Five questions designers with full-time jobs struggle with
How to find your way juggling between your full-time design job and your passion for design.
Good designers are never satisfied. I’ve yet to meet a designer of any sort who’s completely happy with their job. You start off in design school learning about the importance of creativity and that time Sagmeister carved the text of his 1999 AIGA poster onto his torso with a knife, but then only a few years later you’re designing a 300-page catalogue for fishing rods.
It’s easy to start feeling frustrated, disillusioned and try to break out of the drudgery of a full-time design job by pursuing your own path. I’ve personally done this for years – the whole Bruce Wayne thing – working for the corporations by day and then saving the world with personal projects at night.
The question I get a lot is ‘How do you do it all?’ and I realise there’s no simple answer; so I broke it down to five most common issues I’ve found that challenged me on the way. The examples and my experience in the matter come from over a decade of working in brand design and with designers, but are by no means going to solve everything (but you can still keep reading and let me know about your solutions).
1. ‘How will I find the time?’
The most common issue I see with designers is we get overwhelmed easily. Often we’re able to do very complex things quickly, and other times simple things take forever. It’s a common misconception that creativity does not equal planning. Because as designers we’re supposed to be talented and creative and just ‘come up’ with cool stuff on the spot, right? But to be creative in any field is to practice.
Choreographer Martha Graham says: “Dancing appears glamorous, easy, delightful. But the path to the paradise of that achievement is not easier than any other. There is fatigue so great that the body cries, even in its sleep. There are times of complete frustration; there are daily small deaths.”
— from an article by Paul Jun
The point of this quote is not to overwhelm you even further, but to acknowledge that successful people persistently put a lot of tears and sweat into their craft. On a more practical note here is what I do to deal with time management. I plan every hour of my week in advance. Literally every single hour of my day is planned: from calls, to ‘design time’, to going out for a run. Do I stick to it 100% every day? Of course not, but it really helps me to track, prioritise and balance my efforts. If you want to read more on the subject here is an article about how to ‘find some time to design’.
2. ‘Why am I doing this?’
The first time I joined a company after years of living the ‘agency life’, I learned about OKRs. The acronym stands for Objectives and Key Results and it’s a tool that helps organisations achieve their goals by building specific and measurable action points and communicating them across teams. If you’re not familiar with the process you can get useful resources on What Matters, a website run by John Doerr, author of the book ‘Measure What Matters’.
Now if you do know what OKRs are, and you worked in a larger company before, you probably know how dry and tedious they can be. Most companies tend to make them top-down and essentially uninspiring. However, writing my own OKRs is one of the top three things that’s helped my personal and professional career to this date. The saying goes ‘you can achieve anything in life if you really want it’ — well, I cannot stress enough how much easier it is to achieve your objectives if you actually write them down and have an actionable and measurable plan.
Why am I talking about a business tool and not telling you to just write down your New Years’ resolutions? Because goals like ‘I want to do cooler projects’ or ‘I want to be featured on Behance’ are great, but until you put them down on paper and commit to a plan they’re still just ideas. Lastly, don’t feel ashamed to share these goals with people in your life who can support you (for example instead of feeling guilty for working late, include your partner in your personal OKRs and make them a part of your team).
3. ‘What will people think?’
A big part of any designer’s job is to constantly research other projects, studios, brands, and look for inspiration. This constant comparison between our own work and world-class designers is often necessary but can become an obstacle. You go to a design conference and instead of getting motivated, you get an overcoming mixed feeling of excitement and desperation. A blend of wanting to quit your job and open your own studio and the fear you’re going to fail miserably. So it’s not a surprise that many designers suffer from Imposter Syndrome.
“The struggle is real! I don’t think you can be a designer without imposter syndrome. It comes with the territory of inventing the future because there are no rules. Once you discover that everyone feels like a fraud from time to time, it doesn’t feel so bad.“
— Chirryl-Lee Ryan, Head of Experience Design at Isobar, Hong Kong
How does this manifest itself? For many, it’s the fear of showing your work and putting yourself out there. We all know how hard it is to finish your portfolio, and sadly so many talented designers I know don’t have any online presence. The same way doctors make the worst patients, when it comes to branding ourselves, we’re our own worst enemy.
So start small. One thing that worked for me was to commit to posting something weekly on my Instagram page, and just see how it goes. It’s quick, you see immediate results, and no one will judge you for not being perfect, because hey — it’s just Instagram.
4. ‘Why am I not doing what I like?’
Imagine you’re working in an ad agency and you have a big client who’s constantly making last minute changes and makes it impossible to deliver the quality you expect. Or you’re in an in-house team doing banners for KFC and Burger King deals. Sounds familiar? So how are you supposed to position yourself as the amazing designer you know you are, if you don’t really like any of your work?
“Your portfolio is not what you did, but what you’re going to do next. Build your portfolio with the work you want to do in the future instead of just using it as a backlog of projects.”
— Tobias van Schneider in ‘How to Get Unstuck and Launch Your Design Portfolio’
I’ve been hiring designers for years and reviewed thousands of portfolios in my career, and I have to agree with van Schneider on this. People who will look at your portfolio don’t want to know your whole life story. If you were making an ad for Spotify you wouldn’t start by telling your audience that the company was founded in Sweden in 2008 and showing how their UX has changed over the years. Treat your portfolio as a marketing campaign. You’re selling yourself and your customers need to know in a few seconds what you can offer to them in the future and get excited about it. Most of the time it only takes one project.
5. ‘Am I even good enough?’
We talked about the imposter syndrome as something that hinders you as a professional, but what about you as person? When someone decides to work with you they’re hiring an expert designer, but they’re also hiring you as the person behind the work.
“Stop telling yourself you’re not qualified, not worthy or not experienced enough. Growth happens when you start doing things you’re not qualified to do.”
— Steven Bartlett, author of ‘Diary of a CEO’ podcast
A lot of the success I’ve had with projects was due much more to the collaboration I had with clients than my skill as a designer. The better you are at explaining your work and the more they trust you, the easier it gets to get great results. A CMO friend once told me the clue to getting your clients to sign-off on projects is to make them feel like it was all their idea. So the point is not to be the best designer, just the right designer for the job.
Following these five questions, I had to ask myself ‘Am I an expert on this topic and should anyone care to read this?’ — technically no; but I’ve spent every day of my adult life worrying about all of the above, struggling with finding the right motivation, with crippling self-doubt and the lack of time, money and options. On the upside, I have the fortune of having great friends who I can talk to and get advice from every time my mind goes back to these famous five questions.
Feel free to connect with me on LinkedIn and please share your stories in the comments!
