How I shifted from advertising to UX
My journey from art director to UX design manager.
In 2007 I was in my last year as an Industrial Design student. Yes, I know, the title said “advertising” and now I say I was studying industrial design. Well, this is typical of me, being interested in so many things, is a blessing and a curse. I studied computer science in high school, and after that, I was majoring in economics, I lasted about 2 years and a decent number of exams, before moving to industrial design.
So, as I was saying, it was 2007, my last year as a student, and before graduating I had the opportunity of an internship in what, at the time, was the biggest advertising agency in my hometown.
An internship was mandatory to get enough credits to graduate and given “Communication” was part of the curriculum, advertising agencies were an acceptable experience. It sounded fun and I gave it a try. Long story short, I’ve been there for 6 years.
In the beginning, I was employed as a “traditional” art director so I was working on good old fashioned media, like printed stuff and so on. But a few things were bothering me:
- I’ve always been interested in technology, so I was more into pixels than offset printing
- Despite the web team being treated like the young crazy guys doing their little games on computers, while the ad guys were the ones bringing the dough, it was clear to me that balance was going to shift soon
- I envied the lightness with which they could correct typos and errors because their product was a live and evolving thing. While for me, knowing that I could type “ass” instead of “ask” on tens of thousands of magazines with no chance of corrections was a nightmare (of course it wouldn’t be my responsibility only, but still…).
So, at some point, I asked to be moved to the web team. I had some knowledge of HTML and CSS, but I wasn’t touching any of those in years, and it was a time when, especially in small teams like ours, designers were also supposed to know that stuff, to leave developers taking care only of more hardcore javastuff.
Even though the term “user experience” was already out there, it wasn’t really widespread, at least in Italy 12 years ago, for sure not in advertising agencies. Even though we talked about usability, accessibility, information architecture and wireframes, the UX designer wasn’t yet a role in the team, we were all “web designers”, covering all the design things from the very beginning up to part of the development.
A few years later, clients started to jump on the apps wagon. Websites weren’t enough, now everybody also needed an app. This was partly due to the hype caused by the iPhone and the early smartphones in general and also because agencies were very happy to charge for another costly (and most of the time unneeded) service.
Slowly, thanks to the birth of well known digital products and by reading online what was going on in the digital world, talks about UX and UI started to peek during our meetings. People of my generation (professionally speaking) unlikely had any formal education on these subjects (in Italy, at least). The invasion of classes, masters, post-degree certificates was yet to come, so we learned on the job and by ourselves, reading books, online articles, participating at events, sharing knowledge and so on.
Out-of-school UX designers are a new breed.
From job to job I’ve been able to focus more and more on digital products and all the aspects of designing one.
I moved to an agency more heavily focused on digital products, I had freelance experiences with startups, I moved to Los Angeles and worked in a digital media company and now I work in one of the biggest tech companies in the world.
ALL of my previous experiences have been precious to get to where I’m now.
Computer science and coding in high school, economics and industrial design at the university, advertising, communication, branding and web design in agencies, illustration, animation, character design as a freelancer… Everything plays an important role in how I am as a professional right now. So actually nothing is wasted time. In a previous article, I gave my definition of a digital product designer, and to me, all the experiences listed above come into play to define me as a professional.
So, no, I wasn’t an out-of-school UX designer because there were no UX design courses when I was studying, it wasn’t even the subject for a single class. But combining personal development, will and focus I’ve been able to land the role I feel finally comfortable in.
So, you can too 🙌
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My new book “Designing Digital Products for Kids”! Out December the 4th!
Learn the secrets to design successful digital products for children.
You’ll find answers to all your questions regarding the industry, and its peculiarities in 📐 UX design, 🎨 UI design, 🔍 user testing, 📈 business strategies, and much more.
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