Tech designers are struggling to gain the right experience and make portfolios to match our foggy job definitions. Have you noticed the increasing number of vague specializations we’ve invented for ourselves? Here are a few I grabbed from a job board 10 minutes ago. UX Designer UX/UI Designer UI Designer
UX and UI, Why oh why
Companies are racing to fill seats and execute hastily-defined design processes without bothering to question if it’s all necessary for their particular business.
- Recently John Maeda’s Design in Tech Report for 2017 suggested a name for my kind of role: Computational Designer
- The most successful designers will be those who can work with intangible materials – code, words, and voice.
You can make it happen
Treat your career like your most important project
- Aim to be constantly learning and trying new stuff without limits
- Find a company or a work environment that lets you take a shot at everything you want to do
- Or invent your own little niche if you can’t find that
Design (with a capital D)
It requires a holistic grasp of problems, potential, and materials
- A capital-D Designer is comfortable working organically across all of that, without needing to slice it up into separate little steps and responsibilities
- If you’re only working on the nitty gritty implementation, you know about the what but not much about the why
This is possible in the real world
At Basecamp, they skip most of the formal process stuff, and their Designers do everything
- They support hundreds of thousands of customers, plus multiple platforms and products, with a design team of 10 people
- Raymond Loewy, an industrial designer, achieved fame for his design efforts across a variety of industries
- He was involved with numerous railroad and locomotive designs
- Imagine if we stopped boxing ourselves into tiny little specialties just to make websites and apps
