The road to becoming a designer

If becoming a designer is something you’re interested in, but you don't know how or where to start, you’re not alone.

How do I become a designer? Where should I start? What should I focus on? How do I get hired?

As a practitioner and teacher of design I’ve been asked these questions by dozens of people from a variety backgrounds. From new grads looking to land their first gig, to seasoned professionals planning to make a career change. So I’d like to share the advice I’ve given these folks and hopefully save you time and money if design is a career path you’re considering.

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Go out and play

One of the first steps to becoming a designer is to figure out what aspects of design you’re interested in. And a great way to do that is through experimentation.

I encourage you to play around with different types of design to figure out if you actually like doing it and/or if you’re any good at it. Figuring out what you enjoy is much more important than what you're good at. Reason being, as with most things in life, you’ll probably suck at it when you start. So don't worry to much.

Just try things out in a non-committal, playful way. It'll test your appetite for investing more of your time learning about the topic. You don’t need to commit your life to it. Just try it out.

But how?

Find opportunities at work

Do you work at a place that employs designers of some kind? Great. Ask if you could be involved in or shadow a project they’re working on. Or just interview them to learn more about what a week in their shoes looks like.

Have ideas about how to solve a problem your company is facing? Awesome. Try starting a project or contributing to an existing one, and at the same time get exposure to the design process.

Even if you’re not directly influencing the design of something, mere exposure to the design process may be enough for you to understand if it’s a discipline you’d want to invest more time and money in learning.

Don’t work at a place that employs designers? Fear not.

Start side projects

Either by yourself, with friends or complete strangers, start side projects. If there’s a problem you wish was solved, take a crack at solving it as though you’re already a designer.

Go to hackathons, meetups or join Slack communities to find problems and people you could work with to experiment with design.

There’s also something to be said for unsolicited redesigns. Recreating or redesigning existing interfaces is a great way to reverse engineer user interface (UI) design. You can gain an appreciation for typography, grid systems, and the basics of visual design and information hierarchy.

If UI design isn’t your thing and you’re more interested in research, for example. Do the same thing. Try it out. Find a problem you’re interesting in learning more about and potentially want to solve. And learn more about it. Do research.

Learn from others

Look for people who are already doing what you want to do. Ask yourself, how did they get there? What life events or activities led them to where they are now?

If you can’t find the answers, ask them. You’d be surprised how receptive people are to sharing what they’ve learned.

Once you’ve determined how they got where they are, emulate what they’ve done. Or at least experiment with those things.

If reaching out to strangers and offering to buy them coffee isn’t your thing, do what you’re doing right now. Read.

Books, blogs and vlogs have been some of the biggest influences and teachers in my career. Book recommendations below.

If you’re not much of a book worm, or creating your own syllabus is a bit daunting, there are tons of online courses, bootcamps & post secondary institutions offering design programs. Many of which also offer free intro workshops, like this Intro to User Experience Design class I occasionally teach at General Assembly.

A word of warning—before committing your time and money to a bootcamp, college or university program, I’d urge you to do your homework and if you can, attend one of these free intro classes or workshops to see what it’s all about first.

What to experiment with

As someone who is new to design, what should you focus your attention on?

It depends.

It depends on what experiments are paying off. Ask yourself,

What am I most interested in learning about?

What do I enjoy doing the most?

Whatever your answers are to those questions, focus on that. As someone new to the field, the parts of design you should focus on, are the ones that keep your interest. Build momentum by feeding your genuine curiosity.

As promised, here's that list of book recommendations:

• The Design of Every Day Things — Don Norman

• Don’t Make Me Think — Steve Krug

• Information Architecture — by Louis Rosenfeld, Peter Morville, Jorge Arango

• Typographic Design — Rob Carter, Sandra Maxa, Mark Sanders, Philip B. Meggs, Ben Day

Thanks for reading!

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