Exposure

Designers spend too much time with other designers. I say this as a designer myself.

It’s not that hanging out with designers is bad. They’re cool people. But every hour spent talking shop with fellow designers is an hour not spent building relationships that could genuinely improve the quality of your work.

Designers often take pride in being introverts. Left alone with our work, we’d do anything to avoid having to talk to someone. That’s a problem when your job is literally about understanding the world around you. People, companies, markets, economics, and everything else.

This also connects to something designers hear constantly: participate in more research. Test your designs. Meet more users.

Why do people keep saying this?

It’s not a ding on designers. It’s a call for designers to be more informed. Better informed. And more often than not, we aren’t.

Design is synthesizing the world of your users into your solutions. Solutions need to work within the user’s context. But most designers rarely take time to expose themselves to the realities of that context.

You are creative when you see things others don’t. Not necessarily new visuals, but new correlations. Connections between concepts. Problems that aren’t obvious until someone points them out. And you can’t see what you’re not exposed to.

Improving as a designer is really about increasing your exposure. Getting different experiences and widening your input of information from different sources. That exposure can take many forms. Conversations with fellow builders like PMs, engineers, customer support, sales. Or doing your own digging through research reports, industry blogs, GPTs, checking out other products, YouTube.

Imagine sitting with a Product Manager for an hour over lunch, just talking about problems and opportunities in your product. I bet you’d learn a ton of things you didn’t know. Now imagine meeting your Sales team. They go to customer events, conferences, sales calls… a treasure trove of knowledge you’re completely oblivious to.

How about taking that next coffee break with your engineering partner? Maybe with your business partner?

Exposure calibrates your understanding to more points of view. Maybe users aren’t buying your product for that feature you thought was amazing because your design friends praised it to death. Maybe your users are churning for reasons completely unknown to you and you’re not even aware or helping because you’re busy perfecting the design system.

I recently found out the feature we were building would put us as the market leader in that category. I had no idea. I’m now putting way more effort into it than I was initially. A partnership opportunity I was chasing in my product, I found out wouldn’t move the business needle at all. I recalibrated my time and energy elsewhere.

I just would have never known these things from my fellow designers.

Exposure reveals the cracks in your understanding.

We live in a multivariate, living, breathing world. Being an effective designer is as much about bringing the outside in as it is about pushing your ideas out.

You will rarely solve a problem well by just talking about design with designers. Your exposure is too limited. Magic happens when you combine your design skills with insights from people who know more than you. Who know different than you.

• Design + more design = pixel perfect but likely ineffective work.
• Design + broad exposure = effective work that lands.

Ever wonder how some designers keep having good ideas? Why they’re creative not just in isolation but in how they actually solve problems better than others?

They’re exposed to knowledge and information you aren’t. They’ve read something you haven’t. They’re talking to more people and understanding their work better than you have.

Exposure makes all the difference. And exposure is a lot more about people than pixels.

Grow your exposure.