<p>Published on <a href="https://blog.prototypr.io/5-designers-should-myths-how-designers-can-stop-these-mostly-terrible-expectations-from-slowing-9e272d40175d?source=rss----eb297ea1161a---4">| Prototyping: From UX to Front End &mdash; Medium</a> Lucas Glenn </p>
<h3>5 “designers should” myths: how designers can stop these mostly terrible expectations from slowing them down</h3>
<p>For better and worse there is plenty of advice online telling designers what they should and should not do. Designers should use this product, designers should stand up for themselves, designers should have these soft skills, designers should try this new project, designers should write, designers should code, designers should teach— to name a few examples. Dizzying. It leaves the young designer with excessive expectations, like an overburdened pack mule that whinnies, “this is all too, too much.”</p>
<p><img alt="" src="https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/648/1*dCry-7y89YWnsCECFBph7w.png">This designer pack mule is trying to do its job, carrying clients to their destinations. The designer pack mule has the heart of a stallion, but it’s slow-going when saddled with piles and piles of extra expectations.</p>
<h4>What should designers do?</h4>
<blockquote><p>Designers should design.</p></blockquote>
<p>That’s it.</p>
<p>As <a href="https://medium.com/u/41d2ecc0ae5">Mike Monteiro</a> of Mule Design Studio puts it: “Design is a job.” Designers should do their jobs. <a href="https://abookapart.com/products/design-is-a-job">Read his book</a>, for real.</p>
<p>Moreover, what’s best for one designer isn’t always good for another. When you hear advice, decide if it’s right for you.</p>
<h4>Who is telling designers what to do?</h4>
<p><em>Other designers</em> are mostly the culprit, and the highest percentage of them are designers that write for the design industry.</p>
<p>I read design-industry writing every day. Most of it gives me value. Most of it is very good. The “designers should” style article has been appearing in feeds for at least a few years now. And parody Twitter accounts like <a href="https://twitter.com/designersshould">@designersshould</a> and ridiculous side projects like <a href="http://shoulddesignersco.de/">shoulddesignersco.de</a> have thankfully added comic relief to the conversation.</p>
<p><img alt="" src="https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/1024/1*aeJhllkrbyyN8CFqc4NtSA.png"><em>Created by </em><a href="http://tsapl.in/"><em>Oleg Tsaplin</em></a><em> and </em><a href="http://stuartregan.com/"><em>Stuart Regan</em></a><em>, </em><a href="http://shoulddesignersco.de/"><em>shoulddesignersco.de</em></a><em> shuffles through questions in the format of “should designers…?”. You can even tweet your generated inquiries from the page.</em></p>
<h4>Find the “why” to dismantle the myths</h4>
<p>We’ll look at some common types of arguments in the ‘designers should’ category. A good way to decode “designer should” myths is to look for the truths writers are trying to get at. Ask <em>why</em> they’re giving the advice in the first place. Don’t oversimplify the conversation if you’re hoping to get the bottom of it. Boiling down an argument to something it isn’t, and then attacking it, is the classic Straw Man fallacy. Try to understand instead what each writer is trying to say in the layers beneath the headline.</p>
<p><img alt="" src="https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/648/1*H6sXJZAzfMJ5UpRkGzM0kQ.png"><em>Let’s have a go at dismantling some of this extra weight the designer pack mule is pulling around.</em></p>
<h3>1. Why is someone saying designers should use this technology, and that every designer should have one of these?</h3>
<h4>Companies want your money</h4>
<p>When someone says “designers should have X”, it’s the voice of a company trying to sell you something.</p>
<p>It won’t surprise you that ASUS says <a href="https://techinstyle.asus.com/mac-to-windows-guide/">designers should move from Mac to PC</a>. ASUS wants to sell their PCs to designers. It won’t surprise you that TeamTreehouse says <a href="http://blog.teamtreehouse.com/5-good-reasons-why-designers-should-code">designers should code</a>. TeamTreehouse wants to sell subscriptions to their learning platform. From an ethics standpoint, it’s a bit predatory. From a marketing standpoint, it’s “influencer”. From a business standpoint, it’s chill.</p>
<h4>Websites want your eyes and email addresses</h4>
<p>When a design website says “every web designer should try these 10 tools”, they are lying. They want you to click a thing, look at a page, or give them your email address. You know that. I know that. But we do it anyway.</p>
<p><img alt="" src="https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/336/1*wy2g_mbFh-1tvWkdrrTWZA@2x.png">It’s flashy and pretty lightweight, but we’ll get our clients to their destinations faster without it.</p>
<h3>2. Why would someone say designers should stand up for themselves?</h3>
<h4>They have good intentions</h4>
<p>Seasoned and mid-career designers are most often the ones saying you should stand up for yourself. They mean well. Designers at Pixelo think designers <a href="https://www.demilked.com/what-garphic-designers-should-say-no-to-pixelo/">should say no to free work</a>. It’s well intended.</p>
