22 Pieces of Unsolicited Advice for Motivated ‘22 Design Graduates
Hi friends,
It’s graduation season, which means a whole crop of new designers are moving into the professional world or are hoping to do so soon.
I graduated from design school over a decade ago (2011) and since then I’ve worked on dozens of award-winning technology products and have been a partner of a leading Silicon Valley design firm. I’d say things have worked out better for me than I’d ever hoped.
Inspired by Kevin Kelly’s 103 Bits of Advice I Wish I Had Known, here’s a list of 22 pieces of advice (in no particular order) that I would offer to 2022 design graduates:
At any point in your career (but especially when you are first starting out), your job is to make someone else’s job easier. Figure out how you can do that and do it every day.
Develop or adopt an organized file system for your personal and professional work. Make sure it’s easy to navigate, OS-agnostic, and things that are date-sensitive are easy to sort chronologically. Ruthlessly adhere to it. You will thank yourself forever.
Prioritize sleep, diet, and exercise. These fundamentals are general success strategies. Design organizations often have unhealthy cultures of effort brinksmanship rooted in suffering artist tropes. Try not to get ensnared in it.
Take lots of process pictures. File them away in your super-organized file system that you definitely set up. Use them in your portfolio later (if it’s professional work, make sure you get permission from your employer). If you can, have a decent camera at your desk at all times. Otherwise just use your phone. Check out Tim Hulford’s portfolio for an example of documentation consistently and beautifully done.
If you’re new to a team, you’re either a plus-one (actively adding value), a zero (neutral), or a minus-one (actively harmful). Aim to be at least a zero, and try your best not to be a minus-one.
Assume good intent. It makes working with people so much easier. Never attribute to malice what can be explained by incompetence or stupidity. See Hanlon’s Razor.
Deploy Occam’s Razor liberally. The simplest answer is usually the right one.
Peruse design blogs and Instagram accounts occasionally to keep up with trends, but don’t spend all your time steeped in them. If you do, you’ll find your work looks a lot like what you’re consuming all the time. Instead, start from first principles and let your design problem and insights inform the solution.
Slow is smooth and smooth is fast. Learn to do things methodically and well. Do not make speed your primary goal at first or you will develop sloppy habits.
Find one pen you really like. Just draw with that one type of pen and don’t waste time obsessing over your tools.
Put your time into getting really good at fast, low-fidelity, communicative sketching and high-fidelity 3D modeling and rendering. Everything else in-between (like marker rendering) is kind of a waste of time (unless you really enjoy it) in the modern design process.
Focus on design fundamentals - form, proportion, hierarchy, relationships, alignment. Most young designers don’t put enough effort into these basic elements of design, and instead focus on the details and the polish. There’s only so much lipstick you can put on a pig.
Checklists are the most powerful tool for getting things done and done right. Astronauts use them. So should you.
When preparing a presentation or a portfolio, say more with less. A picture is worth a thousand words. Too many pictures is word vomit. Use text sparingly. People don’t read. If you have more than one chart in a row, people’s eyes start to glaze over.
If you have the opportunity to lead a meeting, come prepared. Show up early to set up. Give appropriate context (but not too much), state your ideal outcome for the meeting, and talk through your prepared materials clearly and concisely. Save adequate time for questions and discussion. Sum up the meeting at the end.
Learn to write a good professional email. Use fewer words, short paragraphs, bulleted or numbered lists, and formatting to make your writing super skim-able. Learn to write a good subject line and don’t bury the lede.
Develop a concise version of your portfolio (ideally a website). Show only your best work, cut 90% of the text and charts and graphs and make sure each project has a good story. Use this to get the interview, then show a little more depth there. Ruthlessly cut work that doesn’t reflect what you can do now. Update and polish this throughout your career to avoid a big scramble when you need or want a new job.
Cultivate relationships with mentors. Good mentors will take you further than you can go on your own. Ideally your mentors are people who you work with and you have daily contact with, but not necessarily. People are often willing to help if you ask.
Ask for feedback regularly and get good at considering and implementing it. Most people are bad at giving and receiving feedback. Ask clarifying questions to make sure you get insights that are specific and actionable. Ask why something is good as much as why something is bad. Consider who is offering the feedback, and how much weight you should give it. Not all feedback is equal.
Avoid these two early career traps, and pick your first few jobs based on the potential growth trajectory.
Working at a big, prestigious corporation where either things are too slow or too political for you to have any real impact. Not all big-name companies are like this, but many are. If you have the option financially, avoid the temptation to collect a big paycheck and just coast and chill early on.
Working somewhere where you are the only designer. Many small companies or startups try to get design on the cheap by hiring new grads to be their “do everything” designer. You may have an inflated title and maybe even a good paycheck, but it’s unlikely you’ll find good design mentors and you’ll probably spend most of your time putting out fires.
Not every project will make it to the light of day. In fact, many won’t. A lot of things that you sink massive amounts of time and energy into will go nowhere. This can be disheartening, but no effort is ever wasted. You will always have your learning experiences.
Check-in with yourself regularly. Are you doing what you want to be doing? Are you happy with your choice of career, company, team, job? What gives you energy and what drains you? Adjust and refine throughout your career. If you’re not happy, don’t be afraid to course correct. If you’re in your early 20s, you have a long career head of you and you can afford to change your mind a lot.
Hope this was helpful.
Congratulations to all the new graduates!
Anson