8 Designer Profiles in IT: Discovering the Ukrainian Industry. Part 1
Design in Ukraine is huge: thousands of seasoned professionals with many specializations. But we have one problem — too many job titles for the same design profile. You might find different titles for the same designer at various service, consulting, and product companies.
To resolve this confusion and build a shared understanding, we distinguish designers by what exactly they are doing.
I talked to 17 design professionals around Ukraine to describe 8 design profiles:
- How they are different;
- What are their typical tasks;
- What skills and tools they use.
This article has 2 parts.
First part (this):
- Product Design
- UI/UX Design
- Visual Design
- Motion Design
- XR Design
- Conversational UI Design
- Service Design
- Design Research
Like in any other typology, sometimes you can meet a designer, who combines a few profiles. That’s especially true for small companies.
Let’s go!
Product design
How it’s different
The product designer’s task is to do web and mobile applications. Users may use the apps when they have some pain points, goals or needs. Product designer’s task is to make user way with the app as simple as possible. If you use Instagram or Facebook, you better believe that each of your actions has been researched, designed and tested by the product designer.
Typical tasks
Here is how Product designer Maryna Revutska describes her typical process:
First of all I’m investigating the project, analyse requirements, research business needs and users motivations. I love to involve stakeholders into design process with a Miro workshop.
Kseniia Rozhovetska, Experience Designer at SoftServe, emphasizes:
I always include user research to the design process, even if the client hasn’t requested it. That allows me to build information architecture and user flows. After verifying those, we can start working on wireframes, mockups and prototypes.
UX/UI Design
How it’s different
UX/UI Designers do marketing websites, landing-pages or information portals. Why I separated this to another profile:
- lots of work with content and communicating information correctly;
- usually focus on marketing goals, where you aim to increase conversion;
- designer has more visual freedom in typography, colours, shapes, animation, imagery, etc.
Typical tasks
Digital designer Kateryna Sakhno tells:
The design process has phases. I structure received information: work with brief, analysing competitors, target audience. Then I create a sitemap and develop the prototype. After that, I search for references, create a moodboard and work on visual design concepts.
Oleksandra Luneva, UX/UI Designer at The Room adds:
Then we do UI. It’s like painting the colouring book — we define typography, add real content.
UX/UI Designer at Sigma Software Tetiana Cholombytko concludes:
Also, we create a styleguide and UI Kit, which has reusable components for future work. After release, we usually have design support phase, when we add little fixes from business.
Some designers even use predefined templates and platforms (Tilda, Readymag, Wix) to make the design process faster and reduce costs on development.
Visual Design
How it’s different
Product designers or UX/UI Designer usually work with already defined branding: colors, shapes, fonts, logotype. Developing this visual language and all the marking materials is a task of the visual designer. Visual designers can work in a variety of media, including illustrations, visual content for social media, banners, presentations, merch, storytelling visualizations, and even animations.
Typical tasks
Here is how Visual designer at SoftServe Christina Cook explains her process:
Typically, I create some rough sketches based on business needs and the requirements of the platform, where this visual is going to be published. In case of a long-term project, I approve these sketches before starting work on details. The final stage is fixing all the comments from stakeholders and mockup finalisation.
Iryna Kravets, Visual designer at SoftServe, describes it similarly:
I have a brief or problem that requires a visual solution. First of all, I investigate the problem and all the materials, then suggest 2–3 solutions. After approval work on further realization.
Motion Design
How it’s different
Motion designers work with animations:
- creates animated videos for educational or commercial needs;
- helps with animations for websites, applications or branding;
- creates content for internal and external marketing.
Usually, motion designer receives completed 2D materials from illustrator or mockups from a product or UX/UI designer. Sometimes they do both: statics and dynamics.
There are various animation types: frame-by-frame, pose-to-pose, stop-motion, etc. Motion designer can specialize in 2D or 3D animations, or combine them to reach a feeling of space.
Typical tasks
Anastasiia Andriichuk, Motion designer at SoftServe notes:
I start with research: analyse the task and target audience, looking for references. Then define the idea and write a scenario, which can have multiple formats: storyboard, sketch or styleframe.
Sometimes motion designers go with deeper specialization. For example, Maria Sokratova creates animated stickers for Telegram:
When I receive an illustration from the artist, I break it down to separate elements to make the animation process easier. Then import it to AfterEffects, group and create the shape layers. For example, to animate a cat, I connect eyes, ears and nose to face, paws to the body. And then animate them with main functions like path, rotate, scale, position without using any effects.
That was the first part of this article. Continue learning about XR Design, Conversational UI Design, Service Design and Design Research in part 2 👉
