Published on | Prototyping: From UX to Front End — Medium lukasz lysakowski

Specialization vs Experimentation & Your Design Career

As a mentor of graduates from college design programs and bootcamps, I am often asked a similar question.

How should I find a design job? Should I work full-time or freelance?

Since I mentor in the Bay Area, I also hear an addendum to the question.

Should I work at a startup, an enterprise tech company, or elsewhere?

Recent graduates of design programs frequently ask these questions as breaking into design is not easy.

Why?

The San Francisco Bay Area has many design positions. At the same time it can be difficult to be hired into an early–stage tech startup.

Early–stage startups have to be picky. These startup have limited funding and limited time to bring an idea into fruition. Initially they need the designer to execute. A startup is looking for a person that can solve their needs.

Often an early–stage startup will only hire a single designer. This person handles all things design. In return there is no room for mentoring.

So how does a new designer break into design and define a career?

Introduction

Initially try to accumulate as many different experiences as possible. Try out as many gigs and jobs as possible, as it’s important to have a broad range of job experiences. As each job allows, you to gain knowledge. Knowledge ranges from execution to collaboration to strategic thinking.

To gain knowledge, designers should approach their careers like a Human Centered Design exercise. HCD is a framework that prioritizes testing many hypothesis before defining a solution. As a designer, one should try out many options before settling on a speciality.

HCD process illustration from IDEO

How to implement design into your design job

You start with the goal of becoming a designer. Yet, you might not know what type of designer you want to be. To find your path, you first need to discover:

What are different design roles
What type of design interests you
What environment best suits you
What level of commitment is the best for you

What environment best suits you

Design jobs are found across a few different business categories:

Agency/Studio
In–house
Startup
Independent

Each of these options provide learning opportunities for new designers. These openings allow you to try out different roles and discover what suits you best. So lets review our options and experiences they provide.

Agency / Studio

Right now, startups and technology companies are the primary narrative in design. As such, agencies and studios can be overlooked by new designers.

Yet agencies and studios can provide new designers a lot of different experiences. Agencies offer multiple services that range from strategy, identity, design, and development. Studios tend to specialize in one aspect.

The business model for agencies and studios is based on providing services to clients. As such its often necessary for agencies to have simultaneous clients and projects. All the different clients can result in an agency and studio having a lot of different learning opportunities.

The right agency/studio will allow you to work on a lot of different projects. You will learn a lot by working with different clients, projects, verticals, and deliverables. You will learn the most important of element of design, how to design for different context and requirements. The more design projects that you can work on, the more you will learn on the job. As a new designer, the best way to learn is to be paid to learn.

The second most important aspect of design is selling. You have to be able to sell an idea to a client. Agencies and clients succeed by being able to produce great work and sell it. Selling to clients is hard. At an agency/studio you will learn how to work with and sell to a lot of different people. These are skills that are fundamental to your career.

A larger agency can also provide mentorship as they tend to be hierarchical. This structure is beneficial for mentorship as it accommodates new designers into the business. Creative and art directors provide project based mentorship. As a new designer, you will be able to receive guidance.

Agencies and studios also have negatives. It’s possible to get stuck in a rut in an agency. It’s possible that you keep getting assigned to the same client, same type of project, or same kind of design execution. If that happens, it’s crucial to inform your design manager. Work with your manager, there might be a business need for you to be assigned to the role. Work on creating a plan to transition into another role. If nothing works and your still doing the same-old design then its time for you to gracefully find a new gig.

Capital One Office, Photo via Great Place to Work

In–house

In–house design teams have become a great option for new designers.

In the past, in–house design teams were primarily tasked with maintaining existing design systems. Identity systems were designed by outside agencies and in–house teams implemented them as their guidelines. Furthermore, many companies perceived design as a coat of paint.

Luckily, most companies no longer perceive design as decoration. Companies now understand that design is integral to success. Apple as a design lead company resurrected itself from near death to become one of the most valuable companies on Earth. As a result, companies understand, design creates value.

Design creates value.

In the last several years global consultancies, banks, and technology companies acquired or built out internal design teams.

Accenture acquired Fjord
Capital One acquired Adaptive Path
Deloitte acquired Heat and Flow Interactive
Facebook acquired Hot Studios and Teehan+Lax
Square acquired 80/20

The list above is not comprehensive, more examples are found in the 2016 Design in Tech report.

IBM is now one of the largest design companies with 1,300 on-staff designers! IBM also invested $100 million into its internal design initiative, yikes!! Airbnb, Facebook, Google, and Salesforce built their own internal design teams. These teams have been responsible for raising the bar of design for all designers. These in-house teams are also sharing knowledge and resource to the entire design community. Teams that improve the design community are good bets to have a culture of internal design mentorship.

