Being a designer sucks, but we can make it suck less
Taking pride in your work as a designer.
As designers, we do a lot. Design thinking, especially, is never truly done, and it’s something we’re implementing consciously or subconsciously through the entire project. We’re constantly learning new things, adding new things, or making modifications as new requirements come to light. We’re doing our best to understand what our users need and want, and are building prototypes often with interactions because the user’s needs and wants must inform those interactions, and cannot be left undetermined. These interactions — often referred to as microinteractions — are some of the major pieces that bring a design to feeling as cohesive as Instagram, Twitter or even Google.
We research and analyze data, we make style guides, we make mobile, tablet and desktop variations of design, we review the design, we talk to users, we talk to stakeholders, we talk to developers. We do all of that, but we never do tend to get recognition for those designs. At least, not very often, and not very explicitly. And that’s a fact we have to accept — but not in a self-deprecating or negative way. We need to accept this in a constructive way — a way that reminds us to look at the bright side, that it doesn’t mean we still can’t take pride in what we did. We do a lot to be proud of.
We took those grey blobs signifying buttons and made them clickable and colourful, dammit.
I don’t mean this in the way of “Well I guess I’ll just roll over and never expect to get credit.” I mean this in a way of we need to remind ourselves that while we may not get written credit a lot of the time, it is our design that draws users in. It is our design that was informed, and what we made into something usable. We took those grey blobs signifying buttons and made them clickable and colourful, dammit. We put the bulk of the time, effort and care to understand what our clients and their customers would need, and would like. The developer may have given it life, but we were able to give them a visual guide of what should be implemented because that is what we do, and what we are passionate about.
I’ve had a few experiences working with developers where I give them a design AND a style guide, giving them very clear interaction states for a bunch of elements, only to review the website at a later time and discover they just…ignored it. Or changed something in the design that wasn’t intended to be changed, without actual consultation of the designer, in the entire review process. And it’s frustrating, trust me. Despite it happening many times on different projects, it still frustrates me to this day. But the best thing to do is remember you gave them what they needed, you already put the thought and effort into those designs, and the best thing to do is calmly and politely guide them to what you provided.
We need to remind ourselves that the work we do is enough.
Even while having to wade through team and client feedback, developer review and bug discoveries, at the end of the day, we as designers need to remember to take pride in the designs we create. We can let ourselves be demoralized by a seemingly constant barrage of other team members getting credit for what began as our hard work, or from hearing just an individual piece of negative feedback. There is positivity in design, we just need to remind ourselves that the work we do is enough and that the positive comments we do get on our designs mean much more than what feels like an endless silence of no recognition.
We need to remind ourselves that we can even put a positive twist on that silence: no commentary is a relatively good indicator that our design is doing what it is supposed to. Users can access the data that they need. Users are being delighted by those small little animations we pushed to add because we knew that it would delight someone. We can still use these projects and sites as examples of a working portfolio in the future if need be, with the right permissions from any companies we worked with.
At the end of the day, we still have a lot to be proud of as designers. The recognition is nice, and through school, we’re almost trained to expect it, especially if you were in a design-centric program where if you didn’t have your name on the project for specific tasks you were likely failing. We live in a world where recognition is king. Without it, it’s harder to prove to ourselves that the work we do is worth it. But we still learn so much going through our research processes. We hone our design skills every time we open our computer to work on a project, learning to choose colours, fonts, button border radii.
It’s your design that users will see, time and time again. Take pride in that.
All of this helps us become better designers than we were the day before. We need to let ourselves be happy with our designs and not get caught up on being frustrated or feeling unappreciated when we don’t get specific credit on a project. At the end of the day, it’s nice to get that recognition, but we can’t expect it. We know the work we did was good and meaningful. Even if they don’t say anything, the project team knows that it was your design. The client should know, on some level, who was in charge of the initial design. It’s your design that users will see, time and time again. Take pride in that.
