16 Pieces of Design Wisdom

Designers have a lot of thoughts. I wrote mine here. Let’s dive in.

Creativity comes from the place of love. If you really love doing something, you can naturally be creative in how you see things. How you solve problems. It’s hard to beat and replicate.

They say it’s all about the process. Sure, but do not for a second discount the power of incredible arrangements of ideas and words in your mind. When that ideal combination of words strikes you, when you see the juxtaposition of different pieces coming together in a very delicate balance, note the fuck down. You won’t remember it. Capture it. Any way you can. Your process won’t help you recall it.

There’s immense power in sticking with the same problems for a long time. In that sense, you solve problems by thousand different layers. But you never really solve them fully. And that’s why it’s important to pick worthy problems that will keep you at the game for long.

A lot of creativity is also often forcing things. I know, quite contrary to what I literally said above. Imagine persevering on a gnarly problem for a long time. More time than most would spend on it. You’re either going to have better ideas that others have not seen yet, or you will discover the close bounds of the solution space – either way you come out more informed. This is very powerful.

Taking people along on a journey is as important a job as seeing beautiful designs as visions. Your visions are destinations where you’ve reached. Others cannot even see the vision yet. It’s your job to take them on the journey through conversations. It’s tiring at times, frustrating if you lose them along the way… but the only way you get creativity to places is by taking people on the journey.

Polish carries ideas way farther than merit ever would. And that’s not a bad thing. It’s just a skill you learn to appreciate as much as things like thinking clearly. If you think you have exceptional ideas but aren’t getting much further with them with people, the problem is how you’re packaging them. The polish is probably missing.

Alignment is a very powerful concept at every level – in designs, ideas, values. If you are a good designer with ‘right ideas’ but aren’t making progress with getting people excited, there’s probably lack of alignment somewhere. Preaching human-centric design in a place that puts profits over people is often a lost battle. Not not worth pursuing, just hard. Very very hard.

This might sound controversial but hanging out with other designers will help you raise your floor, but hanging out with non-designers will help you raise your ceiling of what you can achieve as a designer. Expanding your vocabulary to meet them where they are, exploring new possibilities with cross-pollination of vocation is incredibly powerful. Try it.

Ultimately it’s all about teaching. And I don’t mean through courses or videos here. Teaching by working together. Solving hard problems together. Going through heaps and heaps of reps with someone. Remember the alignment point above. Thousands of reps lead to interesting ways of seeing, and taking someone along that journey with you is magical. It teaches them more than what you could ever teach them if you tried.

You need to completely change the way you think about feedback. This took me years. And more than the years, it took incredibly smart and secure people sharing feedback in ways that I had never seen it being shared for me to realize it was a dialogue. People just want to be able to talk about their work. The work they are doing. And it helps tremendously to be able to see something in front of you to be able to talk about it. We are visual people. Designs are vehicles of ideas that make the conversation possible. So when you hear feedback on the designs, it’s a conversation for all of us. It’s a dialogue. It’s a dialogue that would not have happened if not for the designs. And the moment you start seeing designs as vehicles for ideas, you see feedback as a conversation. A collective journey of finding the truth.

I’ll be honest though. Design is genuinely hard and requires a tremendous amount of mental fortitude. There are days when it’s hard to not take it to heart. You need to survive those. And for that you need friends who get it to be around you. You can only thrive if you survive. I always say this – when I started in design all those years ago, I never thought that this would be the most important skill to develop as a designer – the ability to keep at it. Long days, hard days, bad idea days, bad feedback days, botched review days, failed launch days… if you’re showing up the next day, you’ll make it.

The most important ingredient in design (probably second only to love) is courage. Courage to break the rules, to try things that haven’t been tried before, challenging the old guard, pushing the boundaries… look, you’d realize one thing if you show courage: that there are many around you that with such intense passion wished that someone would come and show the way, just so they could join the band and make things happen. There are way too many people unable to make any breakthroughs happen, for lack of courage more than talent. Remember, if everyone does the same thing over and over again, who’s going to break the mold?

There are no rules. Put that modal on another modal. Mix some serifs with the sans. Have some fun and more importantly have it with people you’re building for and building with. Do serious work without being serious and never cheat the craft.

Don’t obsess over process and tools. On most days I design on a 13” MacBook Air with the trackpad. Tools come and go. Double diamonds and frameworks are rarely applicable in constraints under which we and most our comrades operate. Remember what I said above about longevity. If you keep adapting and can perform in any environment, you’d make it.

Appreciate designers around you more. The best designer you can think of probably does not get nearly enough encouragement about the good work they’re doing. It’s essential to keep the fire to create burning for years.

Get consistent. I know, we need to ‘feel it’ to be able to do good work. I get it. But if you want to have longevity, you need to be reliable. To be reliable, you need to be able to do good work even when you’re not inspired. When you’re not feeling it. So many great designers make terrible teammates because they cannot be relied upon. Because they don’t show up every day. You may not like hearing this, but design in service of business outcomes cannot depend on individual whims. To be effective, even at its worst, it must remain mechanical… so that on its day, it has the fuel to become magical. And the most consistent designers can expertly stay at it for years oscillating between the mechanical and the magical.

Get at it!