Written June 5, 2020
Hey, I'm Jarrod. Usually this is a design newsletter. But people are in the streets protesting. I've taken time to listen, and now it's time to speak. Some if it might still be wrong, but here's what I've learned so far.
Dear people of color: I'm listening, I'm with you, and I'm trying to do better.
Dear fellow white people:
Last October I moved from the city to the suburbs for better schools for my kids.
Often, “better schools” or “better neighborhood” are white-people-code for “mostly white people living there”.
Knowing this, my wife and I (both white) debated for over a year about whether moving for better schools was wrong. Eventually, we chose to move. We decided, when you love someone, you do everything you can for them. And we love our kids.
My family needed something, and I was in a position of power to make it happen. So I did.
In the end, the decision we made isn't the point. This doesn't excuse my actions in any way, but:
White privilege is not just moving to the suburbs. It's being able to.
Just as I did, my kids will grow up going to nice schools, have every opportunity available, and will never fear for their safety when they see a police officer.
And that is exactly the kind of life they deserve. It's the kind of life every kid and every person deserves.
The problem is that I can have that life but some people can't. It's that having a comfortable life is so much easier for me. It's that some people don't even have the chance to move out to the suburbs (or wherever they want). It's that some people in our old neighborhood might be stuck there, but I wasn't.
I am still trying to understand if it was wrong for me to move out to the suburbs. If the wrongness is in that I have things I don't deserve and did not earn fairly, or purely in that people of color don't have the same opportunities and suffer because of broken systems. Or both.
And I am still trying to process how disgusting it is that the same systems that made it easy for me to move are the same systems that cause the deaths of Black people.
(I know my readers live all over the world, sorry for the American-centric view, but I hope this still applies to you.)
America was built on the ideal of freedom from persecution; no matter where you come from, what you look like, or what god you do or don't praise, you are free. We fought wars over this exact issue. We fought and bled for this human right. Here, you are safe. You can have that nice house in the suburbs, no matter who you are.
Or that's how I had thought it works. But it's not.
Americans are being persecuted, right now and for far too long. And white people like me have done nothing about it.
I am so incredibly ashamed at my part in this, and even more so that white people do not see violence against our Black neighbors and fellow Americans as our problem. That's wrong. We should all be ashamed that the laws and systems we made not only put George Floyd in harm's way, but directly caused his death and countless others.
And we should be ashamed that we allow politics to get in the way of the safety of anyone. Our politics have become so divisive that we can't feel empathy for a person in pain if it threatens our political stance, and that is so very wrong.
This moment of protest is not about politics or who you voted for. It's about every person's right to live free from fear and persecution. Those terrible things aren't supposed to happen here. America is supposed to be better than this. But they have happened here, every day, for hundreds of years.
I stand up and act for the sake of Black lives not just because of the American ideal, but because it is right.
How dare we claim to believe in freedom while we allow these terrible things to happen at our own front door. How dare we claim faith in God's love when we allow such pain and suffering in our own communities. How dare we put the value of storefronts and cars before the value of human lives.
People of color are hurting, and I helped cause it. We white people made a system that favors us, and it is wrong. Now it's time to change our hearts and our systems, rip out every trace of prejudice, and let go of our advantages. Nothing else is enough.
I am angry at myself. And I am angry at the way the world works. I don't blame anyone for wanting to burn it all down. And as I sit here with an audience of tens of thousands reading my words, I cannot imagine how it must feel to face this your whole life with no one to listen to you.
If you're a white person feeling attacked, remember: this protest is not about Democrat vs Republican or Black vs White. It's about our fellow Americans dying. It is about very real pain.
This protest is about choosing to be who we say we are.
Black Lives Matter. Start acting like it.
—Jarrod Drysdale
Don’t be a solo founder, they said. It’s too hard. You’ll give up without someone to keep you accountable. You’ll burn out. You’ll never launch. It’s too much for one person. It’s too risky and isolating. It’s too ambitious.
I ignored them, and went on to launch 2 software products, self publish 4 books, and earn hundreds of thousands in product revenue completely independently.
There’s a lot of mis-information out there about what it’s really like to start and run a business on your own. And most of it is by people who’ve never done it—not really.
So for my next product, I’m sharing behind the scenes of what it’s really like.
Spoilers: the hardest part isn’t getting to launch day; juggling marketing, design, and coding; or any of the other things they say. The hardest part is the decision making.
I’m sharing every decision I make in this new adventure and why. I hope you’ll learn what it’s truly like to build a product on your own—and not only that it’s completely realistic but that it’s possible to do without sacrificing the rest of your life.
My new business might fail like any other business, but not because I’m independent. Only because of the quality of my work and the decisions I make.
Come see what happens and what it’s really like over at Product In Public. You’ll learn a bit about product design, code, and business right alongside me.
Dear designers/marketers (and innocent person reading this note),
So, you’re doing customer interviews and user research, good for you! You’ve joined the fold of responsible, empathetic, and effective product design and marketing professionals.
But you sound like a robot when you email me. Here are some questions from user testing emails & surveys I’ve received just this week:
“What’s your most important front of office tool?”
(I have no clue what a front of office tool is.)
“Which of the following was the main feature that caused you to reactivate your account?”
(None of them are features I even use in the product.)
“What are your biggest pain points right now?”
(I don’t even know how to begin answering that. Wait, actually can you help me get my kids to take longer naps? Is that what you mean?)
First, you’re asking the wrong questions. Try asking questions like a normal person instead of a marketer or researcher. Ask: “How did work go this week?” “How did you use our tool this month?” “Did you make the progress you were hoping to? Why?” You’ll get much more usable answers.
Second, please stop asking me what my biggest pain points are. No one outside of your industry knows what you mean by “pain points”.
Not only is your jargon confusing, I have to do a lot of work to answer your survey. You’re asking me to do your job for you by distilling my own life down into little marketing factoids. And I kind of resent that.
Yeah, I know that asking better questions means you’ll actually have to read every response. You’ll have to try to understand, read between the lines, and then draw conclusions. Just like in any conversation. But if I’m taking the time to do this, can’t you too?
And for the record, if you email me and ask what my biggest pain points are, I’ll just reply:
“My biggest pain point is people asking me what my pain points are.”
Yours in user empathy,
Jarrod Drysdale
It’s crazy how often I work on a project where the specs change, are unclear, or don’t even exist.
It’s a big percentage of my projects—even though I’m perhaps overly thorough when planning my projects and defining their scope. I tend to be that stubborn person on every project asking “where are the specs?”
If there are no specs, I volunteer to write them. If people say no, I write them anyway, put them in my contract, and reference them during the project. Yeah, I told you I’m stubborn about specs, but I do this because leaving details to be figured out later can have disastrous consequences.
But sometimes project details still change, no matter how hard I work to make those specs and stick to them.
When I have a good relationship with the client, changes are not as big of a deal as they sound. We trust each other and can limit the fallout of these kinds of scope changes because we understand one another.
Other times it can be pretty frustrating. As a designer, I want to have all the info I need to make a great design. And when I find a great solution to the challenge, I want to defend it. It’s just my natural instinct to fight for the best idea (and it doesn’t necessarily have to be my idea).
But I’m realizing that there’s often a pretty good reason why the specs end up changing. No matter how clearly you describe the thing you’re going to design, many people just don’t get it until they see it. Sometimes our job isn’t to go design something specific—it’s to figure out what specific thing we need to design.
Research, specs, etc are supposed to help us determine what the object we’re designing is, how it should work, and provide constraints for how it looks.
But, seeing the object is often the only way some people will understand what it is. Descriptions aren’t enough. Research, specs, and all the artifacts we produce during the early phases of the design process aren’t enough for non-designers to understand what the hell we’re talking about. They need to see it first.
It’s endlessly frustrating to realize there’s new information after I’ve already created the design. The realization that my solution is wrong because I was given the wrong problem is frustrating.
But I’m starting to realize that part of my job is to figure out which problem I’m solving. And sometimes, that means solving the wrong problems a few times before I figure out the real issue.
And yes, sometimes that means I produce designs I end up throwing away. I’ve written a lot in the past about how to avoid “design waste” and fight against needless revisions (I even wrote a whole damn book about it).
No designer wants to be a mindless graphics production machine. And we need to set clear boundaries and expectations about what our jobs are.
But I’ve begun to see my designs differently; not as rigid plans to enforce but as malleable approximations of what I want to create. I’m opening up to the idea of changing my designs at more points during my process.
I’m even exploring alternative design tools that have collaborative features by default, which I never would have considered before. I’m even building a new tool for improving design implementation.
I have also cautiously tested other techniques to get input on design direction much sooner—like sketching alongside clients or developers, sending examples, and even wire framing (which I’ve always been very hesitant to do because it seems like needless extra work).
These techniques and opening up my process to input so far have allowed me to avoid the doomsday scenarios of projects becoming twice as large, getting delayed by months, or crashing and burning because of unclear specs. Using exploration as part of the process and writing specs later on, even after the contract is signed, has actually kind of worked. (Can you tell I’m hesitant to admit that?)
A crazy thing happens after you move past worrying about change requests and start to view the design process as an opportunity for exploration—you realize that opening up the design process to be more flexible is better for the design. Because sometimes the problem isn’t obvious. Sometimes research doesn’t reveal everything and you don’t know what the specs should be. Sometimes you need just any starter design at all to show people, test it out, and then create a real design you’ll actually use.
No designer wants to hear this. It’s a bitter pill. For me too.
I still catch myself getting frustrated when I have to change directions during a design project. And while it’s tempting to try a little trick of self deception and say my personal satisfaction in the project isn’t as important as the outcome my work delivers, I know that when I’m personally invested my designs deliver better outcomes. So we can’t tune out that inner voice telling us it sucks when we have to scrap a design. That voice is important to listen to.
And frankly I don’t wanna play the empathy card and say how other people feel about the design is more important than how I feel about it. I made the damn thing! It’s MINE! 😅
When I examine that feeling of frustration and ask why I feel so stubborn and protective, usually the underlying reasons are that I feel embarrassed that I made the wrong design, angry that someone wasted my time, and/or disappointed that something I’m really proud of won’t get used.
But on the other hand, there are times where I have gotten my way. Where I pushed a design through and convinced everyone to use it anyway—when we followed the original plan no matter what.
And you know what usually happened? The design was kind of a dud. And the disappointment of seeing that design fail was greater than the disappointment I felt about other designs I never got to use.
While I care a lot about the designs I create, I also care a lot about them working well. I might even care more about seeing my designs accepted, appreciated, and used than I do about using the first idea I fell in love with.
And that changes how I see projects that don’t have specs or how I feel when I have to scrap a design concept.
Because when I really think about it, making a great design that people love—even if I have to throw away some work I’m proud of to accomplish that—IS getting my way.
Creativity is inherently risky, or so people think. But when you reach a certain level of skill in a creative profession, you learn that’s not always true.
As a designer for 15+ years, I can produce lovely designs that I really don’t give a damn about. I can go with a design approach I know will get quick approval or that won’t rock the boat for the intended audience.
Or, I can choose to invest myself into my work and chase a greater sense of accomplishment. For some projects, I do push myself to do something daring, different, and a little risky.
When I go the creative route and take a risk, sometimes it backfires. Sometimes people email me and say “that design made my eyes water” (yes, that really happened, and I don’t fault the person who said it). And because of that I might hesitate a little more next time.
But there’s really no relief either way. When I go the safe route, there’s still this nagging doubt in the back of my mind that I could have done more—that I wasted a chance to do something amazing.
I oscillate between these approaches and chastise myself no matter which I take.
If I play it safe, I call myself a sellout who is too scared to take a stand for my perspective.
If I go creative, I call myself overly self-indulgent and impractical. A fool for taking a risk when I could have had a sure thing.
So this week I sat down to decide once and for all: which is the best approach, creative or safe?
I wrote a pro-con list. I categorized past designs by whether they were creative or safe and wrote down how successful they were. And I found something that’s going to disappoint you:
Out of dozens of projects, the safe approaches almost always did better, with only 1 or 2 exceptions.
Disappointing, right? Don’t worry, I’m not going to tell you to start playing it safe all the time.
When I looked back over that list of projects, I realized that the safe approaches were about other people while the more creative approaches were more often about me. Safe approaches worked well because I was thinking about how other people would react instead of what I wanted to do.
The few exceptions—the creative projects with good outcomes—really didn’t outperform the safe designs either.
I hate that realization so much. I want to do work that’s fulfilling for me, and the evidence seems to be saying I shouldn’t. I am so tired of people telling me about user research, UX, and job stories. Sometimes I just want to sit down and create something I love.
But when I look back on those creative projects, they weren’t as satisfying as I thought they’d be. If anything, what I remember most is how many of them failed and how the temporary feeling of shipping something I liked was quickly eclipsed by the poor reception.
We’re creative professionals, and for some of us the whole reason we got into this was to do fulfilling work we love. The idea we can’t do that—that we have to play it safe—is disheartening.
But when I use design work as a creative outlet, it often comes back to bite me. This is a lesson I keep having to relearn. Design is usually more effective when it’s based on research and data rather than my personal preferences and vision.
More and more I feel that this intellectual approach to design is winning out over the more emotional, creative approach that got me into this profession in the first place, and it’s sad.
Sometimes I think “Well, I’ll just save that creative energy for another outlet or pursuit”, but that’s even more sad. Design was supposed to be that outlet. But design isn’t always the job I thought it would be.
I’m not writing this article to tell you to play it safe, stifle your creative energy, and avoid risk. On the contrary—I want to tell you the exact opposite! I want to tell you to get out there and make daring, amazing things.
But I want you to succeed, and I know that design isn’t art, as much as we sometimes want it to be.
I also know that if we designers all played it safe, we’d all collectively be missing out on great things. Those few exceptional, special designs—you know the ones—came from that daring spirit to do it anyway and the refusal to let failure bring creativity to a halt.
So what do we do with this conundrum? I don’t have a good answer. I think we keep wrestling. We keep testing out those daring ideas when we can, and play it safe when the stakes are high. We keep looking for balance, if there is such a thing.
We choose to acknowledge both approaches for their merits, and maybe finally stop calling ourselves failures on every design because it’s either not creative enough or not safe enough. Maybe we can just use the approach we deem best, and let that be enough.
I for one am not willing to give up on my creative concepts for good. They don’t all work out, but I still want to try to find the few that do.
But I certainly don’t mind an easy win, now and again, and there’s nothing wrong with that at all.
Check out my latest risky design, Mod&Dot. It’s a browser DevTools extension for capturing design edits then sharing them with your team. If you sign up for the waiting list, I’ll know the risk I took on this design was worth it.
I’m a unicorn. Yeah, one of those people who can design and code. And I have a confession:
Man, is it exhausting.
I make it even worse by adding additional skills to the unicorn equation like writing, audio and video production, animation, marketing, and more. Gah it’s ridiculous.
A friend once said about me “Jarrod is one of those people who is infuriatingly good at everything.”
Do you even know how much pressure that puts on me? Man, I need a drink.
But I think this feeling is pretty common amongst designers.
Designers these days are under tons of pressure. To be a designer, you pretty much have to at least try to be a unicorn designer-coder. Don’t tell me you don’t feel that pressure. Everyone says you have to. But it doesn’t stop at coding. Every client and employer expects you to be able to do anything they could possibly imagine needing.
We even invent new catch-all titles for our expanding responsibilities as designers: UX Designers and now the ever-important “Product Designer”—capitalized, dammit! The definition is: we fix anything for everyone. It’s designer as polymath and no one thinks it’s even slightly unrealistic.
Now it’s not enough just to be good at design. You have to know how to code. Oh, and there’s more! Product designers need to be business experts too. And they need to be great writers. And good at doing customer interviews. And researchers. And marketers. And, and, and, and, and…
It can be pretty exhausting. Why can’t designers just be designers anymore?
I’ve always been a huge advocate of the idea that designers do more than make pretty pictures—that our work is more meaningful and valuable than just aesthetics. But it seems like the rest of the world is catching on to this and now they’re saying:
“If you wanna be a designer, you have to do everyone else’s job for them.”
It’s insane. It’s unfair. And, did I mention it’s exhausting?
I personally like being a generalist and getting to do all kinds of different work. It’s exhausting sometimes, and when I do get to really focus on my core specialty of design, it’s nice. But on the other hand I do enjoy being a problem solver for my clients. It can be very fulfilling. So I personally want to keep being a generalist unicorn cool guy.
But not everyone wants to be a unicorn, and that should be ok.
While there is a big cultural problem in the design industry where we pressure people into doing work they don’t enjoy (and the disastrous consequences), it’s also an issue of the tools we use—especially when it comes to bridging the gap between design and code.
To design websites, there are only two options for tools:
There’s nothing in between. You can’t just dip your toes into code enough to do your job as a designer—you have to dive in, or just stay out of the pool completely.
Every design tool acts like designers are either terrified of the idea of writing code or that we’re trying to become developers.
And perhaps because development tools are becoming more abstract and complex, it’s harder than ever to work with developers and contribute something to the team unless you can get up and running with all those advanced tools.
A designer who freelances or works on numerous projects might have to get up and running with all kinds of different technology stacks and be expected to contribute to them all.
If I tally up all the coding tools, libraries, and languages used by all my clients, that I am expected to use, the count is staggering: Ruby, Rails, Git, Php, WordPress, Node, Angular, jQuery, .NET, Python, npm, Less, Sass, Javascript, Coffeescript, jQuery, and more. And that’s just all I can think of off the top of my head.
As a web designer I’m expected to know and use more programming tools than some developers might know.
This paints the “designers should code” argument in a totally different light. And, it starts to sound unreasonable, to say the least.
This is a problem I care about—and in some ways I have personally added to the pressure that designers do more non-design tasks—so I’ve decided to start working on this problem.
I want to create a more moderate way to bridge the gap between design and code. To ensure designers can provide their full value and perspective without having to master a second profession of coding.
And I think this new approach requires drawing a line: “Design stops here.”
We’ve gotten carried away with what we include under the umbrella of design. It’s a damn big umbrella, and I think we’re seeing signs it’s starting to fold back up right on top of our heads.
We are losing our identities as designers. Design concerns are being diluted and replaced by other things.
User research is not design.
Programming is not design.
Marketing is not design.
Writing is not design.
All of these are separate professions. They are all extremely important, but they are not design.
Design is creating the form and function. How it looks and how it works. Not researching how people want it to look and work. Not making it work. Not selling it. Not explaining it. Just defining how it looks and works.
All of that information from all those other fields should absolutely inform the designer’s work. And it’s reasonable that a designer should understand those other fields a little bit in order to use the information to make an even better design. Maybe even do a little bit of each.
But being a great designer shouldn’t require being an expert developer, researcher, marketer, and writer too.
You shouldn’t have to do other people’s jobs just to do your job as a designer.
So, I think it’s time to draw that line. Design stops here.
I am making a new design tool that will help us designers draw that line. To design websites, you don’t need to be an expert developer.
This new design tool will help designers skip past all the complex coding tools we have to use just to change the font size on a website, for example.
I want to help designers get back to being designers again. Not everyone wants to be a unicorn like me, and I want to help those people show their full value as designers.
Introducing Mod&Dot, a new design tool I’m creating.
Click here to see how it works and reserve your early access spot
A while back a specific fantasy started circulating in the solopreneur / bootstrapped product / maker communities:
You are an authority. Teach everything you know. You’re already an expert at something, and all you have to do in order to start a great business is start teaching what you know.
I bought it hook, line, and sinker.
Fast forward, and I’ve written 4 books, 2 courses, and more articles than I can count.
And honestly, all that stuff about “anyone can be a teacher” is a load of bullshit.
After all of those efforts to teach, I’m still not that good at it. In fact, I’m pretty bad.
A while back, my wife Rachel wanted to learn to play guitar. I have played guitar on and off for 20 years. I’m not as good at guitar as that makes me sound, but I know a little. So naturally, I volunteered to give her a few lessons.
But after the first lesson, she refused to keep learning from me. She almost quit learning guitar altogether because I was stressing her out. I pressured her to play guitar my way: for the sake of artistic and personal expression rather than just as a fun hobby of learning songs and singing along. In the first lesson. I was a bad teacher and I was unintentionally discouraging her from doing something awesome.
Later when I was writing my first design course, I brought in some early access students and realized my shortcomings as a teacher—I put way too much pressure on students, just like I had with my wife’s guitar lesson. So, I worked with professional educators to polish up the courses and make them less intimidating and easier to use.
Pretty much every company, blogger, product maker, etc is doing content marketing right now. Practically everyone on the internet is masquerading as a teacher.
And in this time where everyone is trying to be a teacher, be careful about who you listen to.
Teaching is extremely difficult. It takes an incredible amount of patience, empathy, and skill to be a teacher. Teaching isn’t something you can master overnight just because it sounds like a good way to run your marketing.
All those people and companies trying to be teachers are doing it for business purposes. They teach to sell. They don’t necessarily teach to teach. And that means some of them are bad teachers. I was one myself , and I’ve certainly found my fair share of bad teachers.
In high school I had a physics teacher who inspired me to learn about science, and that inspiration persists to this day (thanks Mr. Roble!). I also had a history teacher who forced us to memorize facts and dates, which gave me a bad impression of history that also persists—I still avoid the history channel, historical fiction, and any kind of history if I can. And that’s kind of a shame.
A good or bad teacher can make all the difference.
And when everyone is pretending to be a teacher, there’s a good chance you’re getting inaccurate bad impressions or that someone is steering you wrong somewhere. Not because they’re trying to do harm, but just because they don’t realize it.
Being an expert in something doesn’t mean you can teach it. In fact, instructional designers and professional educators—who are trained in working alongside experts to create courses and training—call people like me “subject matter experts”. Through working alongside these experienced teachers, I learned that experts are often the worst teachers because we don’t remember what it’s like to be a beginner, we’re more concerned with advanced subjects and techniques, and the basics are boring to us.
(Maybe this is why it’s almost impossible to find a decent book about design fundamentals, but there are like 400 books on design systems. But I digress.)
So all those experts out there might not really be the best people to teach you. And all those businesses out there trying to teach have ulterior motives.
Everyone can be a teacher, but not everyone should be. Honestly, with so many people writing books, courses, articles, etc, it’s a total disaster and I don’t even.
I’m not writing this to you to act like I’m the only teacher worth listening to. Please be careful about which advice you listen to—including anything I send you.
As for me, I’m trying to be a lot more careful about how I approach the role of teaching. It’s a huge responsibility, and I am immensely humbled that you read what I write. And I’m done with the bullshit marketing technique of writing lessons for the sake of making sales, because it makes for bad teaching. Instead of preaching at you all the time, I’m just going to share what I’m learning—because if it’s valuable to me, it’s probably valuable to you too.
If you’re trying to be a teacher yourself, my honest advice is: don’t. Teaching is hard, and it is a huge rabbit hole to fall into. It took up years of my career. But if you decide to teach, take it seriously. Don’t just teach because someone says it’s easy marketing. If you’re going to teach, put in the hard work to become a good teacher.
Anyway, as a reader, what can you do about all the potentially bad teachers out there? Check everything, and make your teachers earn your trust first. Remember that a successful person is not necessarily a good teacher. Pay attention to how they treat you before you listen to what they say.
Remember that all the free content comes with strings attached. Everyone has a reason for teaching you that goes deeper than just trying to help you learn.
We all feel pressure to tune into all the free content out there. It’s part of keeping your skills up to date, FOMO, yada yada. But, don’t be afraid to stop listening if you don’t like what you’re hearing.
