Dear Designer
Dear Designer: How You Can Tell You’re Getting Better
Being a better designer is about being a better person
This week’s question comes from Twitter, instead of a reader email. I began to reply and then quickly realized it was better answered here, where we have the room for a little more thought and nuance. And this question needs thought and nuance, because it’s not as cut and dried as you’d think.
Obviously, you can tell you’re getting better as a designer when your craft is a little more polished, when you start thinking more about systems rather one-offs, when you start caring about how someone will move through a page more than how the page looks, when it takes you an hour to do what used to take you all day. These are some of the obvious signs you’re getting better as a designer. You can tell the work of a first-year designer from the work of a ten-year veteran. That’s the obvious stuff — the maturing-of-talent that comes with getting more experience doing the thing you do. That shouldn’t be discounted.
But to really get better as a designer, you have to get better as a person. Because there’s a point at which the craft skills hit a wall that can only be climbed by growing as a human being.
