelancing, and instead, I joined a company that I could devote the next years of my career to.
3. Babies, even more than falling in love, made me realize that teamwork is the axis upon which success swings.
Cute, adorable, tiny humans have ways of testing the foundations of any relationship. It is easy to fail those tests if a good team and sound teamwork isn’t in place. Designers play a small and limited role in the development of products and services. Engineers, data-scientists, executives, marketers, sales, and likely others are essential to your success. Not only will you need those people, but the processes and workflows that allow you to work together are also important. This understanding influenced my decision on what startup to join, and continues to influence how I build my own team.
If you’re still reading, you might be thinking to yourself, “To hell with this mushy crap. I can’t just go out and fall in love to get better at design.” You’re right, you shouldn’t do that, but you can find something to love. I recommend loving people, as they are capable of loving you back, but that takes time to nurture. On the RadDesignTeam I have observed each member is a lover in their own way, and their craft is better as a result. They have reminders that life is more than just design. For some it is food, another parents, and one of the designers is married. The list could go on: community, music, faith, friendships, nature, causes, and a lot more. The point is to step away and engage with life that isn’t right in front of you; it will make you better at your craft. It took falling in love, and becoming passionate about my family, in order for me to do this well.
Happy Valentine’s Day to You & Yours
