Published on | Prototyping: From UX to Front End — Medium Anna Jane Matillano

Are you just starting out your design career? Let me share to you these 4 lessons that I should have learned when I was just starting out:

1. Past is past. It is quite well known of a saying that a person should free himself up from his past failures and learn to move on with his present life.

But I never thought that freeing oneself from past achievements is as equally as important. I used to be an achiever back in my college days. That type of student no one would like except her fellow grade-conscious friends. I was active in our college organizations, and I always won inter-school competitions. Oh what a big-headed of a fresh-graduate I turned out to be. It was not until I experienced my first rejection in a job application that I came to realize my need of evaluating myself more honestly.

Real-world has a whole new level of competency compared in a class-room environment and I will be left behind if I let myself stuck in my past achievements. What matters now is my current value and what I can offer at this point in time. Potential will remain as potential if I will not work on them and turn them into tangible assets.

2. Learn from everyone. “Oh I can also do that.” “Hmm, I already know that” “I know, I know, I know”.

These are the usual thoughts that spring up in my mind whenever I see other designs or whenever I hear somebody talks about something I am familiar with. And what did this attitude gained me? Nothing. I missed the chance of learning something from that designer I thought I was better at, and sabotaged myself from learning what that other person had to say because I already decided to stop listening to him thinking that I already knew what he has to say. I also realized that I used to brush-off thoughts from a junior or younger person, thanks to my “Hey I am older than you” mentality. Most often than not, younger people think more creatively than we do and surely we can learn from them too, if only we lend our ears to them.

I never thought how important listening is until I started doing it, though unconsciously, a couple of months ago, and benefited a great deal from it. I think my point can be summarized by this famous quote from the great lecturer, Ralph Waldo Emerson:

“Shall I tell you a secret of a true scholar? It is this: every man I meet is my master in some point and in that I learn from him.”

But please be mindful not to repeat the mistakes of those people we are learning from. We know where they failed, let us use that knowledge, use it to our advantage and choose a different path with a greater chance of avoiding where they failed. It’s not 100% guaranteed, but it is better than not trying.

3. Start small. We always have that dream of starting something big that will forever change the entire course of human history. Or really, we just wanted to start our own blog!

But how many of us fall into the trap of not being able to start anything because we are too busy planning things out and thinking, thinking, and thinking. This is the lesson I learned: Start small. I realized that it was such a wrong motive to start something hoping that it would soon impact the whole world.

Having my mindset on helping other less experienced designers, rather than impacting the whole world, I actually was able to start something! And this article is my starting point. I don’t intend this to go viral nor do I even expect a handful of designers to read this. But I wanted to share them anyways with that mindset of helping someone out, however small this act seems to be.

4. Consistency is the key. This one is so obvious that everyone knows about it. Just observing the well-known designers, bloggers, athletes, or anyone who are the cream of the crop. Why do they excel? Well, they practice a lot, and they are very consistent.

Based on experience, I was able to build a good habit of reading because of consistency. I started small with reading only a few lines of tips and tricks each day, then articles each day, and now books (but not everyday ofcourse, atleast once every 2 months. I am still working on it). As of today, I read atleast 2–5 design articles in a day without having to force myself anymore. (By the way, I am sharing some free reading resources at the end of this article.)

As of the writing of this article, I am aiming to have consistency in practicing rapid-prototyping so as to develop my problem-solving, visual design, and front-end skills. My aim is to produce an interactive prototype atleast twice a month.

I know, easier said than done right? But now I am more aware of my past failures at least and am learning a lot from them. I am committing myself in applying all these lessons, especially consistency, to my career (and in day-to-day life) in hope that whatever I am doing, I will become better and better on it each day. Talk is cheap, and I hope not that I just talk and talk but not do anything.

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So, those are the 4 invaluable lessons I have learned after much contemplation on what I could have done better in the early years of my design career. Whenever we see great designers out there, let us always remember that they never achieved that awesomeness overnight. Surely they worked hard and they were consistent on it.

Free reading resources:

UXPin — They give away free ebooks ranging from SDLC best-practices to interaction design.

Designbetter.com — They have free ebooks you can read in their website about product design, design thinking, and design leadership.

Medium — Learn and get inspired from curated articles written by people around the world. Here are some of the few people/group I follow in Medium when it comes to design:

Today, free resources are really vast and seem so limitless, thanks to the internet! Let’s take advantage of it. The resources are out there, but unless we access them, it is no benefit for us.

I hope you learned something today from this article. 🙂 Let us hope for the best! — Aj

Just so you know, this is my first time to write and I never thought of writing before. But what motivated me into writing is this: “There will always be someone less experienced than I am. So why not write and be of help?” I hope that this would be the beginning of countless writings I will do in hope that somehow, some less experienced designer out there will benefit from them. 🙂

This post was originally posted in my blog.

4 Lessons I Should Have Learned in the Beginning of My Design Career was originally published in prototypr on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

4 Lessons I Should Have Learned in the Beginning of My Design Career

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