If you’ve been on my newsletter a little while or followed my work, you’ve probably seen sales pitches from me. The ones where I write about some frustrating problem, explain how awful it is, then offer you a shiny solution at the end—and surprise, you can get a discount on it if you buy right now!
I honestly feel like shit every time I write one of those.
So why do I do it? Because everyone says that’s how you sell products.
I sell products to make a living. I also freelance. And yeah, I wanna keep paying my mortgage and buying blueberries for my son to eat.
But one thing I’ve realized is that the more things I do because I feel like I have to, the more I hate my own business, the worse I feel, and the less motivated I am to keep doing all of this.
One of those things I hate is sending pitch emails. Not emails about sales, discounts, etc. As a reader I love getting emails from my favorite brands and writers about sales. Saving money on stuff I want anyway is awesome.
I’m talking about the manipulative pitches. The ones that try to pull an emotional lever to get you to buy. Wow, I really hate writing (and receiving) those. Not because I feel bad about selling things or asking you to spend money. I want you to buy my stuff because it’s good, useful, and worthwhile, not because I tricked you with a clever marketing pitch.
So fuck that kind of marketing, I’m not gonna do it anymore. It’s not me.
Oh, and I’m also designing a marketing app. (?!)
Part of what I’m doing right now, in this email, is exploring a new method of “marketing”.
Every company and solo product maker out there right now is doing content marketing. You probably get a lot of newsletters, see lots of articles, and get all kinds of free, valuable-sounding stuff regularly.
But I think people are catching on that it’s mostly noise. It’s just a game: here’s a free thing, give me your email, I’m gonna spam you for a bit, then you can buy something from me. Sound good?
I’m tired of adding to that noise, and instead I want to try just being real with you. There are 25,000 of you on this newsletter (damn, it’s almost 26k now, hi!), and I’d rather get to know you than send you articles anyone else could have written.
Maybe sending emails like this will backfire. I’m kind of breaking the fourth wall here. The first rule of marketing fight club is you never say you’re in marketing fight club. I basically just admitted I used to send you manipulative sales pitches sometimes. Yeah, sorry about that.
I don’t think I can send you another sales email saying how some product will change your life. And honestly I don’t wanna make products that change peoples’ lives. It’s too much pressure. Making useful products is more than enough. So let’s see what happens!
I already cut the manipulative pitches out of my sales pages a while back, and you know what? Clients still hired me. People still bought my courses. I think it’s gonna work just fine.
What will replace the marketing B.S.? That leads me back to the marketing app idea. I often joke that to make any change in my business I have to design a new thing for it. So of course, just to change my marketing strategy, I have to design an app for it. Haha.
I have this “crazy” idea that great marketing is just making great relationships. Really, the idea is that marketing is B.S. and business is just relationships.
In my client work, if we don’t trust one another, the client doesn’t appreciate the work and my income is at risk. And maybe the same is true of any kind of business.
So I’m designing a new minimalist marketing app around the idea of building relationships first, rather than just trying to vomit “VALUE!” at everyone with content marketing. Value is just another fake marketing word, but relationships are real. Value doesn’t build trust—knowing someone does.
To me, this is different from a personal brand. I have written about this before, but I don’t like how personal brands are often predicated on finding fans and building up your own little cult of personality. Trying to be internet friends with the whole world can come across pretty fakey. I’m thinking more along the lines of mutual trust and respect, just like a client relationship. So building a business on relationships is different from a personal brand. I think that makes sense. We’ll see.
This app is honestly a pretty dumb business idea, that if anyone explained to me I would tell them to quit, and I’m only designing it because I want to see if it works. I’m dogfooding it on my own newsletter first. I might never share the marketing app idea. We’ll see. But I’m gonna try this approach right here on my newsletter first and see what happens.
A bunch of people replied to my previous article saying they love the idea of informal articles. So, maybe this idea isn’t crazy after all. Stay tunes, even if it’s only to see whether it crashes and burns. 😉
I want to share some kind of raw thoughts about the endless cycles of consumerism and the flip side of the same coin, which I’m calling “producerism”.
First, let’s get this out of the way: talking about consumerism is kind of juvenile. But after my recent burnout I realized that designers, product makers, and others like us face an equal and opposite force that’s damaging in a very real way.
I don’t know about you, but I feel a constant pressure to produce. If I’m not sitting at my desk making something to put out into the world, I don’t feel like I’m working.
And recently after a pretty intense period of work, I found myself totally unable to keep going. It was like my brain and creativity just shut down. (And, I did it to myself by taking on 5 big projects at once. I knew it was dumb, but I did it anyway.)
So I had no choice. I had to take a break from producing.
I’m writing to you about this to share what I learned—that taking a break isn’t unproductive. It might actually be the most productive thing you can do.
If this sounds obvious to you, you’re either very lucky to not feel that pressure, or you are totally oblivious like I was.
So anyway I took a sabbatical. I shut it all down. I didn’t design, write, or sit at my desk to produce anything. I took a hike—literally. I sat in coffee shops without a laptop. I put on my headphones and listened carefully to music, rather than using music to get inspired to work.
This might have been the first break I’ve taken in almost a year. Sure, I’ve had “vacation” and spent time with my family for holidays. But as much as I love that, it’s not the same. Last week was the only real separation from work I’ve given myself to recharge and reflect in quite a while—and maybe the first time I’ve gotten some solitude since my son was born 3 years ago.
And honestly, stepping away from work like that was hard, because I felt like I was wasting time. I wasn’t productive. I was falling behind.
It only took 1 day for me to realize how wrong I was. After day 1, I already felt more focused and clear-headed. 2 days in, I realized just how tired I had been without realizing it. On day 3, my stress was gone and my mind was racing with new ideas to try. By the end of the week, I felt like a totally different person.
Now I’m back at work, and I’m producing better than I have in months. I feel more focused. I can clearly identify which types of work are meaningful and which aren’t.
But the key here is that I can do all this because I don’t feel the pressure to produce. I know that my business won’t fall apart if I step away. And somehow, removing that pressure makes me paradoxically more productive.
This seems totally obvious when you’re well rested, but when you’re in the middle of the grind, you might not always realize how much you’re wearing down.
There’s an aspect of our culture that expects us to be constantly producing and consuming. It’s almost like an addiction. Who knew FOMO could be such a dangerous drug?
Whatever it is you do, there is a pressure to be constantly producing. Always be designing something new for your portfolio. Always be marketing your business. Always be looking for new clients. And so on.
Stepping away from both the production and the consumption—not writing, but also not reading; not designing, but also turning off my iPhone and iMac; not watching TV or reading the news—was like finally turning off the faucet of all that pressure I’d been feeling.
Sometimes financial pressure can be very real and you don’t have the luxury of a fancy sabbatical. I know what that’s like.
But there’s a chance that the pressure you feel to produce isn’t as critical as you make it out to be. It certainly wasn’t for me.
Trying to be productive makes you less productive. When you choose mindless, relentless production, you are choosing not to do your best work. And, you might even be choosing to give up meaningful work completely.
This is producerism. Mindless production because we don’t know anything else. Production for production’s sake.
I know this is nothing new. I’ve read this exact same advice from other people. Maybe this is just a lesson you have to learn for yourself and this article won’t truly sink in until you learn it for yourself like I did. But I hope the signal gets through:
Mindless production is just as bad as mindless consumption. Designers, makers, and creators everywhere endure an endless pressure to produce. But we can say no.
Productivity is killing us; it’s sapping our creative energy, deceiving us to work on unimportant things, and sucking the joy out of the act of creation. Productivity is just the invention of some corporate overlord meant to keep the worker bees churning out profits. My business and my work can be more meaningful than mindless production. I’m not going to let productivity get in the way of doing work I love any longer.
Wanna join me?
P.s. So I’m trying some changes in my writing and to my business as a whole. For starters, I’m going to try sharing what’s on my mind, what I’m working on, and what I’m learning rather than making you polished, fancy articles. There might be typos. There might be thoughts that aren’t fully formed. I might cuss a little bit because cussing is easier than writing pro grammar. Sometimes I might not write anything new for a little while. And I think that might just be ok.
It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the golden age of digital design, it was the end of good taste, we had every opportunity to create, we had no one to appreciate who we were—in short, we were modern designers just like the designers who came before us. (And we even endured a cheesy ripoff of a classic novel’s opening sentence).
Two designers published their portfolios hoping to get work. They both emailed me asking for a portfolio review the same week. This is their tale.
Editor’s note: both designers I’m writing about in this article are real people and happen to be female. I’ve removed details but kept their genders, because I believe they deserve to be represented as the people they are rather than as stereotypes or hyoptheticals.
Designer A, like so many of us, found herself working for clients who did not use the full extent of her abilities. She designed the sort of online display ads that serve as filler when websites are unable to sell ad placements to more legitimate advertisers—ads in the vein of “one weird trick”, “burn your belly fat”, and worse.
Of course, Designer A was fully aware of these shortcomings and wanted better opportunities. So she set out to create a portfolio to find better, more reputable, and hopefully more fulfilling work.
She began a new portfolio and decided put all of her client projects into it. She organized it meticulously into Dropbox folders and did her best to present the projects clearly, and even though she didn’t have control over the tastefulness of the subject matter, she hoped that the large volume of work would be enough to help her find better clients or even a full time job at an agency.
Designer B, similarly, found herself lacking in opportunities to do her best work. She’d had a handful of freelance clients, and the final designs fell short of her standards. Also knowing she could do and deserved better, she too set out to create a portfolio to find better work.
She took extra time—waiting longer before she could apply for jobs—to produce personal projects to fill up her portfolio. She designed a website about her wedding. She created flyers for a friend’s local art show. And so on. She created her own portfolio website with a custom design expressing her taste, personality, and perspective.
Then, both designers went out and applied for jobs. One of them eventually got hired. Can you guess which?
While I’ve tried to present each designer’s method for creating their portfolio without bias, it’s probably obvious to you.
Designer B got hired. Designer A ended up designing cheesy display ads for a while longer.
“Well, of course that’s what happened!” you’re probably thinking.
But many designers do exactly what Designer A did. We put the projects we have into our portfolios, even when we know it’s not our best work. We use our portfolios as archives.
It’s easy to see this is the wrong approach when it’s not you doing it. But when you’re creating your own portfolio, this is the easiest error you can make.
I share this tale with you as a simple reminder: your portfolio should be your best work. If your current job or clients aren’t allowing you to do your best work, you need to find other ways to create better projects to put into your portfolio.
Your portfolio should show the kind of work you want to do next, not the work you’re paid to do now.
P.s. I teach a course that provides practice projects for filling up your portfolio with your best work. You can grab a free lesson here.
P.p.s. You might think it’s petty of me to write this story about Designer A rather than help her. But, I have been helping her with her portfolio, and she’s well on her way to finding better work. How’s that for a happy ending? Rock on, Designer A!! 🤘
We do portfolio reviews for the wrong reasons, but a simple change in our review methods can make them useful again.
Portfolio reviews are a staple of the design industry, and I previously wrote that they are useless. But I’ve realized reviews can be valuable if we approach them differently.
Getting useful feedback during a portfolio review is difficult, even though design critique is a common practice. Most reviewers feel they have to find something negative or they aren’t being helpful, so reviews tend to be negative. Worse, it’s the wrong format for discussing details in designs because when you’re reviewing a large body of work, there’s not sufficient time to consider the context and purpose of each project in depth. So, feedback tends to be incomplete and surface level.
But as I’ve worked with students in my design course and continued to review portfolios (despite my hesitations), I’ve realized that portfolio reviews can be a worthwhile tool if you use them in the right way.
The problem isn’t with portfolio reviews themselves—it’s that we do them for the wrong reasons.
As I mentioned, we usually use portfolio reviews to discuss details and get advice for improving each design.
But I’ve realized it’s better to approach a portfolio review more like a user testing session than a critique session.
Portfolios have a purpose: to get you hired. When you show your portfolio to someone, you can evaluate how successful your portfolio is in achieving that purpose.
When you do normal user testing, you’d never let a single user’s feedback determine details and changes. Sure, they will definitely comment on whether they like the fonts or colors, but you usually ignore that kind of specific feedback because you’re looking for bigger insights. You’re trying to read between the lines. What outcomes does the design drive, and are they the correct ones? What aspects of the design prevent the correct outcomes? And so on.
Portfolio reviews can work the same way. When you ask someone to review your portfolio, rather than asking them for detailed feedback, you should be trying to figure out if your portfolio will get you hired. Again, as you listen to their feedback, you should try to read between the lines. Or, just come out and ask them directly, such as:
“If you were hiring a designer, and you saw this portfolio, would you bring me in for an interview?”
“Do you think this portfolio shows I can deliver high enough quality to work at Pentagram?”
“Does my work match the quality level you produce yourself?”
These kinds of questions give you a solid yes or no answer as to whether the reviewer thinks you’ll get hired—or even if they’d hire you themselves. Of course, don’t completely limit yourself just to yes or no questions. Ask the reviewer to elaborate:
“What’s your overall impression of my design work?”
“Did you notice any positive or negative trends or themes in my portfolio?”
“Which aspects of my portfolio were the most memorable and why?”
Your reviewer will almost certainly try to discuss details. You can use the questions above to redirect them and try to uncover whether your portfolio would get you hired.
It’s tempting to let portfolio reviews become critique sessions. We designers love to dig into the details of designs, and it’s easy to get lost in those details and forget the entire reason for doing portfolio reviews in the first place—to figure out how to get hired.
Critiques are certainly valuable, but portfolio reviews are not critique sessions. They have entirely different purposes. So keep your portfolio review session on track.
If you can get the right information from the review, the outside perspective can be really valuable. I wrote in the previous article that “If you have to ask whether your portfolio is ready, you probably already know the answer.” It’s important to pay attention to your own gut feelings, but I’ve realized I was wrong to say that outside opinions aren’t valuable.
Taking that advice alone, you might always find some reason to say your portfolio isn’t ready because there’s always something left you could try to improve. You could be stuck improving your portfolio forever.
But you have to cut it off somewhere. A portfolio review can help you figure out where to cut it off.
Just as user testing allows you to see your design through the eyes of a user, a portfolio review helps you see your portfolio through the eyes of the person you want to hire you.
That perspective is essential for making an effective portfolio.
We designers believe that if our work is good enough, we’ll get hired. That the quality of our work speaks for itself. But having great work isn’t enough if people don’t understand why it’s great.
But I met some designers who do quality work but still have a hard time getting hired, while researching my next project recently. As I talked to more designers, I started to see a pattern, and I realized that:
Design portfolios no longer accurately represent what designers do.
This sounds really bad for designers, but it makes sense. After all, the design profession is changing.
All the work we’ve done to advocate for design in recent years by teaching things like UX and design thinking is starting to bear fruit. Clients are expecting more from designers. Clients want us plugged into their businesses, so they can get all the amazing benefits design can provide: better product design, more engaged and delighted customers, and better-performing products and marketing.
We designers obviously know this because we’re changing the way we engage clients. Designers are getting more direct access and making greater impact. We’re crafting entire design systems instead of just page mockups. We’re even starting to get a seat at the table.
But our design portfolios haven’t kept up.
Our portfolios are still just screenshot galleries. We advocate for the value of design during our projects by doing research and testing, but later all we show about those same projects in our portfolios is a few glossy screenshots.
Our portfolios don’t show what we’re capable of doing. Our portfolios actually hide the value of our design work.
We want our portfolios to be beautiful. We rightfully take pride in showing off our work.
But there’s a danger in this. When we design our portfolios to show off what matters to us designers—which let’s be honest is often the aesthetic quality of our work—we’re making portfolios that are not effective at getting us hired.
Clients expect more from designers, which is a great thing, but because of that they also expect more from our portfolios.
We need a more modern take on the design portfolio to match the modern design process. We need to move past the old way of showing our work. We need a format or method for presenting our work that matches the insightfulness and depth of the work itself.
Portfolios filled with only pretty pictures of design aren’t enough to get hired anymore. The new breed of design portfolios must do more than just show the finished design.
Writers are often taught “Show, don’t tell”, the idea being to allow the reader to experience a story rather than just be told about it.
But we designers have the opposite problem from writers; we invite people to experience our designs without giving them enough information to understand the work.
So designers need to “Tell, don’t show.” You need to tell about your design, not just show it. Our portfolios should tell people about:
Even as more people come to understand the value of design, we can’t get lazy. We can’t assume people will see a high quality design in our portfolios and understand that it’s good. We have to tell them why it’s good.
We’ll always need to show our work. We produce a visual format, so we need to show visuals. So keep showing, but start telling, too.
Is your portfolio a relic of the old way of design, where all we did was produce pretty pictures?
Or does your portfolio explain how and why you work, and tell about the results people get after working with you?
If your portfolio isn’t getting you hired, now you know why.
P.s. I’m writing a new course about crafting a more modern, effective design portfolio that’s better at getting you hired. Join my newsletter below and I’ll send you a sweet discount when it launches.
Arrogance is a core design principle.
Does that sound like an insult? It’s not. Arrogance is an important quality for designers and other creative professionals. (And bonus, if you’re a non-designer, keep reading, and you will uncover the mysteries of the creative universe.)
We designers take pride in our ability to bring about improvement from a critical—but constructive—perspective. The discerning eye is part of who we are.
And while sometimes designers create new ideas and products, often our job is to improve someone else’s idea. Design at its core is about taking something and improving it—making a webpage more persuasive, an object more usable, or a brand more attractive to a specific audience.
Design is essentially an arrogant effort. We’re often taking another person’s idea and telling them what to do with it.
Somehow, people agree that the perspective of design, even if it’s a little arrogant, is worthwhile because design does improve products and communication in all kinds of measurable, valuable ways.
But arrogance is core to design for another reason; all creative work requires at least a little arrogance.
If you’re not arrogant enough to believe in your early, unproven ideas until you can develop and refine them, you’ll never make it as a designer or creative professional. I hope this doesn’t sound overly alpha-male of me, but you need a voice inside you that believes in your ideas, even when they’re not great at first. That is the definition of arrogance, right? But it’s an important tool because it allows us to persist past the early doubt and keep making progress.
So while arrogance can surprisingly be a worthy virtue, it sometimes gets a little bit ahead of us.
Designers have a certain reputation for being arrogant.
Arrogance—as perceived by others outside our private design enclaves—obviously has downsides.
Review and critique are important parts of design. We designers are constantly critiquing, evaluating, and revising our own work. Criticism is part of our internal monologue.
While this all seems normal to designers, it can look an awful lot like arrogance to non-designers.
Non-designers are less comfortable with criticism. When we take their ideas and begin our usual process of refinement and improvement, they can feel insulted. And they can see us as arrogant.
Some of us adopt rules about giving feedback such as “Always say something nice first, before you criticize”. These kinds of approaches can help a bit (even if some designers resent this advice because it’s like telling us our perspective isn’t valuable unless we temper it).
As we gain more experience, designers learn to manage this perception and find more friendly ways of working with others without sacrificing our expertise. We bridge gaps by learning about other professions: we learn to code, write, and research. We learn about the businesses and people we work with. We translate their concerns into design terms. We learn to explain design in a way people can understand and even value.
But, what if non-designers are still right, and we are a little arrogant?
After all, when we get a taste of our own medicine and people criticize our work the way we do to others, we get upset. We get frustrated when people criticize our work because it feels like they’re trying to tell us how to do our jobs. It’s one thing for another designer to criticize your designs, but it’s a totally different thing when it’s a non-designer. They don’t know the rules, the methods, or understand the work and attention that goes into each detail. People ask for changes that seem minor to them, but to us, it’s like telling an astronaut how to walk on the moon.
But the sensitivity we have when getting design feedback from non-designers reveals something important—that our arrogance might have gone too far.
As I said, it’s okay to be a little arrogant about your creative work. It’s actually essential.
But, if you allow that arrogance to unchecked, it can jeopardize the relationships with people who you need in order to keep making design (and who hopefully you want a healthy working relationship with).
I know it seems like I’m attacking designers here, but that’s not my goal. Let me show you what I mean by sharing a couple stories from times in my career when I was overly arrogant:
A few years into my career I got hired at an agency where I probably had 5 (maybe 10?) years’ less experience than all my coworkers. Just guess how I responded to this. For the first few months, I couldn’t believe they didn’t fire me, but I tried to act like I knew what I was doing. The agency’s way of working was so foreign to me, and I remember one time not knowing what I was supposed to do, so I just made up some fake copy for a display ad I was apparently supposed to make. We had full time copywriters on every project, but I thought I’d impress everyone by doing it all myself. And then a copywriter ended up with me in the meeting with the creative director, the CD hated the work, and the copywriter got blamed for it. I still regret that one.
Later in my career, at a different job, I was the hotshot designer who got picked for all the cool projects at our agency (or that was how I saw it). I was impatient when other designers reviewed my work or when I was asked to collaborate with them. I often tuned out during design team meetings, just waiting until I could get back to my desk to work my magic. This culminated when a coworker flat out accused me of being uninvested in our projects in an email to my boss. And, I realized he was right.
At this point, you’re probably thinking that I’m a horrible person to do these things. And, you’re right—at the time, I was. I wish I’d gotten my serving of humble pie sooner.
But I share these stories because I think all designers wage this war between our good intentions and our necessity to arrogantly fight for our creative concepts.
Sometimes, the war goes the wrong way, and we deserve the reputation for being arrogant.
You’re not a designer unless someone is hiring you to make design. And while you do need a little arrogance to be a designer, if you have too much, no one is going to want to work with you. You aren’t a designer without the people you work with.
We need the right amount of arrogance. Most designers struggle with figuring out what the right amount is. Often times, I feel I’m either a raging ego-beast trying to enforce my vision upon everyone or a total yes-man pushover who caves to every request. It’s hard to find a moderate middle.
But the times where I am able to strike some balance, I find that people warm up to my perspective, and listen to what I have to say.
When I let my arrogance run wild, I end up doing more revisions and feeling more frustrated.
When I let everyone else get their way, I end up doing low quality work.
But when I balance the two, I do my best work. I’m able to defend the important aspects of my work while opening myself up to outside perspectives that often also improve the work. It is a constant search, but the result is worth it.
The right amount of arrogance makes for great design.
One of the bad parts of being a designer is hitting a losing streak—one of those times where every idea you have is a bad one.
Most designers don’t talk about their losing streaks, and they definitely won’t show you what the concepts they produced during a bad streak look like.
But I’m about to share a bunch of ugly designs I made recently while I was redesigning my site.
Here’s what the final design ended up looking like:
Lots of people ended up liking this design, but behind the scenes, I really struggled.
I created 6 (SIX!) design directions before I finally found the one that became the final design. That is extremely abnormal for me—usually I find the best approach via sketching and rarely waste time creating a mockup up that doesn’t become the final design. But this time, I created 6 mockups that I couldn’t use.
I had failure after failure—every idea looked great as a sketch but completely fell apart when I began the design. And, I found that I wasn’t able to judge my work clearly. I’d fall in love with an idea, only to come back the next day and realize how terribly wrong I’d been.
(Want to see what those awful design concepts looked like? I’m releasing a video showing the entire process of redesigning my site, including all 6 ugly drafts, and it’s only available to students of my design course, TheorySprints. If you want to see them, join the course!)
All these failures were completely private, so they were relatively tiny failures.
But even tiny failures can hold power over you if you let them. We designers have a tendency to look down on ourselves for these kinds of mistakes. We make these tiny failures out to be a big deal. We’re embarrassed of our old work, and we beat ourselves up for not producing a perfect design on the first attempt.
