Create Your Own Path as a Designer
Unpacking the question of ‘which job should I apply for’.
This advice isn’t only for people aspiring to become designers. It’s really for anyone who desires to have a career that satisfies and fulfills them. A question I often get is:
“Which job should I apply for at Riot? Visual Design or User Experience Design?”
The question is innocent, however it exposes deeper issues that many of us can fall prey to. Here’s the feedback I end up sharing whenever I get asked this question.
Focus on you — not the job.
Design discipline aside, it’s important to understand that a job is temporary. It is a single step in a hopefully long and successful career that continues to evolve as you do. It’s better to shift your mindset from a focus on jobs, which are discrete points in time, to your career path or trajectory.
Instead of thinking about a job or title, try to figure out your motivations and passions.. What drives you? What are you passionate about? What are your goals? What do you aspire to be, not just today, but in 5 years? 10? What keeps you awake at night? Basically, what is your long game?
This might be difficult to pin down, especially if you’re just starting out. It is not an easy task to self-reflect, dig deep and come up with a clear picture of yourself and who you are. It takes no small amount of courage to put a stake in the ground and begin to move forward.
Form a hypothesis about the path you want to take and roughly visualize what you’ll need to do to get there. You can always come back and shift, edit and change this initial point of view but you’ll never know until you walk over that starting line. You are the sum of all the things you learn and do — a title, role, job, company, paycheck have nothing to do with it.
Another way to think about all of this is: If you don’t know who you are and what you want, how can you expect a hiring panel to know either?
Focus on you.
If you’re passionate about it, don’t wait. Start now.
You don’t need anyone’s permission to do, right now, whatever it is you’re passionate about. If you love running, you’re probably out there running regularly. The same goes for your career. If you love something, do it regularly. Don’t wait for the right role or job to start it.
Before I got the title of UX Designer I spent nights and weekends redesigning software I loved and thought could be improved. I’d make wireframes and write down my logic and reasoning for the decisions I made for no real audience. I’d read anything to do with User Experience Design and try to chat with well-known UX Designers asking for advice or their favorite tools. Sometimes they answered, most of the time they didn’t. And that is okay. I was happy to be doing it for the sake of doing it and it ended up teaching me a lot.
By creating and practicing you begin to push your limitations and see personal growth. You start to form physical artifacts that reflect your opinions which allow you to get real, actionable feedback. It is then that a clear path forward emerges.
Passion is also something that’s difficult to hide and it’ll read that way across all the work that you do. It was in actively exploring and enjoying my passion that I developed my craft and consequently got noticed by Riot.
Understand the design you want to do.
Design is a large field with dozens of disciplines: Graphic, Visual, UX, Motion, Animation, Illustration, Game, etc. They all share a foundation in design principles then wildly branch out to become unique and specialized.
If you want to be a designer, you should be deeply knowledgeable in at least one discipline/specialization.
Not sure which one to choose? Find a person whose work exemplifies the work you eventually want to do. Or find a few. Research what is involved in their craft. What does their day-to-day look like? How did they get to where they are now? Ask them for their advice, ask their peers. Intern or apprentice with them. Do whatever you can to get an accurate picture of what it means to work in this discipline.
You’ll begin to notice that expectations for disciplines have common themes. Often a discipline’s craft is evaluated with similar criteria regardless of industry or company. For example: a competent Visual Designer will have a developed eye for light, color, value, form, typography, hierarchy and composition. They will understand how to tell a story through their visuals and how to implement them.
There can be variation depending on the specifics of the role, but overall it remains the same.
At the end of the day, if you have to ask someone what kind of designer you should be you’re not knowledgeable enough yet. Or passionately opinionated enough.
A lot of companies won’t be right for you, and that’s okay.
Everyone loves. It’s not enough to love a thing — hell many people love the thing that you love. There must be more: compatibility, mutual interest, a continued path for growth and value added. This is especially true of any company you work for and may end up spending x years of your life with.
Too often the focus is on getting a job at this company or that company. Maybe they have a big name or shiny extras. They’ve probably got a slew of challenging problems and competitive salaries. That’s not enough. There are tons of places out there that have challenging problems and money to burn. And it might be the shittiest job you’ll ever have.
Fulfilling jobs, I’d argue, are based on a mutual fit. Where your goals and vision align with the company’s and the path forward is one of mutual benefit and enrichment. Believing in the vision will get you through the dark days when your project is blowing up and there’s a million people calling for your head and you can barely keep the crushing stress at bay. This mutual fit will endure the inevitable hard days and the good ones to make for something so much more than just a job.
So remember, When you’re looking for a job or are being recruited by a company you’re interviewing them as much as they are interviewing you.
Take control and create your own path.
You’re in the driver’s seat here. No one wants you or your career to succeed as much as you do. The more legwork you do, the more you understand and research and create, the clearer your path will be and the stronger your convictions to achieve it.
Have an opinion about your life, your craft, your progression. And the next time you ask for advice on jobs… I hope it’s when you’re being aggressively recruited for that amazing thing you made. By a great company whose mission you believe in. Then you can ask “How can we create value together?”
