Design or Die

The card up your sleeve should be designed by You

Chances are, if you work in some corner of the web — whether it’s online retail, mobile apps, or any number of the countless pixelated possibilities in between — then you’ve designed something during your professional career.

I’m not talking design in the grand scheme, so if you’re a graphic designer or a mythical full-stack developer with, well, stacks-full of external hard drives harboring terabytes of coded virtual design in the engineering sense of the word, this probably doesn’t apply to you. But for everyone else, whether you realize it or not:

The traditional definition of design has wedged itself awkwardly in the negative space of your daily work task list.

For instance, using myself as an example, a marketer in 2017 likely doesn’t live / breathe solely in the realm of tabular spreadsheets, newsletter drafts, web analytics and scheduled social media. Not only that, he shouldn’t.

Today, digital professionals are at an advantage when wearing multiple hats, and perhaps the most understatedly valuable hat to own is the design hat.

If design were a hat, it’d be a newsboy cap: simple and to-the-point, goes well with nearly any look, functional in every setting.

Departing the hat analogy for good, design is one of those skills which mate well with any web career. It’s one worth learning—even just the basics—because (let’s leap into a metaphor, shall we?) a solid foundational grasp of design is the water bucket for a potentially very deep well of specific knowledge that will go a long, long way.

Which is to say that once you develop an eye for design, it will stay with you. It will even follow you wherever you go. You don’t necessarily have to master it either, but if you do, it will never steer you wrong.

Another thing: design principles bleed into other work disciplines. For me, I’ve learned to communicate more concisely, write better copy, code cleaner html, draft more intuitive email campaigns… the list goes on.

Overall, I’m more efficient at my specialty with design added into the mix. There’s no doubt in my mind that this notion of design-as-indispensable is one which applies to all fields and areas of the internet industry.

When I began my marketing stint at Gallery Nucleus, design skills were practically a requirement.

Faced with creating display ads, event fliers and social media content from scratch, there was simply no way I was going to succeed in the marketing side of the art gallery business without summoning forth the graphic designer lurking inside of me.

At Nucleus, the list of companies we’ve had the pleasure of working with is endless — from Wizarding World ϟ Scholastic to Disney Animation.

As a rule of thumb, always be open to constructive criticism and learning new things. That said, do critique my designs and shred them to bits! I’m eager to improve, so please let me know how I can do better.

The most important message here is to indeed specialize in something, but support that concentration with design know-how.

Throw Photoshop, Illustrator and InDesign into your daily software suite, right in there with MailChimp and Google Sheets. I’ve done so and haven’t looked back since—granted I still have a long way to go in terms of mastering design, but that’s the point: keep learning, keep irrigating water into that well.

It’s never a great idea to wear too many hats at once, but one go-to hat and a few others to swap into when the weather requires it? Now there’s a lesson that’s never too late to learn.