This attitude causes us to avoid taking risks, and that is a real shame because taking risks is an essential part of creative work.
The individual subjects him- or herself to difficult and challenging tasks that require performance exceeding current levels… Learning to manage failure—and not to fear failure—is an important means of boosting creativity.
Dr. Robert Epstein, Encyclopedia of Creativity, page 765
Psychologists and creativity researchers have identified failure and risk tolerance as key skills in highly creative people.
Tiny failures are part of being a designer. Every creative person experiences these tiny failures and rough patches. To continue improving the quality of your design work, as we all want to, you need to keep trying ideas that might turn out to be bad. You need to give bad ideas a chance.
Learn to tolerate your tiny failures. Forgive yourself, and keep moving. Don’t let them slow you down.
But that’s only the first step to conquering failure.
Tolerating failure isn’t enough. You need to learn to love your bad ideas and the challenge of moving past them.
As I was redesigning my site, one of the directions I tried relied heavily on illustrations. Usually, if I’m relying on my nonexistent illustration skills, I know I’m in a bad place. But I kept going anyway. Why?
Because challenging ourselves is what leads to growth. The second, more important step to overcoming failure is gaining the confidence to seek out challenges and take risks. You need to get comfortable enough with tiny failures that you are willing to seek out risky concepts and situations where you’re more likely to fail.
Now, I’m not asking you to fetishize failure like a startup dudebro (fail hard, fail fast, fail often is silly advice).
However in the context of creative work, tiny failures are essential. Trying those illustration ideas was the step that led me to the concept I ended up using as my final design. If I’d never tried the illustrations, I never would have found the idea that was worth using.
Having bad ideas in private isn’t a risk if you keep them private and reserve time and space for yourself to move past them. But more importantly, working through those bad ideas will help you be more creative and find good ideas that are worth developing.
Bad ideas lead to good ideas. Seeking out challenges and risks is the basis of creativity. If you allow tiny failures to derail your work or use them as an excuse to avoid trying ideas that might not work out, you are limiting yourself. You are cutting out one of the most important parts of the design process.
Relishing bad ideas and seeking out risks isn’t about numbing yourself, brainwashing, or adopting some bizarre doublethink. I’m not telling you to become detached. It’s just that bad ideas are only frustrating because you say they are frustrating. You can learn to accept them as part of your process and appreciate them for their role in bringing about great ideas.
Those bad concepts and tiny failures are actually a bit endearing when you realize they paved the way for the work you’re proud of.
Every tool claims to make you a better designer. Using new tools feels like progress and makes us feel empowered—if you use the latest prototyping app or design software you feel like you’re on top of your game.
However, tools have little affect on the quality of creative work.
Sure, they can improve our efficiency, enable us to produce new formats, and provide other conveniences. New tools are great, and I’m not criticizing any in particular.
But no design software can be creative for you—software can’t choose the right typeface or draw the logo mark for you. The problem solving and final details are what make a design great, and those are completely reliant upon the designer.
If you’re a great designer, you’re still a great designer regardless of whether you use Sketch, Photoshop, Webflow, Framer, Invision Studio, or MS Paint.
Using a great tool won’t make you a better designer. Using a cheap tool won’t make you a worse one. It only effects your efficiency. So yes, you can create great design in MS Paint if you feel so inclined.
But there’s a story in our industry that tools do more.
Every design tool’s website uses a headline with some variation of “make better design”. Every design blog covers these new design tools. Well-known designers tweet about using beta versions and provide testimonials. Even design education pushes new tools. The hype is unavoidable.
But when you buy into the marketing that tools can make you a better designer, you are allowing tools to devalue your unique perspective.
The claim that tools make you a better designer is the same old story designers hear everywhere. If tools are what make us designers, then designers aren’t that valuable. Design is so easy anyone can do it. Templates and themes are cheaper than hiring a designer and just as good. If tools advance far enough, maybe we won’t need designers anymore.
We will always need designers. The formats and assets we produce have been changing for centuries and so have the tools we use to produce them. But no one is even close to writing an algorithm that can replace a designer’s critical thinking and creativity.
And that means that the real driving force behind design is you. Not your tools.
Tools are nothing without you, but without your tools you are still everything.
Don’t let the marketing and hype surrounding tools make you feel inadequate or doubt your value. Don’t buy into the idea that you’re not a good enough designer because you still use Photoshop or haven’t learned prototyping and design systems yet.
What’s important is the unique insight and problem solving ability you provide. Tools can never replace that.
I can’t help but wonder where we’d be if the design industry spent more time developing our designers instead of developing our tools. But next time you see a post about a shiny new tool, remember:
Tools can never make you a better designer because they can never replace you.
I’ve heard from several designers lately who have been doubting their skills and work:
“I feel like an imposter.”
“I feel like I’m not good enough.”
“I’m too old and there are so many young designers who are better.”
“I just can’t seem to get inspired.”
“I’m not proud of any of my work.”
But I think you might be surprised to find that self doubt is commonplace amongst designers. There are several reasons for this.
First, our culture frowns upon creativity. How many times have you heard rude comments about “creative types”? We’re widely regarded as unreliable, sensitive, and difficult. Which obviously isn’t true.
But this goes deeper than the stereotype—psychologists believe that even as young children we are taught not to be creative. A researcher named George Land conducted a study for NASA that found children grow less creative and are actually taught non-creative behavior. At ages 4-5, 98% of children scored as creative, but only 10% by age 10, and later only 2% of adults scored as creative.
We are trained to discourage creative behavior. For example, I almost scolded my 2-year-old son the other day for using a toy “the wrong way”. But when I stopped to consider the situation, he was only playing in an unexpected way—I was surprised at what he was doing and I reacted negatively. Even though he was doing nothing wrong at all, I almost discouraged his creativity because that’s what I’ve been taught to do.
We are taught to stifle creativity. And as we explore creative pursuits, these negative perceptions can drag us down.
However, paradoxically, our culture also romanticizes creativity. No one will ever be so brilliant a visionary as Steve Jobs—his reputation is practically godlike. And this happens in especially in the design profession; look at the reputations of Paula Scher or Massimo Vignelli. Each are idols in their own right.
Our belief in the idea of the creative genius leads us to doubt ourselves because we hold ourselves up against an impossible standard. None of our idols were nearly so great as we make them out to be—each was a human with flaws and struggles just like us (and it’s possible they were only successful because of luck).
Further, the design profession is increasingly idealizing the uncreative aspects of our work. Research has become a priority for many designers, and this represents a shift in thinking that logical, structured approaches are more valuable than creative ones. Empathy is the latest clarion call—but it represents sacrificing our artistic vision in favor of other people when so much art does exactly the opposite. Last, usability while noble runs the risk of draining the playfulness and experimentation from our work—reducing creative aspects in favor of sameness and utilitarianism.
It can feel like the more creative you try to be, the more you get punished for it—even within our own industry.
No one belongs as a creative professional, according to all these voices—the experts in our industry, the lessons we heard as kids that discouraged our creativity and told us to “be practical”, the snickering behind our backs about “creative types”, the voices that enshrine famous creatives, and others. None of us are doing what culture says we are supposed to be.
According to them, every designer is an imposter.
We all feel like imposters because we’ve been taught to feel that way.
And this means that every designer is just like you. We’re all fighting for respect. We all face self doubts. We all struggle sometimes to do work we are proud of.
I know this article leans a bit self-help-ish, but hey, is that such a bad thing? Many of your struggles and roadblocks as a designer will be emotional. We all need healthy ways of dealing with these pressures.
Being a designer carries some unique challenges. This isn’t always the easiest kind of work to do.
But I hope it helps to know that you aren’t the only one who feels this way. Next time you doubt your work or your value as a designer, remember:
We’re all imposters, together.
This tendency causes all kinds of issues both for designers and our clients; we suffer for our fashion.
Businesses pay for expensive redesigns every year or two, many seeing it as the cost of doing business. And designers are trapped in a perpetual search for the latest styles, because if we don’t keep up, we won’t get hired.
Clients and designers both are trapped in an endless cycle of design waste.
We work in stark contrast to the classic design we admire. We all regard the work of famous designers like Dieter Rams or Charles and Ray Eames as timeless. We buy the standards manual reproductions on Kickstarter. I own an out-of-print Lubalin book and the U&lc book myself.
We all want to do work of that caliber, but today’s design product is anything but timeless—a modern design might be forgotten in months, not even years.
I don’t even attempt to create the kind of classic design I love. And neither do most designers.
How many of us are brave enough to try to make a living while using only 2 typefaces like Vignelli? It seems impossible today.
This reveals a double standard in the design value system: we do love timeless design, but we behave the opposite way; we perpetuate the idea that design is disposable.
The design industry is certainly much larger than it was in the heyday of Rams or the Eames’ (although measuring the number of professional designers is difficult, this assumption feels safe).
And because the industry is so large, perhaps designers have become so fervent about design trends because we’re attempting to carve out our own niches by becoming trendsetters. Being the person who starts a new design trend must feel great, and I’m sure many designers are chasing that thrill.
But our dependence on trend has a serious downside: design might not be as valuable as it used to be.
For example, if you can forget the automatic opinion that anything you designed more than 6 months ago is out-dated, a design that remains effective for a business for 5 years is—on paper—more valuable than a design that will be replaced after only a year.
We designers are constantly pitching redesigns so our clients can have the latest trends, and while it feels like we’re keeping busy, this practice is damaging. We’re making less money per client and cycling through clients while rarely getting to see the results of the designs we deliver.
We designers are both perpetrators and victims of the cycle of redesign. We revere classic design but don’t dare try to create it ourselves because that would break the foundation we’ve used to build our livelihoods.
However there is a way to end the cycle of design waste and produce the classic design we love. It requires taking a stance and changing the way we talk about and practice design—not altering the actual designs we produce, but changing the way we engage clients and others we work with.
We’ve already started; the UX and design thinking movements are such a stance. We designers as a group agreed that design is about more that aesthetics, and that design decisions are business decisions and design is for other people.
But already, the dreams of user experience design and design thinking are being diluted. UX has simply become a general synonym for design in many circles. And design thinking is frequently a pipe dream; getting access and influence with the leadership of a big company is often impossible. Top-down design just isn’t happening the way we hope.
That’s not even considering the very real truth that many designers might not want to separate themselves from design trends.
But, if you’re one of those designers, you have no right to complain about design becoming devalued when you cling to your trends.
Trends are what devalue design.
We designers have a choice. We can choose design trends. Or, we can keep pushing the message we began with the UX and design thinking movements.
We can suffer no fashion instead of suffering for fashion. We can make effective design instead of trendy design. We can make the right design—dare I say the kind we might even be proud to show the next generation in 20 years. We can teach that the things we call trends are just design patterns that in many cases have existed for decades (I’m doing this by building a library of visual design patterns).
To be clear, design patterns will always wax and wane in popularity to some extent. This is unavoidable, and I’m not suggesting you change the way you create design.
However our obsession with design trend popularity is unhealthy because it dominates every discussion about design.
The change we need to make is in which aspects of design we value and how we communicate that to non-designers.
Regardless of which techniques are popular, we can work to create value and profit through design and show our clients that design is more than a look and feel but an integral part of creating a business.
We can carve out more respect for ourselves by talking about the value of design, so that when our clients think of our work, they know it’s more than fashion
You’ve certainly heard of UX, seen numerous people calling themselves “UX Designers”, and maybe you’ve even read articles attempting to define the term.
But UX has lost much of its meaning now that the swell of excitement surrounding it has somewhat diminished.
Let’s take a moment to cut to the heart of UX. Because there is a powerful message inside this movement that many—even professional designers—have missed.
(Psst. If you already know what UX is, skip the next section.)
Defining UX is a favorite pastime in the design industry (and apparently so is sharing photos of sidewalks). There are numerous attempts to explain the term with grand metaphors and claims, but there is a simple definition.
UX design is a specialization within the design industry that includes a variety of techniques to create designs for the people who will use them, with a focus on how a design works and is structured over how it looks.
A common goal cited by UX professionals is “user happiness”, or trying to give users not just what they want/need but creating an experience within the design that is enjoyable.
UX practitioners don’t always do visual design (making logos, graphics, and aesthetics). Instead they do other tasks to determine the structure and usability of a design based upon understanding the people who will use it. Empathy is another important value in UX. The work of a UX specialist might include user research, user testing, interviews, analytics, planning, brainstorming, planning sequences of screens within an application to accomplish specific tasks, creating prototypes, and more.
But, none of this matters if you don’t understand why the UX movement is so important and powerful.
So, you know what UX design is, and the advice to make a design for the people who will be using it seems obvious. Aren’t all designs made that way?
No, they aren’t, and that’s why this message is downright revolutionary.
Most design projects begin with good intentions. Both the client and designer agree the goal is to make something users will love.
But when the designer presents the first draft of the design to the client, the common misunderstanding of what UX is comes rushing to the surface.
The designer uses phrases like “This design is fresh and will differentiate your product.”
The client responds with phrases like “I don’t think this design really captures what our brand is about.”
If you think about it, neither the designer nor client is thinking or talking about the user. They’re talking about their own individual ambitions for the project. The designer wants to make something new and exciting. The client wants to express their vision and values. Neither of those have anything to do with the people who will be using the design.
This is why the idea of UX design is so revolutionary. UX offers a challenge to both designer and client:
The design is not for you. The design is for other people.
UX design asks you to sacrifice your personal goals in favor of the goals of the person using the design.
Internalizing that idea and actually adhering to it is incredibly difficult for both designers and clients, which is why UX concerns often get overlooked when you’re in the weeds of a real design project.
But if you can manage to focus on the user rather than yourself, the benefit can be substantial.
There are countless case studies proving the power of UX design. One great place to look is the IxDA Interaction Awards.
In 2017, for example, design teams tackled huge problems like inaccurate police data and preventing warehouse worker injuries. Not only did these designers build fascinating designs, they saved money for their clients and improved peoples’ lives in measurable ways.
Not all UX projects are as large or ambitious, of course. But the lesson applies regardless of the scope of your project:
Designing for other people is the best way to create a high quality, profit-driving design.
The Design Thinking movement has gained a lot of attention in recent years because of its controversial suggestions about who can and should design. I’ve personally been critical of the faux “designer lifestyle” that seems to surround both education about Design Thinking and its practitioners.
However, if you can set aside the “everyone is a designer” controversy and ignore the photos of walls covered in sticky notes for a moment, design thinking has an important lesson for all designers and the people who hire them.
(Psst. If you already know what design thinking is, skip the next section.)
If you’re not familiar with the term, here’s a quick primer in Design Thinking.
The term encompasses many proprietary takes on design process from various agencies and universities, but essentially, design thinking is the idea that everyone within an organization should be involved with and responsible for design and that design is a top-down effort. Great design requires everyone, including company leadership, to be involved and make shifts in the way the company operates in order to use and implement design well.
The backlash against design thinking is often that it sounds too academic (which I think is a fair criticism) or that it’s silly to say everyone should become a designer (which despite much of the buzz is not actually what design thinking is about).
However the controversy and grandstanding surrounding this movement hide a critically important idea.
I imagine that the term “Design Thinking” began as an effort to make design sound more important to stakeholders and clients, which certainly isn’t a bad thing in my book, me being a designer and all.
However, this effort to lend the design industry more credibility has caused Design Thinking to become a misnomer.
Design Thinking experts teach CEOs and other non-designers how to think like a designer. Stanford’s D-School teaches a complex design process it calls “Design Thinking”. And so do IDEO, Cooper, and many others.
Regardless of whether you buy into one of those fancy design processes, there is a single critical idea underlying them all:
Every decision about a design is essentially a business decision if you dig deep enough. (And you should dig deep enough, but we’ll get to that in a moment.)
Design decisions are business decisions. Every single detail within a design is connected to the business strategy, goals, and vision.
Right now you’re probably thinking this claim is silly. Choosing a font for a logo is a business decision? Deciding whether to make a button green or blue is a business decision? Yes. They are.
Design is about taking something a business has and presenting it in a way customers can understand, purchase, and use.
Or, a UX expert might say that design is about understanding customers so a business can make the right thing for them to purchase and use.
Regardless of how you look at it, the business is an essential part in the equation of making a design.
As a designer, before I can decide whether to make a button green or blue, I have to answer all kinds of questions, for example:
“Who is clicking the button?”
“What does the user want the button do?”
“What is the business?”
“What does the business want the button to do?”
“What page is the button on, and what is that page about?”
“How did the person reach that page?”
If I found that the user is a millennial who wants to purchase a skateboard, I’d design the button very differently than if the user were an HR director buying payroll software.
This is obviously a bit reductionist and no designer asks 20 questions for each minor decision in this way, but the point is that:
The tiny decision about how to design a button is influenced by the data I have about the business and its intended customer.
Each detail of the design is connecting the business and customer on a deeper level. A green button isn’t just a green button. It’s an opportunity to appeal to a specific segment of the population—an audience the business wants to reach.
Every detail within a design is intimately connected to the business strategy.
Design Thinking teaches us that design isn’t just a pretty picture—it’s the implementation of a business vision.
So, clients, if you want a great design, you need to tell your designer about your business. And, when you make decisions about your business, you need to consider it from a design perspective. If you switch audiences, you need to adjust your design to accommodate that business decision. Just as every business needs to understand its ideal customer, every design needs to understand its user.
And designers, there is a lesson here for you too. We can’t just make pretty pictures and draw cool things anymore. Savvy clients will demand more than that. You need to connect your work to the business’s goals and demonstrate that you can partner with your clients. You need to distill your clients’ needs and goals into a usable—and, yes, pretty—picture that customers will like.
Design Thinking is a silly term. But its implications are significant. Design is powerful because it can affect our subconscious opinions, influence behaviors, and appeal to specific tastes.
Designers can drive profit—but only with a clear understanding of what the business is doing.
Businesses can profit through design—but only if you make design a core part of your strategy and values.
Picking an online course is tough—especially in the design and technology industries where there are so many options.
The rise of online course platforms has given experts of all kinds new opportunities to teach online, and that only sounds like a good thing for learners everywhere.
But the problem is that just because anyone can launch an online course or you can access hundreds or even thousands of courses by paying a small subscription doesn’t mean all of these courses are good quality. As with all facets of the web, giving a voice to someone doesn’t necessarily mean they’re worth listening to.
Many online courses really are downright bad and will not teach you any more than Wikipedia. This is because being an expert in something doesn’t necessarily mean you know how to teach it. And, worse, there are some online course instructors masquerading as experts when it’s easy to tell they aren’t after a little research.
Those who can’t do, teach.
A famous phrase that is too often true.
However, even when course instructors truly are experts, they often don’t know how to teach. Experts who lack experience teaching often make the mistake of moving too quickly—they don’t remember what it’s like to be a beginner, so they often skip important, basic concepts.
It turns out, teaching higher order skills like design, programming, and problem solving is surprisingly difficult. Inexperienced instructors (even if they are experts in their fields) are rarely familiar with effective instruction techniques for higher order skills.
The popularity of the online course format has led many course authors to simply follow the format options available in their course platform of choice rather than creating content around specific learning objectives.
So there are many reasons an online course might not be worth your time.
While writing my own course, I worked with professional instructional designers and researched the most effective online learning strategies.
I wanted to share some of that research with you, so you understand a bit more about how great courses are made (regardless of whether you’re interested in my course).
Here’s a guide to help you evaluate online courses based on my instructional design research. As a student, this knowledge will equip you to find the online courses that help you learn most efficiently—especially for advanced skills like design and coding.
Methods exist for teaching higher order skills like problem solving, design, creativity, and troubleshooting.
Learning about those instruction methods will help you discern whether an online course will actually help you learn. Here’s a quick primer in the latest instructional research.
Bloom’s Revised Taxonomy, taken from my free design bootcamp, Objective Creative.
Bloom’s Revised Taxonomy separates advanced skills into phases of learning and matches those phases with instructional techniques. Professional instructors use it as a guide for teaching more challenging skills like problem solving.
Whereas gaining knowledge or performing simple tasks (like changing a tire) are simpler to teach, teaching advanced skills skills requires more advanced instructional methods.
This is pretty dry stuff, but it’s important because many online courses claim to teach advanced skills but use none of the methods that are most effective to do so.
If you look at the list of verbs in the rightmost column for each phase in the diagram above, you might realize that many online courses only use techniques for the “Remember” and “Understand” phases.
If a course claims to teach higher order skills like design, programming, problem solving, etc, but doesn’t use the methods associated with the higher phases of learning, you might have spotted a bad course.
In the design and tech industries especially, most online training ignores the top 4 phases of Bloom’s Revised Taxonomy completely:
So, while you’re looking for a course, here’s how to tell if a course does a good job of using those methods.
Acquiring data is only the first part of learning. If you want to become a top designer or coder, you can’t just memorize terms. You need to form a process for solving problems and toolbox of techniques you use to react to a variety of challenges.
Research shows that instructor demonstrations of how to solve problems improve learning outcomes significantly. (Source: e-Learning and the Science of Instruction, page 226)
Many students are desperate for feedback from experts because they don’t understand how to work on their own. But the solution they really need isn’t necessarily feedback—it’s the opportunity to analyze how experts work.
Obviously many courses include screencasts where you can watch someone design or code, but the issue is that they don’t show problem solving. Many courses contain step-by-step tutorials that show how to accomplish a task rather than demonstrating a problem being solved from start to finish.
For a course to teach you to Analyze properly, the lessons need to show how a problem is solved, including the reasoning behind each step. This is called modeling.
Last, even if the course does include real problem solving demonstrations, you need to make sure the instructor is actually an expert!
Before you buy a course, research the course author. This is a critical step for finding a quality online course. Look up their website and work experience (And yes, even their LinkedIn profile). Are they really an expert? If they don’t have an online presence or clear work examples, it’s unlikely they will have sufficient expertise to teach you.
Not all feedback is healthy. In fact, some feedback can do more harm than good.
Too often, feedback is directed at the person rather than the work. This is unfortunately very common in the design industry where surviving harsh critique sessions is a rite of passage.
However, research shows this practice is bad for learners. When feedback is pointed at individuals or causes them to question themselves, learning outcomes are reduced. (e-Learning and the Science of Instruction, page 266)
And again, just because someone is an expert doesn’t mean they know how to give the right kind of feedback. Teaching and providing feedback are separate skills from the core subject matter.
So, look for an online course that has clear guidelines for feedback and sets a clear expectation for how you’ll receive it. (For example, my design course includes a “rules for critique” PDF for student accountability groups.)
Another common issue with online courses is that students want feedback from top experts, but hiring people who are at the top of their field to provide feedback isn’t cost effective for course creators or scalable for experts making their own courses. So, many online courses provide feedback from junior staff while supplying the expert as a kind of figurehead who is rarely directly involved. You’re paying for access to an expert but you don’t get nearly as much access as much as you expect.
So, if a course claims to provide instructor-led sessions, Skype calls, and other personal interactions—make sure you verify who you’ll actually be talking to.
However, getting feedback from your course instructor might not even be necessary. There are many worthwhile sources of feedback, not just from experts—so, even if expert guidance sounds attractive, you might not really need it.
According to learning research, the core value of feedback is that it helps the student understand their progress. (e-Learning and the Science of Instruction, page 258.) For example, for designers, a critique session helps you know how much you’ve grown and which design principles you need to pay more attention to.