Negatives for in–house design is similar to agencies. It’s possible to get stuck in a rut by staying on the same project, team, or vertical. Once again if you feel stuck, voice it to your manager, and if nothing changes it will be time for a new gig.

Google Trends for design agency / studio vs atartup searches

Startups

Many people including designers now want to start their careers at a startup. It’s understandable as startups are frequently headliners in the media. Startups are the new cool kid. Even my previous list of in–house teams are technology companies that started as startups.

As designers we are driven by the idea of creating a fresh new design. We still have a core belief that we should be able to own and sign the entire design work. As such it would seem that startups are the ideal canvas for our design success.

Yet, I caution designers without on–the–job experience from joining an early–stage startup. An early–stage startup is company that is looking to hire its first designer. As mentioned before, you will handle all things design. In return there is no room for mentoring. The days will be long and all consuming.

Often you will be on your own without fellow designers to provide feedback. Also you will have to defend your decisions to a team of engineers. The engineers will often be more senior and opinionated. As such you need to be able to quantitatively and qualitatively back up your design decisions. Often this is a skill learned by a combination of hard knocks and mentorship.

Am I saying that new designers should not join a startup? The answer is, no. I believe that a new designer should join a startup that already has a head of design. You can join as the second or third designer but don’t be the first. Take the opportunity to learn from the head of design.

Even as the second or third designer, you will have many oppurtunities to lead a design from start to finish. Even better, you will lead while receiving feedback and oversight. Good design directors don’t tell you what to do. Instead they guide you in the right direction. As a new designer, you will hopefully end up with a portfolio of successful live projects. A portfolio of good work reflects well and leads to opportunities.

Negatives of startups are like downsides of agencies and in–house teams. You can get stuck in a rut and stop learning. As a solo designer at an early stage startup, you are responsible for all design, marketing, and product. The pace will be fast and the hours long. If you do not have a lot experience the environment can be stressful and lead to burnout.

Independent

Sometimes starting as an independent designer might be the first step to a design career. As a new graduate, you still might not have a strong enough portfolio to get hired. Your class work might not have enough depth or diversity.

A lack of depth could be that your portfolio projects are not fully developed. Maybe your examples stop right before prototyping or user testing. A lack of diversity might be a result of your examples being limited to mobile apps for consumers. As a new graduate it will be important for you to work on projects that expand beyond your class work.

How does one find initial opportunities? Ask friends, friends of friends, or family if they need design work. A previous way for designers to gain experience was by creating design work for a friend’s band. A new way for designers to get experience is to help out on friends app or website projects. It’s only becoming easier to build an app or website. Yet these projects still need identity, marketing, and product design.

Also you don’t have to only design for other people. You can use the opportunity to design a project for yourself. With this approach you can create a fully thought out use case while launching your own project. Also don’t forget, your portfolio is a project too. Your portfolio UI / UX choices are also part of the hiring process.

Sooner or later, you will start exchanging your design service for money. Once you this that point, it will be necessary for you to level up your game and work with contracts. Contracts protect both parties as they document the agreed upon deliverables, schedules, and payments. If you build up enough solid work as an independent contract, you can also consider setting up your own design studio.

Here are a few practical tips to getting started as independent designer.

A free guide to a freelance contract with additional services for time–tracking and invoicing.

The Freelance Contract: A Free Service Agreement for You & Your Clients.

Overview for fulltime salary and freelance rates by field and location.

Design Salary Guide – by Coroflot

Read Mike Monteiro’s guide to the business of design. Tips for contracts, working with clients, and selling design.

Design Is a Job by Mike Monteiro

Parting thoughts

As a new designer, experiment with your design career. Don’t specialize early in your career. Try out different design fields and companies. Treat your career like a design exercise, gather input, test options, and work towards your own solution.

Try starting your career in agencies or in-house. Agencies offer learning with a lot of different projects and mentorship too. Also, In-house teams offer mentorship and multiple oppurtunities. Once you have some experience, if you are still interested, try out a startup too.

Also if you want more inspiration of why volume over perfection is important, read the story of the pottery teacher who split her class in half.

The Best Way to Learn Something? Make a Lot of Pots

I greatly appreciate feedback. If you are agree or disagree, please feel free to add your constructive feedback. If you like, please don’t forget to heart.

New Designers, Try Out as Many Gigs as Possible was originally published in Prototyping: From UX to Front End on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

New Designers, Try Out as Many Gigs as Possible

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