How I Reconnected With My Design Craft
It’s been five months since I left my Creative Director role in marketing to pursue product design. There are many things I’ve enjoyed about the transition, but reconnecting with my craft tops the list.
Historically, I’ve operated as a hired gun(n). Flying in at the end of the marketing process to make it look pretty, subjectively speaking. The project timeline was usually measured in weeks and then I was off to the next client. That’s not a complaint, by the way, it’s a trustworthy process I’ve built my career on.
Put simply: My assignment was to make the viewer feel something that would hopefully change their behavior. Then, the next time they buy cat food, they might choose Whiskas*.
But now, there is no client.
There is no desired behavior change.
There is only a product and the people that use it.
Evolution through iteration
My manager recently shared some feedback to a colleague along the lines of: we approach design as an evolution versus a revolution. In other words, small improvements over time through careful iteration.
This idea was alien to me when I first started. At least, the true scale of it was. In my experience, iteration was a design sprint that lasted three weeks, at most. It took a good two months for me to switch from a “get it done” mindset to a “get it right, then test it” one.
Working at a more deliberate pace had a wonderful byproduct though. It rekindled my love for my craft. After years of churning through ideas to meet many (but not all) unreasonable client deadlines, I now haave the time to focus and critically think about the quality and context of what I'm designing.
Measuring enjoyment points
Thinking about how to help someone accomplish their goal activated new parts of my brain. Of course it must look beautiful and align with our design system, but is it useful? And more importantly: do we need it?
There is both a freedom and a wonderful constraint when working on something that hundreds of millions of people use every day.
On the one hand, I feel like I’m contributing to something that quantitatively makes a lot of people happy (even me, at my meager 300 Chess.com elo). On the other, one small change can have a huge ripple effect, for better or worse.
What I appreciate the most is that I can see and measure the results of my efforts. You can call it data, but I like to think of it as enjoyment points.
*Whiskas was my first ever design pitch to win a job from TBWA\Chiat\Day. Our team of three inexperienced creative directors pulled an all-nighter to write and design the presentation. We did not get it.