However, there are many ways to get feedback that helps you understand whether you have made progress—it doesn’t necessarily need to come from an expert instructor. For example, for a designer no feedback is more indicative of progress than a client’s feedback.
Similarly, peers are a great source of effective feedback. They understand the goals and context, and they can provide an objective measure of progress. In my own online course, I chose to emphasize peer feedback and accountability groups. This gives students an objective view or their progress and accountability to keep working. I found this to be a better fit for my students, who often struggle to practice their design skills; they need motivation and accountability for practicing more than they need feedback. And when they need feedback, peer reviews are effective. This structure also makes my course more affordable than if I were running live critiques and sessions.
You’ll notice that online courses with live meetings and sessions tend to be more expensive, and it’s true that some learners do benefit from them. However, remember that there are many ways to get feedback on your work without buying into those formats. Finding the best course for you requires comparing these approaches to how you learn best.
The third area many online courses neglect is “Creating”, or encouraging students to practice using what they’ve learned.
Research shows that practice is the main differentiator of elite performers. (e-Learning and the Science of Instruction, page 259.) The best violinists in the world, for example, tend to practice many more hours per day than their less accomplished peers. This holds true in all skills, not just music.
So, the best online courses encourage practice.
When it comes to practice, 2 methods are important:
Many coding bootcamps encourage relentless practice—and practice is a good thing. But not everyone wants to give up their life for 4-6 months to practice 70 hours/week before they see results.
That format is planned around short-term gains and not long-term success. Clearly, no one can continue at such a pace forever, so it’s not a long-term learning method.
Instead, students need to learn healthy habits for practicing regularly.
Find an online course that provides quick, brief opportunities for practice, but that also helps you create habits for practicing that will last your entire career. (Again using myself as the example, my course includes quick exercises for each topic, and more challenging practice projects at the end of the course that serve as long-term goals.)
However, there is an issue when it comes to practice: practicing is hard, so students don’t want to do it.
So you also need to find a course that motivates you somehow.
What motivates you to learn and practice is a very personal thing. You might prefer buying a course that’s taught by someone you respect, or that has an example project that excites you. Or, you could buy a course that includes some sort of accountability (like accountability groups, 1-on-1 instructor sessions, course schedules, etc).
Whatever it is, pick a course that is exciting and that motivates you to keep practicing what you learn, because when you finish reading the lessons and watching the videos, it might seem like you’re done learning, but the truth is, you’ve only begun.
Find a course that keeps you engaged and practicing.
Take my free design bootcamp, Objective Creative. Lessons 6 & 7 teach the best methods for learning design and developing the creative process.
If you never ask yourself that question, you are not stretching the limits of your taste enough. You are not trying enough crazy ideas. You are in a rut.
If you never have to ask that question, your designs or art are probably boring.
But often we avoid getting into situations where we have to ask that question because, sometimes, it turns out you are insane. Well, you’re not actually crazy but you realize that the idea was bad after all.
And bad ideas feel like a failure. So because we fear failure, we don’t take risks on bad-sounding ideas.
But that’s a shame, because so often, even when the idea turns out to be bad, it still paves the way for another concept that does turn out to be awesome.
Beneath every bad design concept is another more crazy, daring, and wonderful.
And if you don’t dig down into the crazy ideas and give them a chance, you’ll never find the wonderful ones buried beneath them.
Design writers love teaching darling topics like design systems and responsive design, but visual design is rarely discussed.
Often, when people do teach basic visual design topics, they gloss over these ideas quickly. Even when teaching new designers.
If you pay attention to what’s happening in our industry, you will see some pretty crazy things. Experienced designers recommending brief blog posts and step-by-step tutorials as the way to learn about foundational principles like color and typography. Design programs that omit visual design completely. Entire catalogs of design books that completely ignore visual design.
But even when you do find it, the quality of visual design teaching is really poor. You see a talking head, and a quick, abstract description of a principle.
Or a list of steps you can copy. You can find a tutorial for anything. You an even pay a monthly subscription to access all the tutorials you could ever want. You an learn every prototyping tool, design software, and code framework.
But new designers struggle to apply what they learn.
They learn steps to create someone else’s design, and don’t know how to use principles and techniques to create their own new design.
They learn high-level concepts and think they’ve mastered things like typography, but the way they use fonts in their real designs is lacking.
Senior designers are failing design students.
And it’s because the people teaching design are bored with basic principles. To someone who’s been using a principle for 10 years, it’s easy. And they teach it like it’s easy.
And they forget how hard it actually was to learn.
Instead, they get excited about teaching the latest topic or coining their own new design movement.
So we end up with really poor quality design education for the foundational ideas, and really high quality education for the advanced, hot topics.
Design degrees are focused on high-level, strategic education rather than practical skills. Design bootcamps teach people to code in the latest exciting javascript framework instead of to design.
This leads to what we already see everywhere in the design industry: a tsunami of new designers who are unhireable. Who aren’t qualified to work on real projects.
And, equally bad, an increasing shortage of capable designers on the whole, as more senior designers transition into team leadership, start their own businesses, and even cease doing daily design work.
The design industry is enamored with fancy-sounding strategies, and many of them are completely worthwhile.
But we’ve forgotten that in order to use those strategies, designers need a foundation in visual design.
You can’t create an atomic design system without visual design skill. You can’t create a responsive, mobile-first design without visual design skill. You can’t make an insightful UX flow part of a production app without visual design skill.
While design is a lot more than pretty pictures, visuals are still a critical part of what designers do. Aesthetics affect usability but also connect with people on an emotional level. Visuals affect subconscious trust, persuade users to take action, and inspire.
The design industry has forgotten our history.
So many new designers struggle in the trenches when they could be learning from our experience.
So, here is a reminder for all of us.
Every time you read about some fancy new design strategy, remember that it wouldn’t be possible without visual design and the boring, old principles we designers use every hour of every day.
Advanced strategies like responsive design certainly make the world better.
But design and designers owe every ounce of our value to visual design.
Every ounce.
And if you’re a new designer struggling to get noticed and make your way in this profession, hit pause on the fancy strategies you see plastered across every design blog, and focus on building up your visual design skills.
Fill your portfolio with great visual design work.
That’s how you will get hired and start landing the exciting projects you crave.
By the way, you might think I have a scummy ulterior motive to say this because I teach visual design course. But, I’m not advocating visual design because I have a product to sell. I made a product about visual design because I believe in it. If you’re a new designer, even if you don’t buy my course, I hope you learn visual design somehow!
You browse design blogs and galleries, flip through magazines and books, and review your old projects looking for a new thread to follow.
But when you find that inspiration, how often does that early idea remain part of the final design?
Often times, the ideas that inspire us only kickstart the process, and we end up changing them. That’s the natural flow of the design process: you need to constantly improve and refine your ideas.
This makes me wonder: what was the point of seeking inspiration in the first place? Did it really help at all?
Sometimes I try starting a project without looking around for design inspiration first, and it goes fine. Other times I can’t seem to have a single idea without browsing design galleries first.
But this demonstrates that inspiration really isn’t critical. I can survive without it much of the time, and even when I do seek inspiration, I wind up changing those original ideas so much anyway that they don’t seem very valuable in the end.
But what should you do when inspiration does seem necessary?
The science of creativity says that our minds require new inputs: new stimulus, data, and environments. We designers colloquially call this “inspiration”, but really what we are doing is feeding our minds with new data so we can create new ideas.
The science proves that new data is essential to creativity, but what designers do is a little different. We chase that feeling of inspiration, not data.
We believe that to be creative we need to feel inspired. And sometimes we do bizarre things to try and set up the perfect, magical combination of factors that help use feel inspired. Or at the minimum, we listen to music, create an interesting working space, learn about what our peers are creating, and so on.
But the feeling of inspiration has nothing to do with creativity. It’s made up. You don’t need it.
And relying upon inspiration makes your design process unreliable.
So instead of chasing that elusive inspired feeling, just look for new data for your mind to process, and build a solid foundation of experience so that you don’t need inspiration to be creative.
Make creativity your default, not your dream.
The inspiration you find on design sites, etc only lasts for a single project. It’s fleeting. And to make creativity your default, you need to stock up on data that will serve you longer.
The new perspectives I gained from other designers during my career still serve me every day. Like when I learned from Paul to use shape layers in Photoshop to create more rapid iterations of design elements. Or when PJ taught me to make better color schemes by adjusting colors relationally. Or how Scott showed me how to use data to inform my designs instead of just making up imaginary content.
The new perspectives I gained from observing other designers working have proven immensely more valuable than any inspiration.
So as the New Year begins, I want to encourage you to seek out what you really need to grow as a designer this year. Not inspiration, cool posters for your office, or a handmade wooden iPhone case.
Seek out new perspectives this year, not the cheap thrills of the design industry’s inspiration mongers.
Learn from people more experienced than you: learn from another designer, ask for critiques of your work, find a mentor, or start paying better attention to your creative director.
You will find yourself growing and improving exactly like you hope to. Only this time, it’s not another resolution you abandon will in February, because the new perspectives that you gain will be part of your design process forever.
These are the mantras we follow while doing creative work, but sometimes they accomplish the opposite of what we want.
When you hit a brick wall on a creative project, so often you just keep working and pushing yourself. You tell yourself you can do it, and you keep going, even when the quality isn’t so great. You believe that if you just keep at it, you’ll break through the wall.
I’ve described this before as “beating your head against the wall until something breaks.”
But usually, what breaks is your brain.
Creativity can’t be forced. Of course pushing yourself to keep finding new ideas is part of creativity too, but everyone eventually hits a point where the ideas stop flowing. Even the most experienced of us, while we have a reliable process that helps on days when our creativity won’t cooperate, still hit that brick wall.
And this can happen because we see creativity as something to be extracted, like squeezing juice from an orange. But eventually every orange runs out of juice.
So often all we need to do is get out of the way and let creativity work. Take a step back, and you will find that the solution you have been searching for will find you.
Psychologists have found fascinating insights into how creativity works, and you can use this knowledge to get out of the way and allow your creativity to re-engage.
Your creativity is hard at work without you realizing it. Your subconscious mind is constantly turning over the problem in limitless ways, searching for new creative ideas. And, instead of trying to force yourself to find new ideas when they seem to be running dry, just take a break.
Don’t work harder. In fact, don’t work. Let your subconscious process for a while in the background.
The next time you sit down to consider the problem, you will have all kinds of new ideas. And, it’s even possible you’ll suddenly have a great idea in the middle of the night, while taking a shower, or while you’re driving to work. This happens because your subconscious is working. So take a break, and let it work.
Psychologists define creativity as finding novel connections between seemingly unrelated ideas. Therefore, if you learn new, different ideas and information, your creativity will have more data with which to form connections. So, seek new inputs: try new things, visit a new place, or do something you’ve never done before. This will help your subconscious mind in its search for new novel ideas.
In order to have new ideas, you need to clear out your brain storage. So often, creatives don’t want to acknowledge our bad ideas. We are embarrassed of them, and we feel that writing bad ideas down or giving them form is a failure. But you need to know that everyone has bad ideas, and even more so that having bad ideas is a natural part of creativity. If you want more ideas, you need to get the bad ideas out of the way. Write them down. Acknowledge and record them. And when they are off your mind, you’ll finally have capacity to think of something new.
Struggling with creativity is normal, and everyone faces it (even those who don’t work in creative professions). Our minds are not computers; they are vastly more complex and insightful, even if we can’t always predict when and how they will work.
Acceptance of how your creativity works is an important step to becoming a more reliable creative professional. Your process will help you find ideas without needing to rely completely upon creativity, but setting up conditions to foster creativity is equally as productive and useful.
Many designers claim this at some point during our careers, and the dream is certainly exciting. We imagine working for prestigious clients, having a professionally designed office space downtown, and living the good life designing creative, amazing things.
If you could open your own agency or become a creative director you would get all kinds of creative freedom. You could fight for the important aspects of creative work and finally have control over the final product.
But that’s actually not true in many cases.
I used to think so too. But then I got a glimpse into the lives of agency owners and creative directors, and realized that the dream was not like I imagined.
I realized that opening an agency or becoming a creative director, for me, would be a complete nightmare.
Have you ever seen a creative director claim an exciting new project instead of assigning it to a designer on their team? There have been times during my career when I felt creative directors picked the best projects for themselves.
Years later I realized what was actually happening: many creative directors spend a lot of time in meetings and not much time designing. They miss being able to sit down and work on a design. And when a rare chance to design comes along, they grab it. Many creative directors are just designers who don’t get to design much anymore. And when you realize that, it’s hard to blame them for grabbing a project now and then.
Agency owners have similar frustrations. They deal with rent, employee benefits, hiring, accounts receivable, payroll, accounting, cash flow, and sales. Owning an agency requires doing business work, not design work.
The day-to-day work of a creative director or an agency owner is not quite as glamorous as you might imagine. (And that is true with many of our dreams. Read this article about “cute little cafe syndrome” for more.)
The underlying motivation of those dreams is complete creative freedom. We want to design awesome stuff without strings attached.
However, the usual way we try to achieve that dream could deliver exactly the opposite of what we want.
And, instead of just following the usual career paths and hoping it turns out the way you expect, I want to challenge you:
Is your career goal really to earn the title of “Creative Director” or to have your name on the front door? Or could it be something else, something you hoped to achieve by becoming a creative director or agency owner?
What is the best way to achieve your career goal?
I know these are difficult questions to answer.
For me, answering these questions led to some drastic changes in my career. I gave up on the dream of opening an agency and having “Creative Director” on my business card. And I set out to build my own solo business to make more money.
Because for me money is not about status or power. Money is freedom. Money gives me the freedom to create the things I want to create.
Why am I telling you all this?
Because I wonder if, just maybe, you don’t want to become a creative director or open your own agency either.
I’m not trying to say I know what dream is right for you. I’m pushing you to think about it.
Hey, if you like the idea of managing people, verbally sparring about design on a daily basis, and mentoring new designers, that’s awesome.
However, if what you want is creative freedom, there are many ways to achieve it, but it starts with freeing yourself from the career ambitions you inherited from other designers and choosing your own goal.
If you want to be free to create, you need to be daring enough to truly choose your own adventure—not just the ones everyone else chooses.
With so many ways to learn about design and so many designers describing ourselves as “self-taught”, do you need a special piece of paper from a university to prove you are a designer?
If you scan a design job board, you will still see occasional job postings that list a degree as a requirement. Apparently it matters to some people.
And there’s always that nagging doubt: maybe there is something that people with design degrees know that you don’t because you are self-taught. You have this worry in the back of your mind that people think less of you because you don’t have a degree.
Many designers do describe themselves as “self-taught”. It’s a catch-all term for people without the special piece of paper.
And I hate that term because it implies that those designers are somehow lesser than those of us with degrees.
In the design profession, a degree means nothing.
For me, a design degree has always been a weight around my neck: a student loan to pay off and a line on my resume to disclaim because the design program I graduated from just wasn’t very good.
Having that piece of paper did allow me to apply for certain salary jobs during my career. But after I landed jobs that were supposed to require a degree, I met other designers at those agencies who hadn’t attended design school. They didn’t have the special paper. They got hired by having great design portfolios, and it was clear that I never needed a degree to apply for those jobs even if the job posting said so.
My degree cost vastly more than the paper it is printed on but its value is zero. Having a design degree did not open doors for me. My university did not help me get a job. My professors were not networked with employers or able to advise me about what I needed to do to get hired.
The only thing that opened doors for me was having a solid portfolio.
The only paper that mattered was each page I could fill with great design.
And I know that even if I had attended a better design school that could have set me up with opportunities, I still would not have earned them without a great portfolio.
But many new designers don’t know this, and because of it, they can end up feeling like imposters.
Imposter Syndrome means feeling like you don’t belong or fearing being exposed as a fraud. In the tech industry, Imposter Syndrome has become an offbeat buzzword of sorts. The fact that articles about Imposter Syndrome are so popular is proof that a lot of people in our industry are feeling like they don’t belong.
Many new designers feel there is a secret handshake or unwritten law about becoming a respected designer.
There are parts of the design industry that prize academics more than might be equitable and look down on “self-taught” designers. Many of these academics stand on tall platforms, and new designers hear them.
On the other hand, more and more designers claim being “self-taught” as a badge of honor. It’s like the punk rock DIY aesthetic. These designers prize independence, self actualization, and carving their own path like a protagonist from an Ayn Rand novel (if maybe with different politics). And new designers are hearing their voices too.
However, when someone asks whether they need a degree, we fall down the rabbit hole again and face that same old existential crisis: what is a designer? Perhaps all the different opinions are fueled partially by the fact that “designer” is a label anyone can claim. A designer is just someone who designs, and that can be anyone at any skill level.
We weigh the value of design degrees against the virtues of being self-taught, and in doing so, we forget to keep speaking the only message that new designers need to hear. It’s a message that we senior designers have heard so often that we believe everyone knows it already. But new designers still need to hear it, and it’s our job to keep repeating it.
So I will say it again, for those of you who haven’t heard it yet:
Your design portfolio is all that matters.
No one will question the way you learned when they see what you can design. They only care about what you can do. So don’t call yourself “self-taught” or a “design graduate”. Those labels don’t matter and won’t open any doors for you.
Further, no piece of paper, employer, institution, or person can give you the right to design, because you already have it. Don’t worry about whether you need a design degree.
The only issue you need to worry about as a designer is the quality of your work. Just make design, continue growing as a designer, and let your design speak for itself.
Your design work will open more doors for you than a special piece of paper ever could.
And stretching your abilities to the limit, you made the best design you possibly could. At the time, is was the absolute best thing you had ever made.
But a few months later, you tried to forget about it.
When you do remember, you can barely stand to look at that design again. That old design is an embarrassment. You can’t believe how bad it was. What were you thinking? So you remove it from your portfolio, don’t talk about it, and pretend it never happened.
Most designers never show our old work. And, if we do, it’s for laughs. “This is a screenshot of my first website. Look how bad of a designer I was back then!”
We look upon Old Loves—our former subjects of infatuation, the darling designs that we poured our souls into—like a worn-out pair of shoes. They’re dirty and they smell. Seal them in a plastic bag and toss them in the trash. It doesn’t matter how far you walked in those shoes—they are worthless now.
We tend to fetishize our current work and pretend it’s so much better now. But the design you’re excited about right now is headed for the same landfill before long.
And that’s a shame, because our Old Loves got us to where we are now. Our current projects are giving us the practice we need to become even better designers in the future.
Of course you can’t show older, lower quality work in your portfolio, and I’d never suggest keeping old projects in your portfolio.
But I do want to encourage you to take a look at the embarrassment you might feel about your older work. Pause for a moment and look back at all the things you’ve made.
We designers are always focused on the new. The next thing. A bigger challenge and a higher standard.
And we forget all the miles we walked. We forget all the late nights, exertion, and effort we poured into our old projects.
We turn our backs on our Old Loves, and move on.
But you’d never have come this far without them, and that’s why you should never be embarrassed of your old design work.
The fact that your old work looks bad to you is proof you have grown.
For me personally, it’s still hard to look back on my earlier years as a designer and be nostalgic. I worked hard, was totally stressed out a lot of the time, and it’s not like I want to relive those times.
So while nostalgia is the wrong sentiment, pride is the correct one.
Your Old Loves, your formerly great ideas, and the things that used to be the best you’d ever made are not embarrassing.
You should look back at your old work, see all the mistakes and problems you didn’t notice at the time, and take pride in the fact that you do notice now.
And no, I’m not going to bore you with a cliche and romanticize “the journey” (cringe) or other tired, sentimental self-help-book garbage.
It’s just that your ugly old designs are rock-solid proof that you are awesome right now.
So stop putting your past self down, and be proud of what you can do now because of all that hard work.
Note: this article was originally published at the Creative Class freelancing blog.
A thriving consulting business needs a constant stream of new clients, after all. You write proposals regularly to try and keep new projects coming in. If you’re doing really well, maybe you can line up several projects in advance.
Freelancing sites, books, and courses (many of them very, very good and written by my friends) advise you on how to optimize lead finding. Build an onboarding process, like Paul Jarvis teaches. If you refine your pitching practices, like Brennan Dunn does, you can raise your rates and write fewer proposals. Or, simply consider how you email with clients, like Robert Williams advises.
This is great advice and you should follow it.
However, no matter how efficient you are, earning that constant stream of new work gets exhausting sometimes: writing cold call emails, responding to job board posts, and answering referral emails. You end up booking only a fraction of proposals, and you never quite have enough leads for next month.
There’s a different way to consistently earn freelance work, without needing a constant stream of new clients.
Instead of trying to book single, one-off projects, pick your favorite clients and guide them towards ongoing work and a long-term relationship.
Start offering retainers to the people you enjoy working with most. Your quest is not so dangerous as you might expect. Here are some tips to avoid the killer rabbits, black knights, and bridges of death that await you in finding the holy grail of consulting.
I restarted my design consulting business 10 months ago (although I’ve been a professional designer for over a decade).
As I started looking for clients, I quickly tired of the lead-finding slog. The first couple of months, I’d managed to work with some phenomenal clients who rehired me, and slowly (and densely) started to realize that they had ongoing challenges.
I assumed that the ongoing work wouldn’t be desirable. Usually, it entails making little textual website updates once a month or monitoring Google Analytics. That sounded like the exact opposite of the kind of business I wanted to build.
But as I listened to what my clients were saying, I realized their challenges were deeper than tedious maintenance work. In some cases, maybe a client didn’t really understand how to use the assets I’d just made for them. Or, they had aspects of the business they really just didn’t want to have to think about.
I had a crazy idea: what if I pitched them on retainers? I could be the solution to those long-term frustrations my clients were describing. These needs didn’t fit neatly into a one-off project, and were happening on a regular basis. A retainer just made sense for them.
A retainer would be great for me too. If I could count on small projects each month from a handful of clients, I wouldn’t need so many new leads.
So, I did a ton of research on how retainers are structured and how to sell them, and broached the topic with my clients informally. What I learned would inform the biggest success of my consulting business to date.
Here’s what landing several retainers did for my business. My total monthly income for retainers is equivalent to a low salary, and is more than enough to pay my monthly bills. My retainers free up the time I would have spent looking for new leads. The impact has been so significant that I can work on my own products and even accept one additional large project every month. Often times, my retainer clients hire me for larger one-off projects (when that happens, I simply credit the retainer fee towards the larger project).
My consulting income is consistent. It’s also higher than before I had retainer clients.
Even better, I get to work with my favorite clients; the people who value and respect my work and the ones who pay me on time. I even have one client who often pays the retainer fee before I’ve even invoiced them!
Back when I mentioned retainers to each client, I was wary of the word, “retainer”, and didn’t speak it until much later. What I did say was something like: “It seems like you have some ongoing needs for design support. How can I help you with that? Is there a way I could support your goals on a monthly basis?”
Of course, once each client began to see the value of a long-term partnership, the term reared its ugly head, and some of the reactions were severe. “What if I don’t use all the hours I paid you for in a month?” “How many hours do I get?” “Can you give me a discount on your rate?”
Few people in our industry offer retainers because they have a bad reputation. Clients expect a “use it or lose it” allotment of hours that they purchase in advance at a discount. Some consultants might try to sell those blocks of hours and hope they go unused, which means free money.
I don’t blame clients for being suspicious, because a “use it or lose it” block of hours really is a complete con job. It’s unethical. I would never feel right about billing for hours I didn’t work, and I’m sure you wouldn’t either. Plus, scamming your clients isn’t a great way to get referrals when you do need them.
So, with this negative reputation in mind, I set out to make a totally different type of retainer. Here’s how I did it.