<p>Good intentions or not, “designers should” is a bad way to say it. Saying X ’should’ Y assigns expectations. Take it easy on X. Expectations have weight. Designers deal with unrealistic expectations every day. Do they need leaders and writers in their industry telling them they should do <em>more</em>, and do <em>different?</em></p>
<p>You should have professional boundaries. But, saying yes to free work <a href="https://blog.lingoapp.com/why-you-should-work-for-free-according-to-8-successful-creatives-c1b8ff807570">can lead designers to great things</a>.</p>
<p>Defending your decisions might help you during a pitch, but hurt them during a critique. Context is important. Quit with the catch-alls.</p>
<h4>They’re projecting</h4>
<p>Mid- and late-career designers who did not stand up for themselves in their early career will naturally tell early-career designers to do so. Avoid spec work. Don’t work for free. Don’t let project scope creep. Stand up for your decisions. Most of this is good advice, but the designers are talking to their younger, push-over selves. Not everything is about you. 😉</p>
<p><img alt="" src="https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/411/1*RkUQ_f78u6e5GpjZ-gmNcA@2x.png"><em>Those are someone else’s old design school textbooks, and they’re heavy as hell. Let’s toss it all. Wait wait wait hold on hold on hold on a second!— don’t throw out that Beastie Boys album!</em></p>
<h4>Standing up for yourself can be a very good thing</h4>
<p>It <em>is</em> a good thing to not be a pushover. It <em>is</em> a good thing not to sell your soul. It <em>is</em> a good thing to not lick the art director’s boots. But there are situations where standing up for yourself is inappropriate. Should you damage a relationship with a client over whether their internal newsletter headers are #2874A6 or #117864? No. Stand up for yourself when it matters. Don’t stand up for yourself every time you get the chance.</p>
<p>Here’s an expression I use often. As both a freelance and in-house designer it has kept my relationships intact:</p>
<blockquote><p>Is this the hill I want to die on?</p></blockquote>
<p>I do stand up for good design, researched decisions, and effective visuals . But as it turns out there a lot of hills I’m willing to die on. There are many smaller hills that aren’t worth it. Pick your battles.</p>
<h3>3. Why is someone saying designers should have X soft skill?</h3>
<h4>Designers need certain soft skills to be good at their jobs</h4>
<p>Every job description for a design role will have basic expectations for soft skills. Applicants should, 1) be able to work with feedback, 2) be good at communicating, and 3) be good at working with others. These are skills you need if you would like to design well. In most workplaces, these are skills you need if you would like to design at all.</p>
<p><img alt="" src="https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/342/1*IgTbncEoavwtr2VvCir2cA@2x.png">This gold can stay.</p>
<h4>They’re misattributing nice-to-haves as necessary</h4>
<p>If we look at Anthony Wood’s <em>Creative Boom</em> <a href="https://www.creativeboom.com/tips/20-essential-traits-of-a-successful-graphic-designer/">article on 10 essential designer soft-skills</a> and compare it with The Creative Group’s <em>HOW Design</em> <a href="http://www.howdesign.com/design-career/on-the-job/6-non-technical-job-skills-creatives-need/">article on 6 essential designer soft skills</a>, they overlap. Communication, teamwork, and discipline. Those are in your job description. You’ll need those. The skills that don’t overlap? You don’t need those. You won’t hear a business say, “all applicants must be curious, passionate, studious, driven, open, self-doubting, patient, diplomatic, and innovative”. And if you do, run far, far away from that field of red flags. Recruiters want <em>successful</em> designers. When recruiters are smart about it, they will be clear and realistic about what that success looks like. You don’t need to <em>be self-doubting</em> to successfully run a design team of a dozen people. You don’t need to <em>innovate</em> to be a successful in-house designer at a mom-and-pop sign shop. You don’t need to have <em>patience</em> to design a successful product with a team of three over a weekend. You don’t even need to <em>be passionate</em> as a skilled designer. I fully concede that all of those skills are very nice to have. But,<em> </em>should we expect designers to be every one of those soft criteria? Probably not.</p>
<h3>4. Why is someone saying designers should do things for their mental health, or try a specific project?</h3>
<h4>They said ’designers should’ when they meant ’people can’</h4>
<p>This comes up a lot. You might hear something like “designers should go to museums” or “designers should go outside”. What the author intends to say is that people benefit from history and fresh air. The writer is making a value-judgement. They’re saying you should do certain things to be a good or well-rounded person. The intended directive is “be a good person,” but it feels more like, “you need to work on your personality”. The advice is like your mom telling you to wear a sweater when you go outside. But you’re 38. And the breeze is negligible. It’s a cute, well-meaning suggestion.</p>
<p><img alt="" src="https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/384/1*pG-UU5dAk9kaauAtHmugCg@2x.png">The musty sweater looks comfy. A client would even enjoy it on a cold night. That lunch, though. I suspect your mom packed it in 1992.</p>
<h4>Doing something new can expand your creativity</h4>
