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Fast design vs. quick design
Do you struggle to match the speed of your more experienced design colleagues?
I recently collaborated on a UX/UI design project with a much younger and less experienced designer playing a supporting role. He’s very talented for his age (way more than I was at the same point in my career!). Despite just graduating university, he already has a few years of part-time freelance experience under his belt. We were satisfied with his deliverables, but noticed that he struggled to deliver work at the pace me and my client were expecting.
After a recent debrief about the project, he admitted the same thing:
I was surprised by the speed of your progress, and struggled to keep up. How can I work that fast without sacrificing quality? I worry if I speed up I will have to forgo experimentation time and will fall back to lazy design habits.
He makes a number of good points. They demonstrate reasons why experienced designers provide better value.
Design school teaches you fundamentals & software proficiency
If you’re fortunate enough to have a formal design education, you’ll have learned the fundamentals of design theory: colour, shape, balance, rhythm, and typography to name a few. And you will have learned proficiency in popular design software: perhaps Illustrator, Photoshop, or Sketch. Maybe InVision, Trello, or Asana.
You’ve started exploring the arsenal of tools that will help you practice design in the future, knowing when and why to use each one. You’ll have picked up an understanding of many basic design patterns and common best practices that are prevalent in your craft. And, importantly, you’ve learned the skill of design critique — offering methods to gain feedback humbly, and improve your work collaboratively.
But your focus rarely extends beyond this foundation, because you simply haven’t had the real-world experience to grow into higher stages of design thinking.