(Note: maybe this is bad reputation is why many consultants are using the term “productized consulting”, some of which are just highly structured retainer agreements.)
In my business, a retainer starts out as a regular old project. I design or write something for a client and deliver it.
That first one-off project is critical; I get to evaluate the client, and they get to evaluate me. We figure out how well we really work together. Further, I get additional chances to learn about the client’s business and what struggles they’re having. After the project ends, if everything went well, I use those insights to pitch a retainer.
Never pitch a retainer to a new client for three reasons:
During the pitch process, the question of rates will naturally arise. It’s also the most difficult part of selling a retainer.
What do you do when the client calculates an hourly rate and asks for a discount?
Never negotiate your rates. You deserve to be paid fairly for your time and experience. I know from first-hand experience that this kind of refusal is difficult; it’s confrontational and a little scary. You feel pressured to slash your rates or lose the client.
Stay strong. You can survive this part of the negotiation. It all starts with a single sentence:
“I sincerely appreciate the opportunity to work with you, but I can’t negotiate the rate.”
I use that same sentence every time a client asks for a discount. It explains that I value the relationship while also politely refusing to offer a discount.
Immediately following that, I’ll write about the results the monthly work can deliver. If it’s uncertain, I suggest we crunch some numbers before signing a retainer, so that the potential for profit is clear.
Note that I’m completely redirecting the conversation. Instead of falling into the trap of talking about hours, rates, and discounts, I change the topic to talk about what the client wants to get out of hiring me in the first place: profit.
The client isn’t considering a retainer because they have money to burn. It’s about achieving a business goal. So, remind them of that, and position your monthly services as an investment they can put towards achieving that goal.
(Of course, you have to sign the retainer too, which means you have to help them make real progress, or they’ll fire you!)
Negotiating a discount and counting hours steers the conversation away from the value you provide every month.
I realize that this value thing might sound like complete doublespeak. The easiest way of figuring out the value is simple math: how much did I pay for this? How much did I earn? If I could pay less, I’d earn more. That’s more value.
Some people will find the value argument to be disingenuous—that it’s just a different form of the same old con; instead of “use it or lose it” hours, these critics might think I’m just trying to jack up my rates under the guise of “value”.
Profit is value. However, profit, while powerful, is only one part of the value you can provide to a client. The other side is simply removing frustration. The ongoing, long-term structure that a retainer provides is arguably more suited to being a problem solver than a one-off project could be. You can observe problems growing and changing over time and adapt your solutions. You get more than one chance.
Removing frustration is a key part in pricing your retainers, because it allows you to steer away from the idea of hours. Frustration is difficult to quantify into hours, but easy to compare to a price. By focusing on frustration, can also demonstrate that you’re more concerned with being helpful than you are about rates.
I set a flat monthly fee on my retainers. My clients trust me to tell them when they ask for too much retainer work in a given month and when we need to talk about additional fees or make cuts to the scope. I do this all without counting hours.
Does that sound insane and impossible? It’s not. Since you’ve already worked with the client, you have an expectation about how projects will flow.
It’s also about setting expectations with the client and wording contracts clearly. Each of my retainers includes a “small monthly project” which can take “up to X days of work”, in addition to extra deliverables that are less about hours and more about value (which is advice I followed from Brennan Dunn‘s book).
My retainer contract states:
“I’ll advise you on how to get the best value each month and I will act in good faith to use the time efficiently. Further, I will notify you if I expect the monthly project to be especially short and recommend how we can accomplish the most together each month.”
I clarify how overages work like this:
“I will notify you before we agree upon the monthly project if it will require extra work beyond the scope of this agreement. I will also provide a written estimate for the overages. I will not complete extra work without your permission.”
These statements help my clients to be comfortable with the scope of the retainer without requiring an allotment of hours.
Of course, you have to earn that trust by delivering great work and results. Retainers aren’t for you if you just want to sit on the beach.
The first month of a new retainer, I work very very hard to prove my value. Retainers are about the long term, and if you invest some work into them up front, it pays off.
So often with consulting, we fall into the trap of thinking we just make a product or a thing. With retainers especially (but also with your regular projects), it’s so important to focus upon value.
I keep mentioning value. Everyone writes about value these days (especially value pricing). What does value mean? It means you’re earning your keep. It means you are making your client money and making her life easier.
With a retainer, your client will invest a significant budget over the long term and will expect a lot more from you than just a Photoshop file or a few lines of code. They want results and peace of mind in addition to output.
So, when you pitch a retainer, hone in on the stickiest, most obnoxious aspects of your client’s business. What is the day-to-day? What tasks are they not keeping up with? Where are you best positioned to make them a boatload of cash?
For example, one of my retainer clients has an aspect of marketing they just don’t want to manage, so I took it over for them completely. Another needs me to keep her accountable to follow the plan we set in our first project. I’ve also handled other recurring work in retainers, like: running a monthly newsletter, managing ad campaigns, and designing new marketing and product assets each month.
Listen to your client. Then, write a nice proposal about how they can pay you every month to make their pain disappear, only to find it replaced by stacks of cash. That, my friend, is value. They’ll hire you on the spot.
Each of your clients are unique. They have a specific audience, product, and voice. Match your retainer pitch to this.
However, it’s not just about adapting your pitch. You need to adapt your self and your services.
I learned pretty quickly after restarting my consulting biz that clients weren’t just buying a pretty design. They want an outcome, regardless of how much work or complexity is required to achieve one. When finding people with the right skills to hire can be so difficult, I handle every aspect of the project personally and make that outcome happen.
So, to book retainers, stop thinking of yourself as a designer, coder, marketer, writer, or whatever. You need to be a partner. Diversify the services you offer. Be the go-to person. Be the one consultant they’ve ever met who will steer every aspect of the project like it’s magic.
You can do it. If you don’t write, start practicing on your own portfolio site. If you can’t design, pick up some basics so you can advise your client.
Being a generalist has brought me more retainer work than being a designer. Not because anyone out there is looking to hire a generalist, but because it allows me to adapt my services to each client.
By being adaptable, I can do a better job of solving my client’s problems and I can work with a wider variety of clients than if I were a specialist.
That said, if you aren’t convinced about diversifying your skillset and the type of work needs to stay the same, at the very least consider how you can tailor your work each month to meet the client’s needs. Even if you’re essentially still doing the same thing, you can also deliver a monthly report, teach them a new marketing tactic, or provide another artifact that goes a bit deeper than the usual deliverables.
That doesn’t even begin to cover all the possible ways a retainer can turn into a trainwreck. I’ve also written up several other requirements that I put in place to avoid issues. I discuss these with clients so they aren’t surprised when they see the contract.
I’m not on call. All retainer projects are scheduled as normal, but with a smaller lead time than I usually require because I already know to reserve a slot for that client. The result is that I end up rearranging my schedule occasionally, but everything still fits. Also, no one is expecting me to make a website update at 3am on a Saturday.
My contract states that I am allowed to waive this requirement if my availability changes, and I often do. I even encourage clients to ask if something urgent comes up.
However, it’s important to set the expectation that availability works just the same as with normal projects.
At first, a client might worry they will pay for a month and then I could walk away without doing work. (Having worked with the client previously reduces this concern.) The 30 day notice to cancel the retainer contract is there so they know I’m on the hook for the work and that I’m not going to walk away and keep the fee on a contractual loophole. Also, they can rely on me and have a longer-term plan in place.
The 30-day notice also protects me. In the same way, I don’t want to do work and not get paid. So the client is on the hook too.
Last, I depend on my retainers for my livelihood. Because I spend less time each month looking for new clients, losing the retainer would be more of a concern than a one-off project would be. The 30-day notice gives me time to prepare and make up for the loss of income if the relationship ends.
Paying invoices is a major hassle for many clients. It’s part of why we consultants so often get paid late.
So, in my retainer contract, I detail the invoicing and payment process, including dates, to ease the headache of paying me each month. I want the retainer to be pain-free and smooth. Nailing down how transactions happen is a big part of this, as no one likes dealing with missed payments or unexpected invoices.
I don’t allow projects or time to “roll over” to the next month (like mobile phone minutes used to). I realize that this sounds like a “use it or lose it” setup, but I don’t require it in hopes of getting free money. Instead, it’s to encourage the client to keep me busy. I don’t want the work to fizzle out and the client to cancel the retainer. It’s in my interest to keep the work consistent so the retainer doesn’t fall into question.
For a client, signing a retainer is a bit scary. They’re making a big commitment, and investing a lot into it. To alleviate that fear, I offer a trial month on my retainers. During the first month, either of us can cancel at any time, effectively waiving the 30-day notice that’s normally required.
This allows client to feel good about making the commitment. They aren’t stuck with me until they’ve seen how it will go, and if they don’t like the results for the first month, they aren’t stuck with me.
Similarly, I can cut and run if a client turns out to be difficult despite our previous project and every other indication.
However, it’s important to note that my contract requires that even in the event of someone cancelling during the trial month, both that month’s fee and monthly project are still due. Both parties still need to make good on the agreement for that month, then it ends.
By jumping from one client to the next, so many of us are leaving client needs unmet. Stop abandoning your clients!
Now, I’ll acknowledge that for many of us, the appeal to working for yourself is the constant newness. You get to meet new people and find new challenges regularly.
As a designer, so often I just want to dig into a cool new design style or come up with a new brand from scratch. I don’t often get to do that for my retainer clients.
However, having retainers doesn’t replace those fun, new projects completely. But you know what it does replace? Crawling job boards. It also provides a more reliable income while only occupying part of my time, so that I can still take on exciting new challenges every month.
Of course, I couldn’t end this article without preaching at you again for just a moment:
Who says new is more fun, anyway? Working through challenge after challenge with retainer clients and seeing their success grow is one of the most fulfilling experiences of my career. It’s definitely more substantial than the fleeting coolness of designing a new logo.
How many of us consultants can say we helped even a single client’s business in a truly substantial way? This doesn’t often happen in a single drive-by project. But a long-term client relationship can become a major achievement.
When I saw this tweet:
At first I was mad, but then I realized he is right. It is kind of sad that trashing clients has become such a normal thing for designers to do.
I went and read some client horror stories, and I honestly found myself siding with the clients too.
Have you ever been a client yourself? I remember when I hired a contractor to finish my basement last summer. Before the project, I quickly got extremely stressed out trying to research how to reroute drains and air ducts and run cat6 cable and all kinds of crazy things I thought would need to happen as part of the project.
And when I called contractors, some of them acted like I was a complete idiot when I told them what I wanted them to do.
Until the last contractor I called listened and said “You know what man, that’s not how I’d do it. But I can definitely help you get this project done right.”
I hired him, and I am writing this email to you from my sweet new basement office with cork flooring and designer wallpaper.
The contractor I hired didn’t do the work the way I thought he would. Of course he didn’t—I had never finished a basement before and every single idea I had about it was totally wrong.
But he did explain to me how he worked and why he did it the way he did. And I felt a lot better about paying him when I understood those things.
This is our problem as designers:
We want to do our work without explaining it to anyone, then we get mad when people don’t understand.
But if we want people to understand why design is important and how we work, we are the ones who have to teach them.
It’s not a client’s fault if they don’t understand design.
If a client (or a boss, coworker, etc) doesn’t appreciate what you do, then you need to teach them why your work is valuable. You need to show why you are the right person to hire to do the job.
And if they come to you with crazy-sounding ideas for the design, you need to realize that the ideas sound crazy because the other person isn’t a designer. They don’t know how to make design. But asking for those things is the only way they know to kick off the project.
Instead of being mad at them for having crazy ideas, you need to explain the right way to do it and convince them to trust you.
Because most clients from hell are just normal people trying to start a design.
In part 1, you learned about how that experience can help you choose clients in the future who are a better fit and who are more likely to follow your design recommendations.
However, if you are like most designers, you still have past designs floating around that you are not really responsible for, but that have your name attached anyway. And they are cause for concern.
The last thing you want is for potential clients or bosses to think that a poorly modified version of one of your designs is your actual finished design work.
I too have made many designs that are now floating in the ether of the web with changes I find unfortunate and even damaging. And I wish I could go back and fix them. But, if the client is not interested in my advice, I cannot be responsible.
We are not responsible for what others do with and to our designs after our involvement ends. Any expectation otherwise is completely unreasonable.
You can’t always control what happens to your designs, but, for self-preservational purposes, you can still control how you present your portfolio and explain your work. And it starts with realizing that you do not have to rely upon live portfolio samples.
Most people, designers and not, believe that live work samples are better than screenshots, design mockups, and archived versions. This belief is built upon the hope that our designs will always endure the way we originally made them, but that never happens. Every design changes eventually. And if it doesn’t change, it gets replaced.
So, expecting to use live links to fill your portfolio is unrealistic. And, anyone who expects to see live samples as your core portfolio does not understand how design works.
The cure to this is simple. With just a tiny bit of explanation, you can show why it’s important that others see only what you made, instead of a live version that was influenced by others. Here are some examples of how you can explain it:
“All designs change eventually, and I wanted you to see the version I made so you can understand exactly what I am capable of doing.”
“The client modified the design after launch due to new constraints, and I wasn’t involved. This version is what I made and will help you see my level of skill.”
As a portfolio reviewer, I tend to view any design portfolio that is composed of live links with a little extra scrutiny. While some designers can and do launch designs that remain intact for a long time, every design will change eventually. Usually, live projects end up being changed by someone else. And, when I look at a portfolio, I want to understand exactly what that designer did. Live links are less likely to be an accurate indication of a single designer’s abilities.
So, forget about showing live designs, and just show the version of the design that you made. That’s what people need to see. Show a screenshot or a backup of your original version. It’s your right to show your originals (unless contractually prohibited, which is very rare).
Showing screenshots, mockups, and archived versions is no less legitimate than showing live designs. In fact, they are better because they will help people perceive your work and abilities more clearly.
So, by tailoring how you present and explain your portfolio, you effectively remove the only damaging aspect of having old projects floating around that have changed without your direction.
I realize that the very idea of those designs persisting might still give you pause. It’s an issue of pride, too. But you need to learn to let go.
Don’t try to own your designs. You make your designs for other people, not for yourself.
Instead of trying to enforce ownership, be a caretaker of your designs. Over time, you will learn to set up situations where you are directing the design, not just producing it. That will give you more influence over how the design evolves.
But even then, you will not be able to control every permutation of every design you make. So learn to let go. Keep snapshots of your great work, rather than trying to control what happens to it after your involvement ends.
Eventually you must let loose your creation to live a life of its own. Just let it go.
Sometimes you will notice that a client will change a design after you deliver it. Perhaps a month or two later you check back in on the client to see how they’re doing, or just want to return to a previous work to re-admire it, only to find the design has changed for the worse.
For many designers, the initial reaction is outrage. You worked so hard on that design, got the client to approve it, and then they went and changed it behind your back.
While we designers need to take ownership over our work, the design ultimately belongs to the client, and they have every right to do what they want with it. And, sometimes, changes to our designs happen for good reason, even if they don’t always satisfy our high standards as designers.
However, even if you can accept that, it’s still disappointing to see cases where a client isn’t getting the full value from your work.
Designs always evolve. But when they devolve, it can be worth speaking up. There is a difference between design changes that we designers personally don’t like and those that actually do affect the client’s success. When you see the latter happening, what’s the right thing to do?
I think that notifying past clients of potential consequences of changing a design is ethical and even a tiny bit noble. I personally always try to avoid sounding like a petty designer who is angry about changes to my work, because it is a little bit petty and certainly doesn’t win back clients. So if I see a client who made changes I don’t like, I only reach out to them if I believe there are serious consequences beyond sacrificing a little bit of aesthetic polish.
However, in the handful of cases where I’ve made a good faith effort to help the client and gently warn them of consequences, the client’s reply has been something like this:
“Thanks so much for looking out for us! We’re still working on it, and if we need help we’ll reach out to you again.”
And then I never hear from them again.
What’s happening is that after you deliver a design to a client, they know it rightfully belongs to them, and they will change it as they see fit. Sometimes, a client is more concerned with satisfying their own ideas and ambitions, and either doesn’t care about the results or believes they know better.
I’ve learned that when a client changes a design after I deliver it, especially when I worked very hard to educate that client about why the design should perform well and how to monitor that performance, this is usually evidence that the client wasn’t a great fit in the first place.
So instead of trying in vain to rescue an old project that’s seen better days, I review the project and client, and try to learn from the experience.
(I still make an attempt at least once each time. I feel it’s the right thing to do and hope it might lead to an opportunity for both me and the client to fix the design. But it hasn’t worked yet.)
I personally don’t feel great about taking money from clients who aren’t going to realize the full value of my work. Also, when a project doesn’t turn out well, I can’t use it in my portfolio, and I probably won’t earn referrals from it.
So when that happens, I make notes about why the project didn’t go as well as I’d hoped and try to understand why the client wasn’t a good fit. And I use that knowledge to qualify future clients.
I’d rather work for clients who I can really help and who are receptive to my advice.
I also try to establish long-term relationships with my clients to avoid this. Design requires constant maintenance and testing to deliver its best value, and a long-term client relationship with regular design updates is more budget-efficient than infrequent redesigns. Designs do naturally evolve, and guiding those changes ensures better results. Long-term support also selfishly helps me earn more referrals and keeps my portfolio pieces intact. So, this kind of arrangement is really better for both designers and their clients. (See my article on retainers for more.)
However, as designers we can only do our best work and hope clients will follow our advice faithfully. In cases where they don’t, we can just look for future clients who will.
Why are there so many designers with terribly out-dated portfolio websites?
Why are there so many articles on the web about “Personal branding”?
The answer for each of these question is the same: humans have a blind spot. We are unable to ever truly understand how others see us. That is what makes personal branding, designing your own website, or writing your bio so difficult.
I just wrote and designed a new website for myself. And I worked on it for much longer than I would any other project.
As I was sitting revising the homepage for the upteenth time, thinking about every reaction people might have to seeing a huge photo of my ugly mug, I realized it’s actually not that big of a deal. I was overthinking it.
But that’s natural when we consider our professional personas. We try to find a way to present a version of ourselves that others will like, but the truth is we’ll never really know what others think.
You can try to take a step back and be neutral and treat your own project like you would a client’s, but science says we can’t. We will fail. We are unable to be neutral observers because we are part of the closed system we want to observe.
Like I said, it’s a blind spot.
So what do you do when you need to write up a resume, bio, or update your professional website?
You can go read all the advice about personal branding:
But the truth is that most people are pretty boring. Way too boring to be a brand.
For most of us, being our authentic selves online would involve a disproportionate amount of posting about doing the dishes and grocery shopping. I don’t know about you, but that’s a bit too authentic for me.
Also, being your authentic self online requires knowing your authentic self first. And that is a daunting task.
Further, I personally hope it’s impossible to reduce an entire human being into a marketing slogan. I find the very idea a bit depressing.
This is why I find most advice about personal branding to be a sham. Discovering your authentic self and presenting it to the world is too much pressure—and it’s not even useful from a business perspective.
We still have to find a way to market ourselves, get hired, and make a living. And for many, that means having an online presence and some kind of brand.
Instead of worrying about what others think of us like we did in high school, the answer is simply to ask others to do the one thing you would otherwise never want them to do:
Ask others to put you in a box. Tell them to stick a label on your forehead.
You are “the person who does X.”
Marie Poulin is the design strategy gal.
Justin Jackson is the marketing guy.
Amy Hoy is the bootstrapping gal.
Jane Portman is the UI design gal.
Brennan Dunn is the raise your freelance rates guy.
Sean Fioritto is the JavaScript guy.
Mariah Coz is the online courses gal.
Paul Jarvis is the freelancing guy.
Jarrod Drysdale is the design guy.
That’s actually not so bad, right?
People don’t need to know every detail of your life and personality in order to trust you and hire you. They just need to know the aspects of you that matter to them.
So wrap up those aspects of yourself into a tidy package that you give to others. This is your branded self.
Your authentic self is something precious that you should reserve for the people you are close to. It is complex and beautiful but too difficult to communicate quickly, which makes it useless for branding.
Your branded self is the slice of your authentic self that you present so that people outside your inner circle can connect with you more easily and quickly. Especially in a professional setting.
To be clear, your branded self is not dishonest—only simpler. You’re leaving some things out not to hide but because that makes it easier for people to start getting to know you.
When you have this clearer, simpler idea of yourself in mind, it becomes a bit easier to write your bio or design your portfolio website because you don’t have to play the high school guessing game of what others think. You choose a specific picture of yourself to share, and you share it.
Sure, your branded self is a bit like a staged selfie. It’s a snapshot. But you have to start somewhere.
Which sounds better:
“Hi, nice to meet you. If you want to hire me, first watch this 5-hour documentary about my childhood.”
“Hi, nice to meet you. I make websites for a living, how about you?”
Personal branding advocates will read that and respond that there are many people who make websites for a living, and that statement doesn’t make you sound unique. And they are right. But most people won’t want to hear your life story either.
So, you can easily end up sharing too much of yourself, or too little. Success lies somewhere in between.
Sharing too little is just as ineffective as oversharing. For example, I’ve seen countless designer and agency websites with huge headlines on their homepages that are nearly identical: some slight variation of “We make beautiful, engaging, innovative websites.”
And they animate the headline, set it in a nice typeface, and slap a swanky logo next to it. But they all still seem kind of the same.
Your branded self is not just a job title. Every designer thinks they make great websites. This claim won’t build trust or convince people to hire you.
Personal branding advocates might tell you to ask yourself: “What makes me unique?” Which, again, is a difficult question to answer.
A better question is “What value do I have to offer?” Value is not beautiful websites and experiences. Value is all about the outcome and results you can deliver.
Marketers use a strategy called the Unique Value Proposition, or UVP.
Your branded self needs a UVP. Not a job title, list of deliverables you make, or a documentary about your childhood, but a simple statement that shows why you are uniquely valuable.
Frankly, writing UVPs is very hard work. Writing a good one requires that you understand who your audience is, what they want, and how you can serve them. Just being a designer, developer, or whatever doesn’t make you unique or even valuable.
A UVP for your personal brand should indicate how you are different from your peers and who you seek to serve.
Your UVP is the box you want people to put you in. It’s the label you are proud to have stamped on your forehead. And it is the reason people will trust and hire you.
The key to personal branding is: focus on how you can help others, not how you want to present yourself.
When I was a teenager, my friends and I would go to indie rock shows where 50 people max would watch a band play. After the show ended, we’d get to meet the band. This gave me a sense of ownership over that kind of music, to the point I’d use words like “sellout” when a band I liked found bigger success or when other people started listening to them.
Looking back, of course, this was a childish and arrogant way to think. More people discovering great art is only a positive thing.
As an adult and having been a working designer for over a decade, I still see that same attitude directed towards other creative professionals, not only musicians.
Many people think that creative professionals such as designers, copywriters, and illustrators are sellouts. We failed to earn a living with genuine art such as painting or poetry, so we gave up, sold out to the man, and started writing and designing marketing materials and ads instead.
Designers and other creative professionals are not sellouts. Sure, some of us have other creative ambitions. But using our creative expertise for business purposes and to earn a living does not make us inferior to “real” artists (whatever “real” art is).
One could argue that designers have won out over artists by finding a way to navigate cultural pressures that devalue art and creativity. We have found a way to earn a living and still make delightful creative work.
I often wonder if the people I work with think I’d rather be wielding a paintbrush than pixels. If they think I am a sellout who makes logos and websites instead of landscapes and still lifes.
