Story of failures — anecdotes from a designer’s life
When I started Design, I didn’t have any idea about how hard or easy it’s going to be. I didn’t even know that I could make it a career choice. I jumped right into it because I enjoy doing it. As the years begin to unfold and I started digging deeper into it, I realised that the journey wouldn’t be easy. I faced difficulties and failed multiple times. This blog is a compilation of all such big and small failures.
It’s an effort from my side to bring my vulnerable self in front of you. I believe that this article would encourage many of us to bring their stories of struggles to the world and bring an end to the glittering life as seen on social media.
If you’ve been following my yearly series “summarising my design story”, you must be knowing most of my story so far. I’ll try to focus on the unspoken things and tell you how they had contributed to becoming what I am today.
#1. Summer internships
Over the course of 4 years, I have done quite a lot of internships. Getting internships hasn’t been all easy. When I started in 2016, I got my first internship quite easily. My senior who was freelancing for a startup for quite some time, referred me. Until then I didn’t really get a taste of how hard getting an internship could be until I had to apply for next summer internship.
I sent out multiple emails to the companies, applied through the website and cold messaged multiple people over LinkedIn but I didn’t get any reply. I began wondering what could have gone wrong. One of the obvious things was that I didn’t have a good portfolio. I was sending my resume as my portfolio. It’s funny right — I was applying for a process-focused internship and sending a sheer piece of paragraph (resume) with a Dribbble link as my portfolio. How could it have done any justice?
After receiving so many rejection emails, I managed to get an internship in a small early-stage startup. Being the only designer at this company, I struggled through the internship and left it after a month. I felt dejected and made a promise to myself that this isn’t going to continue the next time I had to apply for an internship. I started working on my portfolio and launched it. Fortunately, It became a huge success and helped regain my confidence.
#2. Google Internship
My newly launched portfolio helped me secure a winter internship and consecutively helped me to sit for google internship interviews. I was so happy about getting this opportunity to be able to work in one of my dream companies but then another failure hit hard. When I was so close to getting the offer, I got rejected in the last round. Since I had spent 3 months in the process, most of the companies had already filled the positions of interns. I also hadn’t applied to any companies during that time hoping that I would get selected for Google.
All my confidence was shattered.
I then started applying to other companies but I wasn’t getting any reply. I got frustrated and ranted on social media about companies not caring about candidates. Unexpectedly, hate comments started coming in. That day I learned some harsh lessons-
A. Never rant on social media
Posts on social media lack context and emotion. We cannot expect sympathy from a group of people over the internet who had no idea about what’s going on in our life. It’s better to find friends at this moment with whom you can rant and bitch about life and they won’t judge you.
B. Invest in networking
Even after having a good portfolio, I wasn’t getting any reply. I was sending cold emails and messages to random people on LinkedIn and expecting a reply from them. It is the time when I realized that good portfolio cannot guarantee you a good job. There was a need to be equally socially active as well and tell about my work. Being socially active will also increase the chances that people will know about you and highly probable that people will reply to your emails.
C. Your circle is not your competition
We, in college, are all stuck in rut to get better than others. We forget to realise the fact that there are more and better people outside of our college. I realised this fact when I joined twitter and started following so many amazing students. I had always thought myself lucky to be among the best of minds with easy access to resources and such caring seniors. I was wrong and Twitter was an eye-opener for me. Twitter fam, I love you ❤
In the end, It was not all bad for me as I was able to secure an internship in UrbanClap. I got the chance to work on an amazing project and learned so many new things. I also started heavily investing in networking and been preaching the importance of it since then.
#3. First job interview
It was my last year of college and I wanted to put all my effort in securing a good job. I had my portfolio in check and was active on social media too. I shortlisted a few companies and started applying. Since I was rejected in the last round of Google, I wanted to give it another shot. I wanted to do something unique for Google. So I got the idea of converting my illustrator themed portfolio to a google themed portfolio. I also added the ability to switch from presentation (ppt) style layout to doc style layout. I worked on it and tweeted about it in the hope that someone from Google might look at the portfolio and reply.
Contrary to my expectations, I didn’t get any reply. Probably folks at Google were super busy. At that time, Flipkart was also at design hiring spree. I mailed and got a reply immediately. I had my first round of interview and I got rejected.
Such a bummer.
I had no idea what could have gone wrong this time. Folks at Flipkart replied to me saying that they were hoping to see the more in-depth rationale to my design decisions. Some major lessons were learned here-
A. Don’t be underprepared for your interviews
Get your presentation reviewed by a couple of people before sitting for an interview. I made a high-level presentation of my work for the interview and thought that I would answer the questions as and when they would come up. But when they did ask me, I fall flat. I wasn’t able to remember the details of my work. Hence, I believe that it’s the best idea to do some mock interviews before actually sitting for interviews.
B. Untidy sketch file is the new portfolio
Case studies in portfolios are the shiniest version of our work. They often fail to capture intricate details of how our work evolved otherwise they would be too long and not readable by your recruiter. This is where our untidy sketch files can help us and become our new portfolio. When I was asked to show some iterations of my work, I didn’t have them ready on my sketch to show because most of these iterations were done roughly on paper or in the head. Since recruiters are very interested in knowing how our research translated into design, It’s probably a good idea to keep all iterations in sketch file for documentation. I, now, maintain a “dump” page in my sketch files to store all the past iterations and attach a note on each artboard detailing out why the iteration was rejected.
C. Is it all game of luck?
Some of you will be shocked to read this statement but I have come to believe that Interviews are all a matter of luck. Your interviewer has the job to decide the fate of your interview. His behavior, personality, and mood can affect the result of the interview (not pointing out my interviewer though :P ). In addition to that, every interviewer has a different style of interviewing. Like in my Google interview, They wanted me to take one topic and explain that in detail while in Flipkart interview, they wanted to know the full project in detail. While most of the interviewers require you to present 1–2 case studies but in Gojek interview, I was expected to explain all of the projects that I have done so far. You have to be ready to face any kind of situation in an interview.
After Flipkart interview, I detailed out my presentation, moved all the iterations from my notebook to Sketch and sat for Gojek interview and luckily, I cleared the interview and got the role.
Although this 4 years of battle ended unexpectedly, in the end, I am happy too that it ended with Gojek. It’s been three months here and there is a load to learn — be it convincing our developers to push a small pixel or presenting the work in a meeting. At the same time, I am looking forward to all the new challenges that are yet to come.
Summing up
All of the above failures had their own amount of impact in shaping my life. I am happy that some of these failures happened and helped me to show a mirror. I hope this article can inspire anyone of you reading this to start embracing our failures and learn from each one of them. Failures as small or as big as they can be, always suck. It was because of my friends that I was able to deal with these hard times. My advice is to try to make as many good friends as possible with whom you can share anything or try to distract yourself from all negative thoughts as much as possible. Because this is what best you can do.
In the end, I will end this article with a quote-
“Work hard and fail until world fall short of good designers and that day would be yours.”