<p>Writers say you should <a href="https://by.dialexa.com/5-reasons-why-user-experience-designers-should-have-personal-projects">take on a side project</a> or <a href="https://www.dashe.com/blog/instructional-design/learn-draw/">draw</a> because it’s healthy and creative. Most of the time, they’re right. But if you’re overworked or already learning a lot, you probably don’t need a new side-project. In that same vein, you don’t need to draw to be creative. It sounds obvious when you say it out loud:</p>
<blockquote><p>You don’t need people telling you how to be creative.</p></blockquote>
<h3>5. Why would someone say designers should write, code or teach?</h3>
<h4>To validate their own decisions</h4>
<p>In early 2017 I did a social experiment. I collected hundreds of online statements that began with ‘<em>real men should</em>’. Every day I performed a different statement, using Instagram to record and journal. “Real men should not wear skinny jeans,” “real men should eat meat”, “real men shovel the driveway in the dead of winter”. It was exhausting. For three months I sank my teeth into toxic generalizations about gender and masculinity.</p>
<p>It took weeks of researching ‘real men should’ comments in tweets, forum posts, and op-ed pieces. I found that beneath the surface writers were trying to <em>validate their actions</em>. More than that, they wanted to <em>validate their actions as masculine</em>. When a man said “real men should not wear skinny jeans”, they hoped to express, “I wear bootcut Levi’s, and am a real man.” When a man wrote “real men drink pink smoothies,” it implied, “I drink a strawberry health drink every morning and it does not compromise my masculinity”.</p>
<p>Likewise, when a designer says, “designers should work in sprints”, they might mean to say, “I work in sprints, and even though sprints are usually an engineering thing, I am a designer”. It’s a tool for validation in the design community, just like ‘real men should’ is a tool for validation in online men’s circles. Over 4.9k claps are commending Joshua Taylor <a href="https://medium.com/@joshuantaylor/designers-shouldn-t-code-they-should-study-business-dc3e7e203d39">for being a designer that has studied business</a>. That’s very validating! He probably feels good about studying business. He probably feels right to say other designers should do the same.</p>
<p><img alt="" src="https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/1024/1*veZ1FtRcz1tHJ2577nqFcA.png"></p>
<p>If a designer says designers should write, it validates their decision to write. And likewise with coding, teaching, and learning business.</p>
<h3>The benefits of myth-busting</h3>
<p>The benefit to dismantling unnecessary shoulds is that you can focus on doing your job. Your job is to solve problems that design can solve. The “shoulds” can shift from heavy expectations to light-weight possibilities. When those expectations are lifted, you can be the beautiful design stallion you’ve always known yourself to be.</p>
<p><img alt="" src="https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/648/1*Zgk9w-qMnGkBZEhoAErbIg@2x.png">You are amazing.</p>
<p>Hopefully, your new ability to scrutinize “designer should” myths liberates you from the expectations. Getting to the hearty <em>why</em> of each myth is a great way to do it.</p>
<h3>PS: Here’s how design-writers can avoid writing themselves into this trend</h3>
<p>You might be a design-writer yourself, or you might want to do it someday! Keep in mind, it’s not something all designers <em>should</em> do 🙃. For design-writers, here are some alternatives to telling other designers what they should and shouldn’t do.</p>
<h4>Share how designers can be better at their jobs</h4>
<p>Career advice is fantastic! Please, share how designers can grow as designers. Be mindful, however, of telling designers they should do something that isn’t their job at all.</p>
<h4>Finish the damned sentence</h4>
<p>Continue the “designers should” claim with a big, fat “if”. For example, “designers should learn to sell their decisions <em>if</em> they want to increase their job security”, or “designers should learn to code <em>if</em> they want to grow as web designers”. That’s cool, and it doesn’t burden designers with unnecessary expectations.</p>
<h4>Instead of telling designers they should do something, show them what they’re capable of</h4>
<p>A designer might need a reminder that they are capable of doing cool things that aren’t their job. A designer can host a youth workshop, turn their notes into a course, or automate daily web tasks. Even better than <em>telling,</em> is doing, documenting, and then <em>showing</em> designers they can do it!</p>
<p>That’s inspiring stuff. That’s valuable.</p>
<p>You can do that.</p>
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<p><a href="https://blog.prototypr.io/5-designers-should-myths-how-designers-can-stop-these-mostly-terrible-expectations-from-slowing-9e272d40175d">5 “designers should” myths: how designers can stop these mostly terrible expectations from slowing…</a> was originally published in <a href="https://blog.prototypr.io">Prototypr</a> on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.</p>


5 “designers should” myths: how designers can stop these mostly terrible expectations from slowing…

5 “designers should” myths: how designers can stop these mostly terrible expectations from slowing them down

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