But I never wanted to be a painter. I began a design career because I wanted to make websites.
And, for so many designers, this is what we wanted to do all along. It was never about finding a way to make our art and get paid for it.
We became designers to make design.
Oddly, that is not good enough for some. Our culture too often refuses to respect creative work unless it is completely altruistic.
But creative work is the same as any other kind of work. Money does not tarnish creative professions any more than it tarnishes other professions. Design is not compromised art, but something separate.
Designers, writers, and other creatives have bills to pay too. And using our creativity to pay them does not make us lesser-than. It makes us the same as everyone else.
Every few months all the tech blogs brag about a new thing that will replace designers.
But we designers are still here.
Because the truth is that you can give people the most automagical design tools possible, structure it for them so that it seems foolproof, and they will still mess it up. (No offense, but it’s true.)
Most non-designers believe that design is something you can learn by reading a book and create if you have the right tools. These same people wonder why they are unable to match the results of experienced designers after reading the same books and using the same tools. They go searching for that secret that the best designers know, and, often, end up writing off designers’ abilities as something to do with innate creative potential.
The secret behind the enviable work of the best designers is simply this: skill.
Design is a trade and craft. It takes practice. Knowledge and tools cannot replace this.
This is also why technology cannot replace creative competency. Instead, creativity drives new technology.
If WYSIWYG software replaces designers, we will be creating that design software.
If pushing pixels in Photoshop gets replaced by some new algorithm-driven software tool, designers will be creating the algorithm parameters.
Adapting to new constraints and environments is what designers do. That is why we aren’t being replaced. We are only evolving.
And we have done it before.
Just as we did when the printing press forced scribes to become printers and movable type designers, or when ‘desktop publishing’ forced paper-cutting-and-pasting graphic designers to go digital.
We were scribes, and we still are.
We began as communicators, writers, and doers who made both form and function. We mastered both composition and presentation and elevated the written word to sanctified heights. Our cultures trusted us with the most prized artifacts we had: holy and important texts that we took and transcribed into beautiful works of art.
An example of an illuminated text. Public domain source.
Humans will always communicate. We will always need to elevate and preserve our ideas and culture.
And we will always need scribes.
Designers have been here all along, and we aren’t going anywhere.
As a designer, you will always be working for someone else. It’s either a client or a customer, always.
The person who writes the checks has final say, even if they are wrong.
This introduces frustrating influences into our creative process. We designers sometimes feel we are losing control over our work, just because we do our work for others. If they are paying, we have to do everything they say, or we have to work hard to persuade them to follow our advice.
The day-to-day work of a practicing designer is a twilight battle zone. We fight on two fronts: creative battles against our own ideas and inspiration; and practical battles against the people who pay for and use our design.
But sometimes, it’s okay to wave the white flag and retreat.
You are not the boss, and you shouldn’t try to be.
That might sound strange coming from me. After all, I often write about how to earn trust and persuade clients and coworkers to follow your advice.
But, on rare occasions, the strategies don’t work. This happened to me recently.
Sometimes, the person paying you wants want they want. And you think that you have to comply and get paid, or walk away unpaid.
In these situations, I encourage you to realize that this is a false dichotomy. There is another option.
If you are unable to persuade your client or boss to use the design as you made it, you still don’t have to agree to change requests you know are bad.
Instead, you can find a new solution.
Usually, when unstoppable force meets immovable object and you see no path forward for the amazing design you have made, what you actually have lurking beneath the struggle is a new design constraint.
It’s frustrating to realize that you have a new design constraint after having already made a design.
But, while frustrating, when you hit a dead end in a design project, you have an opportunity and a choice:
You can either remain stubborn about your recommendations, which can make you look like a jerk. (I did this recently, and do not advise it.)
Or, you can back down and find a new solution that fits the new constraint. You can be the designer instead of trying to be the boss.
Yes, it is hard work. Yes, it sucks to step back from an awesome design and rethink many of your decisions. Yes, you want to avoid doing this whenever you can.
But, finding a new solution when you are at an impasse shows the real value of working with a design professional.
A client might see a design, refuse to approve it, and think that if you can’t solve it, their project must be hopeless. They fear there is no solution to the impossible problem they have given you. They don’t feel great about the impasse, either.
If you take that opportunity and use your awesome creativity to solve the new problem, again, in the face of seemingly impossible-to-everyone-else odds, here’s what will happen:
Upon seeing the new design, your client will be pounding her fist upon her desk, screaming “HELL YES THIS IS AMAZING” at you over the phone. And then she will proceed to rehire you for another project.
Sometimes, backing down from our vision for a design is the best way to be valuable. Sometimes, we designers need to set aside our own vision, and just solve the problem the client actually has. Even if they didn’t clearly explain it to us at the beginning of the project.
Sometimes, our job as designers is to find the problem before we can solve it. This means rework and scrapping great ideas. This is certainly an exercise in humility. It is a difficult pill to swallow.
But I have never had a client react so strongly and passionately to one of my designs.
For me at least, that is what success as a designer looks like:
Solve the problem no one else can solve.
Solve the problem they didn’t know they had.
Solve the problem, even if it’s not the way you prefer.
And you should be angry. Because, if you are a designer, many of the people you work with have thought you were petty at one time or another.
We try to use other, more positive phrases to explain the way we work. “Detail-oriented”, and so on. But it doesn’t work. When you explain your design vision, you see the accusation on their faces.
They think you are petty because you do things like this:
Dear designer, when will you learn that trying to enforce your design vision will never work?
You enter every project like a bouncer at a rock show. Ready for a fight. Aggressive posture. Glaring at everyone. Occupying the space in which you stand as if your family has guarded it for a century.
But everyone else is there just to experience some amazing music and take some small part in it.
People think that designers are petty because we enter every project looking for a fight. We have an us vs them mentality. We try to force our vision upon others and refuse to let them take part. Of course they resent it.
A designer is not a bouncer. A designer should be like a guitarist inviting kids on stage to dance and join in with the band. Because music is for everyone, and so is design.
So, why are designers petty? Because we try to force people to follow every detail, without budging, and without explaining why it matters.
The truth is that non-designers don’t need to approve every detail of a design. They think they do. They see details, and think that reviewing a design means giving commentary on those details.
But what they actually want is not usually specific fonts or colors. (If you ask a non-designer to come up with details on their own, they are usually unable to give suggestions.) What they want is to feel confident that the design solves the problem. That the design is going to work. That before they jump on board with you, they know the ship isn’t gonna sink.
So, if you don’t want non-designers to think you are petty, you need explain why your design is awesome and why it will get people what they want. Show the non-designers you work with how you solve problems visually instead of trying to enforce small changes which seem minor to them. Talk about reasons, not design details. Teach them why, not how.
Further, welcome their input, and provide a structure for when and how they should be involved. I’m not saying you should follow every request, but instead invite others to participate and contribute ideas to the design project early on. Let them get invested into the project and have their say before that will cause you extra work. You might even find that some of their ideas are worth considering! But regardless, setting up this structure positions you as the expert and removes many conflicts that happen late in projects because people feel excluded and uncertain about the design.
When people get to feel like they get to participate in the design process, they won’t think you are petty. They’ll be more open to your ideas, because you were willing to listen to theirs. And, they’ll be much more excited about implementing the design faithfully because it’s their design too.
So are designers petty? Not more than any other professional. Getting the details right is part of doing a good job. No one ever accused a lawyer or doctor of being petty for getting the details right.
However, people know that lawyers and doctors focus on details for their clients’ and patients’ benefit.
Designers do the same.
Comparison is valuable because it helps you get a neutral perspective about your skill. Especially for newer designers. But it can be damaging to even the most experienced of us.
The truth is that you will never be as good as other designers. Not like you want to be.
Because you didn’t see all the bad ideas they threw away while making that award-winning design.
You didn’t feel their self doubt as they put their Mac to sleep after another day of hard work without having found a single worthwhile concept.
All you saw was the awesome, finished thing they made.
And you act as if they made that amazing design in the blink of an eye, without the creative struggle or the hours of hard work that you endure every time.
You compare yourself to an impossible ideal.
Of course you fall short.
You will never, ever be that good at design, because no one is.
The truth is that every great designer you admire has horrible ideas that they throw away.
Every famous designer made ugly designs that no one else ever saw.
That is the nature creativity and none of us is immune.
I don’t care how experienced you are. If you’ve been a designer for 2 years or longer than my measly 10+ years.
You will make ugly design and then doubt yourself, and then you will see other designers doing amazing things and wish you could be that good.
But instead of expecting yourself to deliver perfect work the first time, every time, just keep doing your work. Keep designing.
You will get better at design.
And, if you keep going, someday you will meet a new designer who sees you like that.
You will meet a designer who can’t imagine being as good at design as you are.
Earlier this week, as I was critiquing the work of another designer, I was thinking back to when I was a junior designer and had to endure critiques of my work. I was remembering all the comments I used to hate:
Them: “Did you think about doing X?”
Me: Yes, and I already ruled it out.
Them: “Can we change this to Y?”
Me: No, I already tried it and it didn’t work. But you’re going to make me show it to you anyway, aren’t you?
Them: “I’d really love to try doing [thing that changes the entire scope of the project].”
Me: Sigh. There go my Saturday afternoon plans.
When I was the one doing the critiquing, I found myself saying all those same things I used to hate hearing.
We creatives are supposed to be good at constructive criticism and the design world’s version of that, “Critique”. (Hey, whoa, that’s the name of my newsletter. It must be important.)
But we are actually pretty terrible at it. Myself included.
When I give feedback on the work of other designers, I often mention details because I have skill in design and know how to look for them.
Noticing details is great—it makes us designers uniquely able to appreciate the work of our peers.
However, this ability also makes us uniquely able to undermine other designers.
When I look at a design made by someone else, it’s so easy to notice details and then pick them apart. I know what to look for.
But that other designer put a lot more thought into it—they made the design and then presented it that way for a reason. And here I am, stepping in without having spent any time considering the problem, giving feedback on those small details. It’s no different from a client asking to “Make the logo bigger.”
Worse, as we all know, bringing up these kinds of details implies that the design is also wrong from a broader perspective. This implication is completely unreasonable when I’ve only learned about the problem and seen the design 5 minutes ago.
This kind of discussion is actually not critique at all.
The dictionary definition of critique is:
Evaluate (a theory or practice) in a detailed and analytical way.
Most of us designers don’t critique. Instead, we comment, criticize, and nitpick.
The best creative directors I have ever worked with had this amazing ability not only to notice the details, but to understand the intent behind them.
When you review a design made by someone else, try to discern their intent, and if you can’t find it, ask them before offering your opinion.
Because as a designer, you have a right to offer constructive criticism and doing so can be incredibly valuable.
But a license to critique is like a license to kill. Don’t take it lightly.
You have the power to dishearten and stifle, or to encourage and empower. Critique should be a force for improvement and growth. Not condescension or a petty enforcement of your taste and skill. Picking at another designer is a surefire way to get the same treatment next time the roles are reversed.
Critique is a significant portion of what makes design worthwhile, and the word means—literally—that design is analytical and logical.
Design is creative, but it is analytical and logical too. To make great design, we need to balance both of those aspects of our profession.
That’s why Critique is the namesake of my newsletter. I want to encourage you not just to be creative, but to be logical and careful about how you approach the design profession. For all our own good.
Sign up below if you’d like to join me.
Design can do damage.
We all want to believe that a new design is always better. But there is a dark side to design: sometimes design can do damage. Data often shows that a new design can cause a loss instead of a gain, even if the new design looks nicer to us.
It’s fun to make a design without worrying about results. You set out to make something cool and exciting, revel in the dream, and take pride in what you create.
But, when the client or person in charge sees the bounce rate rise, or some other metric change, they get concerned about the design’s effect on results very quickly. That excitement fades, and difficult conversations happen.
Doubt, fear, and anger creep into the hearts of non-designers, and they end up asking the designer for changes via fingertip-lightning.
Designers, in turn, get frustrated when facing a pile of changes and go all Darth Vader.
The dark side of design threatens to rip us apart, but the light side holds a simple answer: just talk about it.
We designers often ignore this dark force when working with others. We are concerned with the details of our work and forget to explain how those details matter. We don’t tell others that we’re trying to reduce risk. And yet, we expect others to trust us that bad things won’t happen.
On the other hand, non-designers rarely ask about risks, even if they are thinking about them. Instead, non-designers will ask for specific changes, without explaining that the reason is the fear of decreases and damage.
Both parties just want to talk about how amazing the design is going to be and avoid the bad stuff entirely.
But if you want to avoid potential bad consequences of a new design, you need to talk about them while you’re making the design.
Even better, make a plan together about how to measure the design and what you will do if it doesn’t perform as you expect.
Often, the correlations between a design’s details and its success are a complete mystery to non-designers. That’s ok.
Our job as designers is to reveal those connections—to teach how we use seemingly minor details to create a powerful combined effect.
Resist the lure of the dark side by talking openly about both positive and negative outcomes.
As a non-designer, instead of zapping people with fingertip-lightning, ask about risks and voice your concerns without asking for specific changes.
As a designer, instead of chucking the fingertip-lightning guy down a bottomless pit like ol’ Darth, teach how your design will reduce risk as much as possible.
You will break the grip of the dark side and make an awesome design to boot.
You’re working on a new design, and it’s coming together like magic. Every idea you have clicks into place perfectly. The mockup looks amazing. It might be your best all year. You’re exhilarated.
The next morning, you sit down at your desk and open up that mockup. The thing you see before you is dumbfounding.
It looks downright awful!
How did this happen?! Yesterday, that design seemed perfect to you. It came together so quickly, and you were confident in the quality.
You’ve heard of beer goggles, right? Well, you had design goggles on.
Even after over 10 years as a designer, on occasion I will get pumped about a concept, design it, and then look at it the next day and realize it is horrible. (And, no, I’m not gonna show you an example. Ha.)
Creativity has a way of betraying you. Inspiration will stab you in the back.
Sometimes our work can have a fickle nature, and this is why designers have to face a reputation of being unreliable, wishy-washy, or other negative qualities often ascribed to “creative types”.
The truth is that making bad concepts is part of the creative process. We have to get the bad ideas out of the way before the good ones will show up.
Unfortunately, sometimes we trick ourselves into thinking a bad idea is good, and spend too much time on it.
That’s why I encouraged you to make quick ugly sketches, remember?
Experience helps, too.
But, like I said, I’ve been doing this a decade and I still fall into that trap sometimes.
Here’s how you can protect yourself from the bad ideas masquerading as design genius, and how you can avoid being that stereotypically unreliable designer without giving up on the creative spirit in your work.
No matter how excited about and confident in a design you are, never present it on the same day you made it.
Take a night to sleep on it, and think it over. That minimal amount of separation can be all you need to see the design objectively, without design goggles.
Open up your mockup alongside some swanky award-winning design by an internet famous designer. Compare them.
This might seem futile. After all, those designs are for different businesses and solve different problems entirely.
However, something about forcing yourself to compare your design to something you know is already good can reset your quality standard. It’s like taking off the goggles.
Comparison—even if functionally useless in judging if a design will be successful—is a little hack to jig your crooked mind back into looking at your own work objectively.
If you work at an agency, you’re probably lucky to have other designers around. Ask them for a quick critique.
If you work remotely like I do, it’s immensely helpful to have a network of peers you can email or DM in these cases. Why not even reach out to another designer you follow on Twitter for help? You’d be surprised how many are willing to give you a quick opinion. Because, all designers know what it’s like to be stuck with the goggles on.
Sometimes, the pressure of a deadline can jolt you out of your comfortable, creatively lazy mindset and back into “I need to finish this now” mode.
When you have extra time, you have the luxury of filling it by dwelling on unworthy ideas. So, instead of letting that happen, cut the extra time. Impose a new, imaginary deadline on yourself. Challenge yourself to get the design done faster.
You might just find that the bad ideas become more obvious.
So often, newer designers will miss a deadline or just quit a project altogether when they realize they wasted all the available time on a bad concept, and can’t imagine a way to dig back out of the hole.
I’ve done this. I’m sure most designers have.
I’m sorry to say that the only way to keep this from happening is to get more experience.
But, you can plan for it. Know that sometimes, that design you spent extra time making is going to end up being something you can’t present to the client.
Always have a backup concept.
Always pad your projects enough that you can recover if a concept leads you astray.
Always explore your favorite concept thoroughly in sketches, brand mood boards, and/or type studies before investing deeply into a mockup.
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All designers have bad ideas. But, the best designers expect this and refuse to let bad ideas ruin their day.
I have even seen entire design projects put on hold because clients or stakeholders were confused about the wireframes and lost confidence in the design team.
Delivering wireframes before the mockup or prototype seems like a logical way to reduce risk. You’re trying to give the client or other involved parties a preview of what the final design will look like.
However, wireframes tend to bring more confusion than clarity. They invite feedback about certain aspects of a design too early and expose stakeholders to unfinished ideas that should never see the light of day.
In practice, wireframes are usually a complete waste of time, but in a few rare cases, they are indispensable.
You can avoid the fallout that wireframes cause by using them with clear purpose in only very specific circumstances, and ditching them the rest of the time.
Always sketch first. Sketches are the fastest way to explore and evaluate rough design concepts. (I’ve written about how sketches should fit into the design process previously.)
Wireframes, on the other hand, are always slower. They must be made in graphics software or something like Balsamiq, which is more involved than simply scribbling on a piece of paper.
Committing a design concept to a digital format makes it less disposable. And, early in the design process, it’s critical that we designers don’t get too attached to rough ideas before we’ve exhausted our brainstorming potential. So, often, wireframes can cause us to commit to bad concepts too soon.
Wireframes should never be part of brainstorming or exploring ideas, except in a few cases where you need to collaborate with peers during early stages. (See below.)
Sketches are better for exploration, and, when no one else needs to see the concepts, beat wireframes every single time because they are faster and more disposable.
Never use wireframes to show work in progress to a client or stakeholder. Ever.
Clients and stakeholders rarely understand the difference between a wireframe and a polished design mockup. Often, even after you explain that the final design won’t have the same colors, fonts, spacing, and aesthetics of the wireframe, people will still get hung up on those issues.
They mean well. They really do. But, non-designers rarely understand how to approve a layout or interface concept without looking at details like fonts and colors. They will struggle to evaluate only certain aspects of the design, which the wireframe is supposed to demonstrate, and will instead judge every aspect.
Thus, showing wireframes will force you to take a pause in your project in order to explain and train more, when you wouldn’t have to if you’d just skipped the wireframe stage completely.
Further, when you allow a stakeholder see an early design concept in the form of a wireframe or rough mockup, you are inviting feedback into the design process too early.
My rule is to never present incomplete ideas or variations of a design. Anything I present to a client is my final decision. Even when I do use wireframes—I do, and I will get to that—they represent my best solution to the problem and not a rough concept.
Don’t let wireframes be a cop out. Don’t defer your job—deciding on the best version—to a client or someone else. Pick the best concept and present that.
I’m a huge advocate of setting expectations and making sure the client understands how you make design. I invite clients to share ideas early in my process, and I work hard to set clear expectations, which helps me to avoid lengthy design revision cycles.
However, you can set clear expectations and allow the client to get involved without showing unfinished work. Control what stakeholders see, and make sure that when you present something, that you need them to see it because you need approval.
If a concept isn’t ready for approval, never present it. Not even as a wireframe.
Note: I’ve been fortunate to find some clients who don’t get caught up on the visual aspects of wireframes. If you are able to work with clients over the long term, which I highly recommend, you can build rapport by delivering great work regularly. Clients will come to trust that you deliver great results so that you can use wireframes in clever ways, such as to avoid doing visual designs for every page or feature, or even alongside a living style guide to avoid mockups completely, and reap the time savings. But this is a risk if you haven’t built up trust with a client/stakeholder previously.
Okay, so I’ve taken a strong stance on wireframes here, but I do actually use them! There are cases when wireframes are completely indispensable and worth the extra time they take to create.
Even as a designer who writes heaps of code, on complex software projects, I will still run into cases where I don’t understand how a feature might be built on the back end.
In those cases, I create a wireframe to share with a developer to discuss my concept, so that they can vet it from a technical point of view.
I admire and respect developers, and the last thing I want to do is cause them to end up stuck with a design that’s ridiculously difficult to build.
So, in cases where I don’t understand how development will work, or if I’m concerned there might be broader technical repercussions, like speed, availability of data, or causing a developer to spend 2 months writing a new API, I formalize the concept into a wireframe and go discuss it.
In these cases, wireframes not only provide designers and developers with a way to collaborate, but they can also prevent those classic designer vs. developer battles. Wireframes can save your relationships at work and reduce conflict. They are well-worth creating in those situations.
Many designers are hesitant to involve developers so early in the creative process. However, if you are invested into designing something that can function well and is realistic to build—which all designers should be—sometimes you need to show your early concepts to developers.
Every single time I have used wireframes in this way, developers have been gracious—even those who have reputations of being pernicious—wink!— and appreciate the chance to help define how the feature will work.
The surprising part is that when I have approached developers with what I thought would be a complex technical problem, nearly every time they surprise me. I have seen wireframes leading to developers embracing the concept and putting in extra work to find a technical means of supporting it. But, even better, great developers often surprise me with a way to make the interface even more elegant by supplying a cool new technique I hadn’t heard of.
Inviting developers to vet complex design concepts pays off every time, and wireframes make it possible.
When you’re working as part of a design team, wireframes become a useful tool for offering up your best concepts for discussion and critique.
While I prefer sketching, I also believe that sketches should be ugly and condemning anyone else to deciphering them is cruel and unusual.
So, when I’m working on early stages of a design with other design pros, I spare them the grief of looking at my scribbles by sharing a wireframe instead. What can I say, I’m nice like that.
Seriously though, while I wrote that committing a design concept to a digital format formalizes it, that can be valuable when discussing with other designers. You can’t critique a sketch, after all. A wireframe feels more formal and worthy of serious consideration for a team.
And, of course, other designers are capable of discussing only certain aspects of a design, like layout and usability, and won’t get hung up on the aesthetics of a wireframe like a client or other stakeholder might.
Too often, wireframes are the maladjusted offspring of sketches and mockups. Their purpose is unclear. The role of a wireframe is often confusing because we present them without a clear question mind.
However, if you set clear expectations about how you are using wireframes for each project and what response you are looking for, they can be useful.
Use wireframes with clear purpose but never as a placeholder for complete thoughts.
But this obsession diminishes the everyday practice of design.
I know this is a strong statement.
The intent behind design trend posts is innocuous; people write that stuff to give you a little dose of inspiration. We designers are always looking for more ideas to incorporate into our work. Design blogs do a great job of this, and the end-of-year design trends posts get lots of traffic for a reason.
But the rest of the year, when you are in the trenches practicing design, trends are insidious.
Another new design trend seems to start whenever someone sees 3 shots on Dribbble that share a minor visual quality.
This in itself, while maybe a little silly, isn’t especially harmful.
However, obsession with trends shifts conversations away from whether aspects of the design are effective, usable, build trust with the intended audience, or make an element’s function apparent, and instead, towards personal opinion and fashion.
The issue is that, now, we judge designs by whether they are fashionable, and not their success.
Further, by placing so much emphasis on trends, unqualified critics can invalidate proven techniques overnight. What were simple tools designers used to make interfaces easier to understand are written off completely without even an attempt at justification.
These developments have real implications in a designer’s daily work. When popular writing about design trends pretends to invalidate useful techniques, or when clients learn from us that design is subjective, we have more difficulty earning a living as designers.
Following design trends is like free lunch to new designers. (I actually wrote that in my first book.) To those who are learning or just starting out, trends serve as a standard to aim for. You can learn to create that specific style and use it to build a portfolio and get hired. Learning one style is much easier than learning to command multiple styles, so I always recommend that new designers try to spot trends and follow them while they are still building up their skills.
But the usefulness of trends ends with learning.
As you climb through the ranks of the design profession, if you can only deliver the latest kind of design style, you’re going to hit a compensation ceiling.
So many of us try to sell our work by explaining it is “modern” or “fresh”. But those qualities are highly subjective, and, as you gain experience, you will meet clients who are hesitant to pay for something they can’t quantify.
So, you need to learn to quantify design for your clients. If you want to earn more money as a designer, you need to learn how to connect your services to results.
And, to be blunt, if you get hired on the premise of creating a unique, fresh, and different design, and then deliver something that looks just like every other on-trend site, you kinda seem like a liar. Sorry, but it’s true.
Are you tired of having every single person you work with (who isn’t a designer) act like they know more about design that you do? It’s a common complaint.
We have earned that treatment from clients, developers, and others, because of the way we discuss design in public.
Your clients are watching.
While we debate which version of Flat Design is correct, whether skeuomorphism is bad, or whether 45 degree angle line patterns are passé (yes, that is actually a real design trend debate from a decade ago), your clients are still watching.
And they are learning how to talk about design from you.
They observe designers in these superfluous debates about style, and they learn that the correct way to discuss design is to offer up one’s own personal opinion. So the next time they talk to you about your design work, they do so.
And you get frustrated.
It’s crazy to me how we designers haven’t made this connection yet.
The way we talk about design in public affects our daily work. If you are tired of getting petty change requests from clients, stop writing petty comments and articles about design in public.
Our job has always been: deciding how much ornamentation and which aesthetic style is appropriate for each project.
So, while for new designers I do recommend learning by following trends, I only offer that advice with a qualifier:
Don’t put the creative process on autopilot because you read a fun post about a hot topic in our profession.
Not every audience will respond well to the latest style, technique, or trend. It’s your job to figure out who the target audience is and which approach will appeal to them best.
And, we have to make that decision again for every single project. Blanket advice from people advocating various trends and other design soapbox preachers (including me), while offered in good faith, is still blanket advice. Design should never be a one-size-fits-all endeavor. Instead, you’re looking for the right fit for one project at a time.
We do this because the designs we make are not just table settings. We are serving up the main course.
Our slang has evolved. ‘Relevant’ no longer means ‘pertinent’, but instead, ‘fashionable’.
This is the perfect symbol of how segments of our industry have abandoned success metrics and function, and have given in to less substantive topics.
Perhaps because we designers have a palpable desire to make things that are relevant, fun, and exciting, our industry is doomed to repeat itself. We can’t break our addiction to coolness.
More than half a decade ago we abandoned the practice of making Flash websites because they were often plagued with usability and accessibility problems. The design industry embraced web standards, hoping to improve the quality of websites across the board by making them equally usable on every device for every user.
I was one of those designers making Flash sites who dove into the world of web standards, HTML, and CSS, and found there incredible, lasting value for clients and users.
And yet, we have returned to making those same kinds of websites, only this time, in JavaScript. The design awards sites are completely overrun with beautiful websites that are difficult to use and have little and often downright bad content. While it is a source of pride for makers of these sites to tout cross-browser, mobile support, calling them usable is too often generous.
This return to the unusable is more evidence that we have allowed trend-based design to infiltrate professional discussions in the design industry. We got bored with standards and usability, and now we’re back to animating buttons. (P.s. I animate buttons. But I hope you find substance in my work, too.)
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Maybe you are one of those designers who wants to spot or start the next big design trend. I get the prestige of that, and I also can’t blame anyone just for being excited about the design profession and wanting to read everything they possibly can about it.
Designers are a hungry bunch. We need inspiration and fresh ideas.
I won’t judge you if you indulge in the little guilty pleasure of reading a design trends blog post every once in a while. We can even talk about it over caffeinated or alcoholic beverages, just like we do Mad Men, Mr. Robot, or some other entertaining cultural phenomenon.
But let’s leave the entertainment where it belongs, and reserve some place for serious design talk. Our profession needs it, and our clients and businesses deserve more than passing fads.
Sharing beautiful sketches is a source of pride for many designers. Do a quick search on Dribbble and you’ll find countless gorgeous sketches that are certainly enviable.
Seeing concepts for digital design in a tangible form has a certain novelty and excitement. Further, demonstrating how those physical artifacts transition into the final digital form shows off the designer’s creativity and skill. I don’t blame anyone for being proud of that.
However, beautiful sketches have no place in the design process.
During the design process, sketching serves a single purpose: capture and explore visual concepts as quickly as possible.
To a designer, sketching is visual brainstorming. Early in the design process, designers need to have lots of ideas quickly. As the more experienced among us know, early ideas are often the worst. We need to get those bad ideas out of our minds so that better ones can start appearing.
Ugly sketches are better because they are quick. Nice-looking sketches obviously take more time to create, and thus they slow down the flow of ideas.
The desire to create beautiful sketches also causes designers to commit to a concept too soon. During early stages of the design, it’s important to move past every idea rather than dwell. The goal is to have a volume of ideas, not to develop them. Refining concepts happens later.
If you make a beautiful sketch during the early stages of the design process, you spent more time on it than you needed to. You interrupted the flow of ideas by focusing on one, before the brainstorming was complete. And, it’s possible that you missed a chance to come up with an even better concept.
Don’t limit your potential for great ideas by committing to one idea too soon. Keep your ideas flowing and give yourself the proper time to evaluate and refine them later.
A sketch is a horrible way to decide on final presentation details. A sketch should only be a rough version of an idea, and it should exist only to serve as a temporary record of that idea.
When you have chosen a concept worth developing further, you’ll make a few more sketches to explore it and exhaust your ideas, pick the best version, and proceed to a mockup or prototype.
A detailed sketch is a poor mockup—it doesn’t reflect the final format closely enough to be useful. It’s another thing you’ve created that can’t ever be used. And, there are better ways to refine your concept in detail than sketching. Sketches are bad at detail, no matter how skilled you are at drawing, because you’re creating those details in a medium that’s nothing like what the final product will be.
Remember back when many designers eschewed mockups because they aren’t functional in a real context? Everyone was supposed to start designing in code to be as accurate as possible.
Regardless of what you think of that debate, you have to admit that sketches are even worse at representing the real medium for a final design. Sketches can never become anything close to real, they don’t look real, and they don’t feel real. That’s why you should use them to record rough concepts but not for detail.
Sketches provide a low-risk way to get those ideas out. If you spend a lot of time on a sketch, you’re investing into a concept that might not be deserving of that attention. If you end up scrapping that concept later, all the time you spent making that beautiful sketch is wasted.
You wouldn’t spend 3 days creating a mockup in Photoshop for every design concept. That’s too risky. It’s too likely you’d end up wasting a lot of time.
Sketching has the same risk. It’s better to save your full attention for when you’re certain a concept is your best.
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Now, don’t get me wrong. It must be fun to create beautiful sketches! I’m certainly jealous of that skill. I’m not saying you should never draw beautiful things. I’m just saying that it doesn’t have a place in the early parts of the design process.
A huge volume of ugly sketches leads to a beautiful, high-quality design. Sketches aren’t important in themselves. They are a means of creating that great design in the end.
I’d much rather take pride in the final design that people will actually use than the pile of sketches on my desk that will only gather dust.
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Caveat: artists and illustrators. If you’re drawing a logo or illustration, sure, it makes sense to have nice-looking sketches. A sketch might even serve as the template or guide for lettering and other techniques. But, even in those cases, I guarantee most artists start with rough sketches first.
You probably don’t believe me.
Tell me if this sounds familiar: you spend days and weeks on revisions. I used to do that too. I used to present designs and have them rejected so harshly that the list of revisions was basically a complete redesign. I’d beat my head on the desk, think “Well, I have to get paid”, then gnash my teeth as I watched the Photoshop loading splash screen. (Oh man, I have no time to gripe now that Sketch opens so quickly, amirite?)
I didn’t always know this, but those seemingly endless revision cycles were a huge drain on my income. Not to mention my morale.
The revisions will continue until morale improves.
You’ve probably read articles that say your job as a designer is to sell the work. The standard advice is that if your client isn’t happy, you didn’t explain well enough.
Explaining design is an important skill, and it’s one every designer should work to improve. (Maybe I’ll write about that another time.) But, not explaining design well is only one small part of why clients can react so strongly to our designs—and end up requesting so many heartbreaking revisions.
It’s not enough to explain and sell to your clients. You have to train them.
The vast majority of clients do not understand any of these things:
This ignorance causes problems right from the beginning of the project, and they snowball causing the extreme reactions we all fear when presenting the design.
So, if you want to avoid those reactions and endless revision cycles, train your clients so that they understand each of the misconceptions above.
Clients do not understand: who the design is for.
Possibly the most redeeming quality of the UX boom is that designers are thinking a lot more about users. We do it in a very self-righteous way—”I’m a user advocate! I make people’s lives better! I’m basically Mother Teresa!”—but the outcome is still remarkably good. This focus on users in our industry is positive because it connects our work to data and real outcomes. It steers design away from subjectivity.
However, the whole UX-persona-user-story-experience-buzzword-key-party thing is a just an indirect way of saying this:
Your website is for customers, not you. It’s a waste of money to design a website for 1 person.
And, you can just come out and say that, and in much less time than it takes to do a user study.
If you end up designing a purple and yellow site because your medical industry client is a big Lakers basketball fan, it’s your own fault. You didn’t teach the client that the site isn’t for him, but for his customers.
And, when you present that purple mutant for the first time, the client won’t like it. Even if it’s exactly what he asked for. He’ll see the design and realize he couldn’t possibly sell medical products on a purple website.
I fully realize that I just casually dismissed the entire UX field. Don’t get me wrong. I completely understand how valuable it is. I just think we get so lost in our terminology and technique that we neglect to explain it to the client in plain English.
It only takes 1 minute to teach the client to focus on customers and users. That one minute of teaching will save you hours of work later. And if you do that teaching up front, you can remind your client later, like this: “Remember that conversation we had about focusing on customers? That’s why we shouldn’t change the design.”
Clients do not understand: what design can accomplish.
Most clients approach a designer with something specific in mind that they want. Often, if you ask them why, they’ll just say “We need to update the brand” or “This design is getting old” or “We want something more modern”.
They want a nice design—and most of them know it’s important to the business in a general sense—but if you challenge them to be specific, many clients will be unable to relate design directly to a metric.
But, if we’re really honest, every metric is about money.
As a designer, every conversation you have with your client is about money. Every single meeting—from the very first “Nice to meet you” call to the day you deliver the design—is about money. You are working to earn the client money. The client is comparing the profit the design earns to your fee. If you don’t make that number positive, you will be the first to get fired when the marketing budget starts running low.
Further, if you teach your client that your work is about making them money, they are pretty much guaranteed to listen to you.
Clients do not understand: how design is made.
Even designers who are really great at explaining design use a vague but all too common phrase that devastates projects. It sounds like this:
This style is clean, fresh, and modern. It will establish your brand in the marketplace and differentiate you from competitors.
Most designers use some variation of that phrase to explain their work.
And it’s a horrible, inaccurate, garbage thing to say.
Why? Because style accomplishes nothing. Establishing a brand in the marketplace means nothing. Neither of these are measurable, and they are completely subjective.
By explaining your designs this way, you are implying that you just picked whatever you thought might look cool. And, if picking and making design is only about individual opinions and perceptions, your client will certainly have their own to share.
Cue the revisions. Or the redesign.
Instead of talking about how the design looks good, explain how you chose that exact aesthetic to appeal to your client’s customers. Demonstrate all of the critical thinking you used to arrive at this conclusion, and, how specific aspects of the design are planned to achieve the project goals.
When a client realizes that you made the design with goals and results in mind, they’ll be much more careful about asking for changes. They want those results—and they’ll know that any change could affect the likelihood of achieving those results.
Of course, this also means that when you start a design project, you need to do research and create your solution with goals in mind. Never agree to work on a concept with nothing to go on. If you do, the design will fail because it has no foundation, and you’ll have no basis for persuading the client to use it.
Clients do not understand: what designers do.
No matter how well you train them, most people just won’t understand what designers do. This is why it is immensely important that during a design project, you never disappear. You should always give the client a head’s up about what you’re working on right now and what they should expect to see from you next. That way, when you’re close to delivering the final concept, they know it’s coming, and they know what it’s going to be like.
If my client is surprised when I deliver a design, I messed up. I never want a client to be surprised by the work—not even if it’s a positive surprise.
I want the design I deliver to be exactly what my client wanted. The solution they were hoping for—and that they helped me to create. Not an unexpectedly beautiful object—which is also a relief because they had to pay for it sight unseen. I want my designs to be calculated, expected, and on the mark every. single. time.
Because I really hate taking an axe to a wonderful design. Don’t you?
You have to do more work to make sure your client isn’t surprised. You have to plan out your projects, get your work done when you say you will, and be organized enough to know what’s coming next and when you can finish it.
For junior designers, this is nearly impossible. It was for me.
If you find that you struggle to plan out your work well because creativity can be fickle, the answer is simple: pad all your deadlines. Give yourself extra time, and hey, if you end up not needing it, deliver early or work on something else.
Setting expectations is your responsibility. Here are some important points that you should bring up during a project to help guide conversations and set expectations:
If you bill at or over $100/hr, you should be doing all of these things. You are not worth that rate unless you do.
I know that list contains a lot of information. The crazy thing is that many designers leave out almost all of it. This is why clients can seem so difficult. The truth is that their reactions are completely reasonable given that they have almost no information.
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When you train your client and set all of these lessons as the context for your work, you won’t even need to explain your design as much. That skill of “selling the work,” while important, becomes somewhat less so. Your client will see the design for the first time and connect the dots between everything you have taught them and that amazing piece of work.
All they’ll have to say is: “Looks great, let’s build it.”
When I quit studying electrical engineering in college to become a designer, I thought I’d spend the rest of my life broke.
14 years later, I’m earning 6 digits a year. I have my pick of projects and clients. I work remotely, from home. I’ve worked on glamorous projects and made awesome software, brands, books, and websites.
I want to help you achieve success with design, whatever that means to you—whether it’s making money as a professional designer or adding design skill to complement your own profession.
But, I believe success in design starts with your expectations. And your expectations about design are probably wrong—even if you’ve been doing it a while.
That’s okay, because my expectations about design were wrong too. Here’s a little bit of my story.
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Before I decided to become a designer, I went to a tiny college you’ve never heard of in Oklahoma to study engineering. Nearing the end of the first year, I was miserable. Engineering wasn’t what I expected—I felt like I was learning to fix broken stuff instead of to create.
I’d been playing guitar in a crappy rock band and tinkering with making a band website in my free time all freshman year. I was getting pretty good at the website part (even if our band couldn’t get the same people to show up to practice more than once). And I found writing Actionscript and HTML to be a lot more compelling than Calc 2 homework.
I decided that I wanted my career to be making websites. I knew I’d be making less money, but the tradeoff would be worth it since I’d be happier.
So, I went in to see my engineering department advisor. “I want to change majors, can you sign this form?” I said. He pointed at a folder sitting on his desk. “I was just about to submit the scholarships for the top 5 engineering students in your class. Your name is one of them. Are you sure?”
“Yes.”
His shoulders slumped visibly. He signed the form to allow me to quit, and I left. He probably thought I was a complete idiot.
Unfortunately, my college didn’t actually have a web or digital design department, being tiny and crappy as it was. Since I wanted to do digital design work, my major ended up being a combination of journalism, broadcast, and art classes. (This ended up causing me to butt heads with art department folks later since I didn’t fit their mold, as you will see.)
Eventually, I think it was before my senior year, I realized that I wasn’t learning enough at school. The only real designs and websites I’d made were outside of classwork, and my upcoming classes didn’t look to be much better.
The worst class of the bunch was, ironically, 2D Design. It was me and 15 bona fide art majors, most of whom knew their way around an art studio, and who looked at me like: “Why the hell are you here?” It was basically a “Hey, let’s all make mixed media art” course. Let’s rip pages out of old children’s books and glue them to mannequins. Let’s put a dead bird in a suitcase and call it art. Ugh. Can I roll my eyes any more emphatically? We learned nothing about design in that class.
The entire semester, repeatedly, the 2D Design professor tried to convince me that a career in web design was not as worthy a pursuit as fine art and that I should switch to a major in the art department. I felt he treated me as an outsider and condescended the kind of work I aspired to do. I’m sure he meant well, but he came across as poorly informed about where the industry was headed—it was plain to see to anyone with an internet connection.
The semester ended and I got a C in that class because I couldn’t draw or paint for anything. My art was horrible. It was the lowest grade of my entire school career. I know, not that bad, but I was a huge nerd and cared a lot about grades. It was a big change from acing engineering classes.
My silly experiments with my rock band website had led me to begin following the Flash community (hey, it was really cool stuff at the time) on sites like Flashkit and Ultrashock. I’d picked up some programming chops, but I realized to make websites that even came close to measuring up to the professional work on those sites that I admired so much—and to get hired when I graduated—I’d need to learn more.
I bought a ~1000 page programming book, ‘Essential Actionscript 2.0’ by Colin Moock, and read the whole thing in 1 weekend. I spent the rest of my summer building Flash websites, when I wasn’t working a part time job in a call center. I taught myself all the basics of programming: variables, loops, functions, and even some Object-Oriented Programming. Over those months my Flash projects changed from timeline animations to single-frame interactive projects with hundreds of lines of code.
I discovered that I excelled at walking the line between technical and creative.
My senior year, close to graduation, I beat out all the art majors for a coveted and rare full-time gig at a local ad agency. OKC is a college town with several universities, one of them very large, and there were lots of other design grads but very few entry level jobs. How I got hired is an interesting story and I’ll share it another time. But the short version is that the agency hired me because I had real work in my portfolio, not self-indulgent art projects.
Word spread through my tiny college quickly, and that 2D Design professor made a snide comment to me about how my lowly mass-comm-major-self stole one of the jobs that should have gone to an art major, just days before graduation.
I beat out his “real art majors” with my programming chops. Self taught. And the rest of my career went exactly the same way.
…
I’m sharing this story with you because it shows that most people’s expectations of what it’s like to become a designer are wrong.
When I was a college kid, I chose design because I liked it. I thought I was giving up the potential to earn a high salary. We designers don’t have a reputation of making a lot of money, especially compared to engineers.
Designers also apparently count as ‘creative types’. Because of that, most people think that all designers are accomplished visual artists.
Now, you and I know these stereotypes about designers are wrong. I’m living proof.
Being a designer has nothing to do with being a creative genius. I’ve built a successful design career on technical skill. My ability to code landed me not just that first job right out of college, but every single full-time design gig I’ve ever had. I couldn’t draw a nice piece of art to save my life, but I design awesome, creative, and beautiful websites. I’ve coded movie websites, stock trading tools, ads, and websites seen and used by hundreds of millions of people. And, since I could code them, I also got to design them.
Being a designer can also earn you a great income. We aren’t all starving artists. I know designers who make double and even triple what I do. No joke.
Later in my career, I was able to build a thriving consulting business, again, because of skills that have nothing to do with design.
Sure, I’m good at design. I’ve devoted many late nights and long hours to practice and my skill is hard-earned. But my clients hire me because I get them results. I offer much more than aesthetics; I’m a problem solver, strategist, and partner.
Making pretty things is only a small part of a designer’s work. Most of it is problem solving. You have to be the one who shows up and tackles the nightmare interface no one else wanted to solve. You learn the skill you need to get the job done right. That’s how you get hired early on, and later, how you get paid well.
My design philosophy is that design isn’t a philosophy. Design is just hard work and problem solving. (Ironically, I fix broken things A LOT.)
If you’re willing to do that hard work, you can make a lot of money as a designer. If you don’t want to be a designer, you can still use that ethic to do some pretty mind-blowing stuff.
Since design is mostly problem solving, anyone can learn to design. The best designers I know use critical thinking and problem solving more than their creativity. For most people, learning to design simply means applying your critical thinking skills to a different set of challenges, and learning to use a few new tools. That’s it. You don’t need to become a different person or unlock your creative soul. Just think and work. Pow! You’re a designer.
If you are an experienced designer and think your only value is creativity, you are limiting your success and your income.
If you are interested in learning design and believe that entails communing with some mystical spirit of creativity, you’ve been misled.
These experiences are why I write a little differently about design from what you might be used to. I don’t write “Best Design Trends” posts, because that stuff is garbage to a serious, practicing designer. I respect you more than that, and I know you are capable of doing more than following trends.
Stick with me, and together, we’ll tackle the hard work of design. We’ll have some fun and make some cool things.
And we’ll make all those people who told you that you couldn’t do it—just like those snobby art majors from my tiny college in Oklahoma—or everyone who told you programmers that you aren’t creative—or all those art directors who told you designers that your work wasn’t up to snuff—think twice.
Over dinner, I was telling Rachel, my wife, about my day. I’d sent a really difficult-to-write email to my best client, telling them how the project they wanted to hire me to design was wrong for them.
When I start working with a new client, I have a “Getting Started” PDF I send them that includes this paragraph:
“I don’t just sell a coat of paint. If you can’t measure whether a project affects your bottom line, it’s not worth the investment. So I’ll never try to sell you just a pretty website. I don’t accept a project if I don’t believe my work will pay for itself.”
Scoping out this project and comparing it to my client’s goals, I knew it was going to be a waste of their budget. And therein was the dilemma:
Do I tell my client not to do this project and end up not getting hired?
It’s obviously in my interest for them to hire me. I want work and I want to pay my mortgage. But do I really mean what I wrote in that PDF? Am I really the type of consultant who will deny the project if it’s wrong for the client, even when I want the money?
At the time, I was concerned I might be about to head into a dry spell in my business. Turning down the work when facing that uncertainty was even more difficult.
But I started consulting because I want to be proud of my work. If I wanted to go do mindless design work and overcharge clients, I could go back to working for The Man.
So I turned down the project. I felt is was the right thing to do.
(Sorry for the humblebrag. There really is a point. Stay with me.)
You know how the client replied to that email? It went something like this:
“You’re right. Instead, we want you to handle our product design and marketing from now on.”
They hired me anyway. For a bigger project.
Even better, they followed my advice, and we got to work on a project that had a much better chance for success. I taught my client something: I really am invested in their success. I might have turned down work, but I earned trust.
Consultants fear the lull. I’ve written about the feast or famine cycle before, and have explained how earning repeat work with the same clients can be so much better than having to find new clients over and over.
But to earn repeat work, you have to build trust and act as a partner. You have to deliver results or you’re not getting hired a second or third time. You have to make hard calls and be the expert, even if it means you’re putting yourself out of a job.
So much freelancing advice is structured around pitching and landing gigs. Learn how to write emails to clients or position your services. Learn how to raise your rates.
But there’s little advice about how to partner with clients. I don’t mean to criticize these folks teaching you how to run your business—many of them are my friends, actually—but it’s so important to consider the ethics of freelancing.
Freelancers have a bad reputation. Many clients learn to see us as unreliable and only interested in racking up those billable hours. How many clients have told you that they’ve had a bad experience with another freelancer? I hear it all the time.
Here’s why that happens. Because of fear, we book any project we possibly can, and in the process, take on work that’s not good for the client. The project inevitably doesn’t get results, which adds to the bad reputation.
But if you can master your fear and truly be an expert—even when it’s better for the client than for you—you’ll be able to distance yourself from that bad reputation. You’ll get the respect you deserve as an expert.
All because you acted like one.
When was the last time you made a design that you felt was complete and truly perfect?
We designers use the term “pixel perfect” to describe our ideal: a beautiful, flawless design. Such a design instills pride when the designer looks back at it, rather than the slight embarrassment we usually feel about old work. Sitting in a portfolio, the pixel perfect design is the embodiment of what we’ve spent all those countless hours honing our skills to achieve.
I’m sitting here in my living room spinning Kid A on vinyl (my favorite Radiohead album), remembering a horrifying design I made a year ago. I was sitting in this exact chair listening to the same music, typing some article or another, unable to go back into my home office and finish the design. It was a horrible design, and I was ashamed to put my name on it. But I had to get paid.
I’m sure you know that feeling well. As designers (or as people who make things in general), we’re always looking for that high that comes from making something great. Maybe it’s why you began this career in the first place.
However, opportunities to do our best creative work are elusive. We have to make compromises because we work with other people: copywriters, creative directors, developers, clients, and so on. Or, we compromise because of time or budget, which usually seem like excuses.
Of course sometimes a design benefits from collaboration, but you know it in your gut that sometimes you give in to compromise because you can’t figure out another way forward.
Early in my career, I learned not to attach personal satisfaction to my design work. “I don’t express myself through design” was my badge of honor and my claim to martyrdom. There I was, a creative professional, declaring that I had no emotional attachment to my work. The benefit to the client, so went the suggestion, was that I could adapt to any style and communicate any message. I wouldn’t steer the design to match my personal taste and risk its success out of—what I casually implied other designers indulged—narcissism. I was an expert communicator because I was detached.
However, a few years ago, I started writing like crazy and eventually acquired a new skill: audience research.
(I’ve written about why all designers should write previously.)
My time spent in audience research has taught me that I had it all wrong: designers should care about their work, and even more so, care about the people who will see it. If you care, you will work to understand those people through research and empathy. You will ensure the design speaks to them clearly. Without understanding, design is at best an assumption and at worst impotent.
So, I’m back to pursuing that elusive high of a perfect creative work. I’m learning to teach the people I work with what it means to make a pixel perfect design: we’re not just making something pretty, but we’re connecting people. To connect with others, you have to invest something of yourself, because that’s just how relationships work.
I’m unlearning all those old habits of detachment, which if I’m truly honest, despite thin justifications, I only developed to avoid the disappointment of compromising on my designs.
I’m throwing myself into every new design like I did back when I was working at my first gig; back when starting every new project was better than opening a birthday present.
A design that connects people who otherwise couldn’t understand one another.
I’m honestly not sure if it’s possible to make a perfect design like that. But I still think it’s worth trying.
That famine is one of the biggest fears in consulting. Every one of us faces it eventually.
I decided to put the task to my newsletter readers and asked how they avoid the inevitable period of slow or little work. I received so many replies with quality advice. (If you’re one of the people who replied, thank you sincerely.)
Here’s the advice I received from experienced consultants about how to prevent the famine.
A common issue is being so booked up with projects that a consultant can’t find time for marketing or coordinating future work.
Several readers replied and advised scheduling time to work on your own business the same way you schedule client work.
What I do now is simply schedule time for this like I schedule time for my clients. There [is] no ‘but I didn’t have the time to update my webpage’ anymore. I HAVE to take the time. I treat it like a client’s project and I don’t want to fail myself.
One method I’ve found useful is to carve out time at the beginning of the day before e-mail or other work and spend 30 mins to 1 hour on those specific topics.
Easier said than done […] but at least with that framework there and the calendar reminders in place, it nudges you in the right direction.
Always be selling. You can’t book your billable time 100%, you have to discipline yourself to take some amount of time, let’s say 20% (1-day) and use that to market yourself, follow-up with leads and plan for the next X-months.
If you don’t spread out projects and make time for your own business, or if you tend to book work whenever the client wants, you are almost guaranteed to run into a feast and famine cycle.
Reserving time to work on your own business requires discipline and some willingness to negotiate deadlines with clients.
You might worry if you ask a client for a delayed start date, that they will bail. However, once you have convinced the client to hire you, you’ve already overcome a huge barrier. Timing is often less important once they’ve decided to work with you. (And if the client is demanding you start tomorrow, you might want to walk away from that work anyway, for other obvious reasons.)
You’d be surprised how many people just work and work without a long-term plan.
Even just writing down a single goal forces you to think about more than the urgent short term.
Another benefit is that goals give you a way to track the health of your business in addition to income.
We set monthly themes to keep something to focus on. Each month is then broken up into weekly themes/goals so that we always have something actionable and specific to work towards. Each week’s goal builds on the previous week to work towards the goal for the month.
This way, when we are busy with client work, we have these overarching weekly and monthly themes to keep us from just putting our heads down and ignoring our business.
The issue with goals is that you can easily make them impossible or too numerous to achieve. So instead of placing a ton of pressure upon yourself to achieve a monumental task, start with a small goal.
Further, it’s too difficult to track multiple goals at once. If you’re like me, you’ve made a huge list of to-do items or goals, and only ever address one or two. However, a single objective is easy to keep in mind while you work.
Something like this: book one new client for next month.
Or even smaller: make a list of the types of clients I want to work with.
Goals can build upon one another. Work on a single, small goal at a time, and in a few months, you’ll be shocked at how much you achieved.
As designers, coders, and people who build stuff, we like to focus on the thing we are making. But, to build a healthier and more predictable consulting business, focus on long-term relationships with clients instead of single projects.
When I do present the client proposal (in my business, we call it a long term health plan), I frame the initial project in the context of a long range plan. And I apply the unique factors I discovered about them in the beginning.
While the initial project is the main thing for most people, presenting things in this way helps people know that it is more than just a transaction for me. They realize I am actually dedicated to helping them get what they truly want over time.
After the initial work is done, I check in regularly with people on how things are going. I let them know that I am here for them when the time is right for the next step.
As a result, I’m rarely at a loss for work.
Josh is actually a client of mine. He wrote me with this advice, and I decided to share it because the parallel is interesting. (Even if you think I’m sucking up to my client!)
As a web designer, I tend to structure my consulting business like other designers. But there are many different types of consultants, and it’s worth borrowing practices from other industries.
Josh, a dentist, works to establish a long term plan with patients instead of simply performing a single exam and saying “Hope to see you again soon.”
Consultants like us should be doing the same thing. Instead of focusing on a single project, work to set up a long term partnership. Sure, you have to book a project. But make sure to communicate that you won’t disappear once the project is over, and that you are committed to solving the clients needs over the long term.
This is good for everyone, but it can be challenging to establish.
Forming long term partnerships requires a more careful approach. Instead of jumping into details about a project, try to learn more about the client’s needs and challenges.
I haven’t met a client yet who needs a new web design every month. But, web design work, just like programming, marketing, and other consulting services, is rarely complete on launch day. Sure, the requirements are met and the project is done, but websites can require ongoing maintenance and updates.
Explore ways to offer additional value to clients by solving ongoing pain points for them. The only way to find these pain points is to ask. Instead of brainstorming possible projects, ask your clients about how their businesses operate, and what concerns they have about the period after the first project.
In addition, you could explore productized consulting, like I wrote about previously, which could be an elegant way to structure ongoing work. Or explore a retainer, at a rate that fits the clients’ needs and budget.
Another common cause of the dreaded famine is not marketing your services.
Let’s face it: no one wants to do marketing. You’d rather be coding or designing. But, the agency or web shop you used to work for did it, and that’s how they could afford to pay you a regular salary.
That’s the goal for your business, right? Reliable income. That’s the first goal of every consultant.
When you run your own consulting business, you have to do marketing. But, you don’t have to resort to cheesy, tasteless methods, either.
Many consultants rely upon referrals to find more work. This sums it up best:
I think part of the problem is that I’ve been referral-based since day 1. Literally, I’ve never done any “traditional” marketing or sought out projects. So, honestly, I have no idea where my clients come from or how I get them. [I’m] completely at the mercy of “receiving the email”. And because I don’t know those things (where my clients come from or why), I’ve always felt like I have no control over my business. Sometimes I’m flooded with more work than I can handle. Other times it’s completely dry.
This is something most consultants experience: somehow, you finally manage a steady stream of leads through referrals and don’t have to crawl those horrible job boards anymore. You don’t have to worry about marketing—the work is finding you!
Then the lull hits.
One subscriber, Visnja Zeljeznjak, sent a link to an article she wrote about her own feast and famine cycle. She advises not relying upon referrals, but taking a proactive approach and marketing your services, just like you would a product.
Of course working to earn referrals is an important part of your business, and if you do a good job, clients will naturally pass along your name.
However, referrals just aren’t a steady stream of new work. They aren’t reliable enough to serve as the only lead generation in your business.
So, you’ll have to do some marketing. Here are a few approaches to consider:
Meetups & Networking
For me, the one thing that kind of works is to show up at meetups. There are several in the area that have fed me work for years (about a decade or so).
Focus on a niche to find specific types of clients
If I were starting all over again now, I think I would pick a very specific niche, like authors, or churches, or local businesses, etc. and put in place a lot of marketing strategies I’ve learned over the years. If you have a very specific audience you’re trying to serve, I think it’s a lot easier to get out of the feast or famine cycle.
Email Newsletters & Guest Posts
I’ve experienced this about 6 months ago. After several projects finished, we had a famine period.
What we realised is that we had to do marketing constantly to fill out the consulting pipeline. What also helped us was being visible:
—sending out email newsletters
—speaking & attending events (networking)
—guests blog posts
The best way to avoid the famine is to never give in to the feast. Don’t let a period of intense work distract you from the long-term.
To recap, 4 key ways to avoid the famine:
“Productized consulting” is the all the rage in the product and freelancing communities. You might be tempted to pass it off as merely a buzzword.
I felt the same way, so, as an experiment, I launched one of my own. What I learned is going to surprise you.
That somewhat confusing term refers to a freelancing service with a fixed length, scope, and price. For example, I offer a “landing page in a day” (LPIAD) productized consulting service, which includes copywriting, design, and front end code for a 1-page website at $1000.
Regardless of what you call it, the benefit is that the client knows exactly what they will get and for what price—up front—which is attractive when freelancing projects have notoriously unpredictable structures.
This strategy isn’t new. As with so many of the best strategies, 37signals, before they built and became Basecamp, pioneered it. They offered a fixed-length and fixed-price design service. It was called 37express: pay $2500 and in 1 week 37signals would redesign a single page of a client’s website.
According to Matt Linderman on SvN, 37express was one of the ways that 37signals built up an audience before they launched Basecamp.
More recently, other talented consultants are offering similar fixed services. Nick Disabato offers long-term site optimization and A/B testing strategy for a fixed monthly fee. Jane Portman offers monthly creative direction for software businesses. Adam Clark offers wordpress theme customization and deployment in 1 day. Brian Casel is even teaching a course on how to start a productized consulting service (Disclosure: he interviewed me for the course but I have no financial incentive to link it).
With all this buzz about productized consulting, the natural question is: why? Why are all these talented folks offering tiny, fixed consulting services?
If you’re cynical like me, you assume the answer is simply money. It’s an easy way for consultants to make a lot of fast income. But the truth is, this is good for the client too.
Let’s start with why this is good for you, the freelancer (hint: it’s more than just money). Then I’ll address the criticisms.
The most exciting part of productized consulting, to me, is that I don’t have to search for leads on job boards. No cold calls.
Instead, I got to announce LPIAD like a product, and because of that, get the word about my services out in a completely different way and to completely different people.
A fixed consulting service is easy to position as a product. “Landing page in a day” is immediately understandable, and I don’t have to pour as much effort into selling it as I would a 2-week consulting project. I can cast a wider net.
This has some interesting side benefits.
While a broadcast method like this might not drive thousands of sales (I hope not: help me I’m drowning in landing pages, oh god, help), it does get my name out in front of thousands of people. I can post it to Hacker News, and thousands of people I’ve never met, people who I’m so far removed from that maybe no one in my immediate network has met either, will learn who I am and that I offer consulting.
Clients post projects to job boards because they don’t know anyone who can do the work. But if they’ve already heard of someone, what will they do? They’ll reach out.
Even after I shut down my productized consulting sales because I had too much work, people kept emailing me to ask if I was available.
Let that sink in for a moment. I didn’t have to go looking for work. It was finding me. That’s the single best reason to start productized consulting right this very second.
Maybe this is unfair, but before I launched my productized consulting service, I thought the price would attract penny pinchers. The types who mean well enough, but don’t understand that I can’t design a brand new Pinterest clone for them in 2 hours.
I was completely wrong. The people who emailed me interested in the service were respectful of the price and my time. Those who hired me are even better—not a single one has crossed the line by asking for free, extra work.
However, a few of those emails turned into leads for larger projects. Three nice folks emailed me saying they’d like to purchase several 1-day projects, inquiring how they should do so. I responded by explaining my process for standard consulting work. So far, two of these have booked paid projects (accounting for slightly more than half of the total above).
Thus, offering a lower-priced fixed consulting service didn’t cannibalize standard consulting work. In fact, the opposite is true—it served to get my name out in front of clients with regular-sized budgets too.
The other fear about launching productized consulting was that existing clients would see it and immediately fire me, after seeing that I offer a service for so much cheaper.
One client saw my productized consulting service launch, and mentioned it. The only reason he brought it up was to congratulate me—he wasn’t phased by it at all.
I think that launching this type of service carries little risk, so long as you’re smart about explaining it. Existing clients aren’t going to fire you, especially when they see that a fixed consulting service provides something different than what they need.
I have no data to support this yet, but if clients from my LPIAD service do well, there’s a good chance they’ll return and hire me for a bigger project. I’ve already established a relationship and trust, so why would they hire someone else?
Even if they don’t return, it’s still a new connection. If they’re building businesses, they certainly know others who are too. That means more leads through referrals.
Either way, as a consultant, there’s a strong incentive to do a good job.
After I launched my “landing page in a day” (LPIAD) service, through some fluke it reached the #2 spot on Hacker News for the better part of a day.
However, the questions and criticisms began pouring in. Numerous HN commenters posed that the price is too high and the result too unpredictable. I received lots of email from potential clients, asking “Can you really write and design a website in 1 day?”
I absolutely can, but not without a strict structure. Let me teach you how to do the same.
A strict process ensures quality results
Calls, meetings, contracts, proposals, and onboarding take a lot of time and drive up consulting fees. To make a 1-day project realistic, I had to strip out as much process as possible but still ensure I get the information I need in order to do the work.
I automated my onboarding process to limit the amount of time invested before the project starts. After the client pays up front, they automatically receive an email questionnaire. They reply with answers and a date to schedule the project. I confirm over email. On the day of the project we talk on Skype for 15 minutes. I run this call very strictly to ensure I get all the information I need to do the work—unfortunately, there’s no time to chew the fat.
The other way I save on time is that I use my design framework. It’s a set of tools, such as color schemes, font pairings, and other base styles, that I’ve built on top of the Bootstrap framework. It allows me to produce custom results very quickly, and without it, there’s no way I’d be able to finish these projects in 1 day.
Every single person I know who offers productized consulting has a similar limit to make it realistic. I my case, it’s using a framework. Others use a specific tool or technology, or set a hard limit on monthly hours.
As a client, there’s less risk because of these constraints; the entire process is engineered to be predictable. We consultants couldn’t sell a productized service if it wasn’t. However as a consultant, it’s a major test of your project management skill. If you don’t plan well, you’ll end up spending way more time on the project than you get paid for. That also means there’s no downside for the client: if the project goes as planned, they get what they paid for, but if the project plan goes wrong, they get more than they paid for!
To offer a productized consulting service, it’s important to add constraints and manage time well. But if you’re confident in your project management skills, the rewards can be substantial.
The requirement to pay up front filters out window shoppers and leaves more time for clients
Completely automating the lead-up to a consulting project has a side effect: what do I do about window shoppers?
If you’re a freelancer, you know what I mean: those people who email you, talk to you on the phone, and ask you to send a proposal, but who probably never intended to hire you.
Reducing window shoppers is obviously good for the consultant, but it’s good for the clients who do hire us too. As a consultant, if I can reduce the amount of effort I put into finding work, I’ll have more energy for my clients. Nothing is quite so soul-sucking as sending proposals to job board posts. If I can do that less, the quality of my creative work will only be better.
With the 1-day projects, I was especially concerned about people taking up time but never hiring me because there was a potential to reach a much larger volume of people. The easiest way to filter out these (certainly well-meaning but still time-draining) folks was the price.
If a client pays me $1000 up front, they are serious. I can’t think of a better way to chase off window shoppers.
The truth is, $1000 is a not a large budget in the broad sense. My consulting fees average higher, and I’m sure yours do too. That’s cheap to a serious client who might be accustomed to projects with 5-digit price tags. To those clients it’s also a fairly low-risk way to begin a relationship with a new consultant.
However, most people purchasing my 1-day projects are launching new businesses. For most of them, it’s their first business and/or it’s a side project.
You’d think the price would scare them off. But for these clients, $1000 is a steal for what I deliver. I don’t just design the page: I write it, give marketing advice, and code it. Finding freelancers to complete all that work would certainly price well beyond $1000.
(Frankly, at the end of a landing page in a day project, I’m exhausted. I put a lot into these and could never manage to do two in a row.)
But from talking to my clients, I’ve learned the value isn’t even those deliverables. It’s the opportunity to get advice—and frankly, to have an experienced person do the hard part of marketing or launching a business for them.
Let’s be honest with ourselves: consultants of all types and industries have probably experimented with varied fee structures for as long as consulting has existed. This is nothing new.
An iron-clad price and product are a simple way to explain the benefit of hiring a consultant. There are a hundred comparisons, but here are a few: financial advisor order fees/commissions, realtor fees, and Roto-Rooter (extremely popular, productized plumbing!).
Fixed consulting earns all types of experts more reliable income and better-educated customers. It has a strong history, and that’s just one more reason why you should try it.
Why your level of enthusiasm will make or break your content marketing.
With content and email marketing, so many of us miss the forest for the trees. You can write a newsletter and update a blog regularly but still completely miss the point of content marketing.
Think back to when you were a kid in school. Which teachers had the biggest impact upon you? I bet you’d choose the ones who were most excited to share knowledge with you. My high school physics and calculus teachers shaped who I would become. They instilled in me an appreciation for science and math which remains today.
Great content marketers do the same for their audiences.
I want to teach you what passionate content marketing looks like and why it’s so powerful. Here’s a short story about me visiting a swanky coffee shop and about the fanatical coffee roaster I met there.
After the story, I’ll share 3 ways of emulating this roaster’s approach to selling coffee that will make your content marketing more effective.
Corvus Coffee is a little roaster in Denver, CO. At the time of my visit, they didn’t have distribution—if you wanted to try their coffee, you had to visit the shop (which is also where they roast). Clearly, at the time their business model relied upon a fantastic experience at their coffee shop.
The first time I bought beans at Corvus, the barista followed me around, asking questions. “What kind of coffee do you like? How do you brew your coffee? I can help you pick a type of bean that fits both your preferences and your brew method. What kind of coffee do you drink now?”
At the time, I was a bit annoyed (it was early and pre-caffeine!), but it was hard to stay grouchy because the guy was just so excited to tell me about his coffee. So, I ended up sharing that I had an aeropress, but couldn’t seem to get a decent cup from it. He grabbed a bag of coffee beans from the shelf and told me why he thought I’d like it. I expected he would herd me toward the register, but what he did next was a complete surprise.
He put the bag of beans back on the shelf, and offered to teach me to brew those very beans with an aeropress. He explained every step, gave me a sample of the grinds so I could match the grind size at home, and let me take photos on my phone. He even had me write down the measurements of beans, water, and temperature he used.
And then, he gave me the cup of coffee for free!
There’s a lot of high talk and pretense around coffee. I’ve been to a million boutique, high-priced, trendy coffee shops. But never once at any of these places have I gotten a lesson on how to properly brew coffee myself at home, and much less have I ever gotten a cup of this so-expensive-it-must-be-brewed-with-baby-tears stuff for free.
On my way out, the excitable barista casually mentioned that he’s actually the roaster. That’s right—the owner himself brews the coffee and then spends time talking to the people who drink his coffee. He steps away from his magical coffee roasting workshop and reduces himself to working the register.
I ended up buying a $16 bag of coffee, which is about double what I usually pay for a bigger bag. I took it home, and guess what? I managed to brew a great cup of coffee with my aeropress all by my clumsy self—for the first time.
Now, here’s why your content marketing should imitate this humble coffee roaster’s free brewing lesson:
When I entered the shop, I had given up on the idea of brewing coffee well. I just wanted to buy some fresh beans and go back home to an average cup of joe.
But this crazy coffee roaster wouldn’t let me—his enthusiasm about coffee was contagious. The guy followed me around the shop asking about my taste in coffee as if it was the most important question he’d ever asked. He wasn’t just confident in his product, but he convinced me that I could make great coffee too.
In the startup and products communities, we say that great products sell a new version of the future. The part we leave out is that:
Your enthusiasm will convince people the future you are selling is possible.
Your customers have probably seen other products like yours. They’ve read articles about similar topics.
Educating the customer isn’t enough—everyone does that. You and your enthusiasm are what make all the difference. At the end of the day, people will remember your personality more than your product. The best content marketing speaks to the reader’s values and gets them excited!
When so many baristas are fashionably (and tragically) apathetic, this coffee roaster cares. That made my visit a completely different experience from any other coffee shop I’ve been to.
Of course, he could have stayed in the back room, exercising his craft, roasting coffee beans to earthy perfection.
But if he hadn’t stepped out from behind the curtain and asked about his customer’s problem, he never would have known that the customer about to buy his product didn’t know how to get the best value out of it.
If you don’t ask, you won’t know what to teach.
Further, by asking, he learned exactly what he needed to teach me. He didn’t assume I wanted to learn to brew coffee on, say, a chemex. If he had assumed he knew what to teach, he wouldn’t have been nearly so helpful.
Content marketing needs to be closely tied to the customer’s needs. If it isn’t useful in solving a real problem that your customer actually has, it’s not going to drive sales.
I could buy coffee beans from any number of places. But that doesn’t solve my problem. The person who taught me to brew great coffee on an aeropress won my business.
When that gentleman placed the bag of coffee back on the shelf and offered to teach me, I was shocked. In doing this, he was putting my interests ahead of his own. He delayed a potential sale to help solve my problem.
Smart marketers invest in customer success.
During the brewing tutorial, he taught like an expert, not a salesperson. He didn’t keep hinting at how he wanted me to buy his product—he just focused on the the lesson.
I came to trust his advice because he proved how knowledgeable and skilled he was. Clearly, someone so excited about coffee wouldn’t sell an inferior bag of beans. And the preview he showed me of the results I could get—the free cup of coffee—sealed the deal.
Content marketing should show off your expertise, and thus your product’s value. It should prove how the customer can be successful.
The guy roasting the beans at Corvus is enthusiastic, empathetic, and an expert. He doesn’t just make coffee, he lives it. he wants others to love it as much as he does.
The average barista can (usually) make you a decent cup of coffee, and they don’t usually really care what happens after they ring you up.
Who would you rather buy a $16 bag of coffee beans from?