Advice That Blew Up My Design Career
From starting my UX design career in 2014, to getting my first ever freelance gig, to achieving 100,000 subscribers on YouTube, and launching my first successful bootstrap business; I could have not done it without the advice of some wise people who changed my perspective completely. It was almost as if I was being handed the key to a treasure I had always sought to open.
Now these are the 5 key pieces of advice that took me from a struggling freelance designer to a multi-faceted design leader in the span of 10 crazy years.
Reach Out & Pitch, Don’t Wait Behind a Screen
At a Dribbble design meetup in New Delhi, I was probably one of the youngest guys to go around and talk to some UX/UI design veterans. I wasn’t huge on asking questions, but I was eager to network. Who knew I would meet a mystery man who would throw me on to a life-changing path.
He raised his eyebrows as soon as I described my freelance design career so far. I was skipping classes in school and working on my skill set and networking in order to land lucrative clients, to almost no success. He laughed a little before giving me some advice I’ve not forgotten till date.
He mentioned how the market is crowded and everyone is basically offering the same exact service repackaged and marketed differently. As a designer, standing out was going to be a major challenge. He changed pace and mentioned how valuable a face-to-face interaction has been in times when emails are repetitive and all over the place.
The next step I needed to take was to actually get in to meetings with people who were looking for someone like me. I was nudged to go and grab opportunities instead of waiting for them. Here are some ways I did that:
- I constantly attended events and meet-ups where I could exchange my number with people who owned businesses or were freelancers like me.
- I made sure I had a website, a “link in bio”, set up solid profiles on every social platform, and I made sure everyone knew I was open to work. There was no point hiding any more!
- LinkedIn was blowing up at that time, so networking on LinkedIn was of huge value.
- I constantly practised design and posted on platforms like Behance. This gave me organic reach, where I scored a few clients from. I still know people who use Behance to land new clients till date.
- I remember focusing on landing meetings instead of pitching over text or call. This allowed me to leave a better impression and understanding my client’s problems in detail. Make sure, if you see potential, you actually invest time and effort.
Be Open To Anything Creative, Don’t Just Stick To One Role
Ever since I began designing, I focused on solving problems, and not what my job title said. This helped me learn a ton, explore avenues I had never explored before, and even earned more.
Working in early-stage startups has its downsides however, the multirole work was a huge benefit for me. I was freelancing and interning for small startups, which meant I had to use every tool out there, learn skills on the job, and even find solutions to everyday problems myself.
At the time, I was saying “yes” to every type of job possible. I was hungry, I wanted to make money, and I had fun doing anything creative. I see way too many newcomers wanting to specialise since day one, or stick to one role while being super ridged. While this might be helpful to some, it takes out a lot of the adventure and fun you can have. Most designers I’ve met have broken out of their shells, and gone out to explore.
Now, recruiters and clients do want “experts” in a certain field or area, but always prioritise candidates who show prowess in other areas as well. This could mean that you bring more value to the table, can teach others in the company something new, and are on terms with everything trendy happening in the industry.
I call these skills — “Parallel Skills”, which means having skills closely associated with your primary job role. So, if a UI designer knows 3D design, they can use their knowledge of 3D to implement cool graphics and effects in their UI. It could be a video editor with a knack for sound design, who creates the greatest sounding videos ever!
Write, Create, Shoot, Contribute, Get It Out There
Expressing my ideas in the form of publicly shared content was the best leap I took in my career. I used to code websites for fun in school, and just shared a small snippet of a design to CodePen.IO (basically Behance, but for developers). The next day, I woke up to hundreds of likes and an official shoutout on Twitter. A few lines of code, gave me the confidence I needed to go to the next level.
Here’s the code I shared:
This boost fuelled a fire inside me, and I started creating designs regularly. The next big step was here on Medium. I started sharing resources and ideas I had on Medium. I was doing it casually until it blew up with a viral design article, which pushed me to write more!
Now, another huge push came from some advice I got from people in my life. Someone gave me the idea to share my articles on actual Medium publications and not publish them alone. This gave my writing the audience it deserved. My girlfriend (now fiancé) motivated me to start YouTube, which grew to almost 150,000 subscribers designing UIs and websites.
When I started going for interviews, they would check my content out before talking to me, and would be massively impressed by my knowledge and creative ideas. I later realised that creating content attracts other creatives in the field, and was truly a blessing for my career growth as well.
Use the right kind of shortcuts
When I began my career in design, I wanted to be “original”. I wanted to create things from scratch, be completely independent, and stay away from plagiarism. However, I was spending more time on repetitive and unnecessary tasks, which almost got me fired from a job.
This made me question my methods and follow a new style of work. I shifted my focus and time on to valuable problem-solving tasks, which were aspects that would benefit the business I was working for. For everything that was repetitive and boring, I took the help of premade templates, UI kits, frameworks, and tools that would shorten the process. All of a sudden, using a UI kit to design interfaces and save time didn’t seem like cheating any more. It almost made the final results look better and helped me make the clients happy.
With A.I. tools coming into the limelight, creating solutions to problems has become so much easier and faster. It is almost like having an assistant on payroll without having an assistant on payroll.
Here are some ways in which I’ve come to use A.I. the most lately:
- Come up with quick ideas based on prompts — names, quick Q&A, viable options and solutions for a problem, quick brainstorming, extracting information and deep research on websites, and the list goes on!
- Create quick graphics for forms and pages, make custom assets for ongoing projects, come up with creative options to choose from.
- Ask tools like ChatGPT and Gemini for feedback on designs (Yup! you can upload images on these tools and ask it for direct and precise feedback).
- Keep a constant check on trending new tools, this really helps you stand out amongst people who might lack that drive to discover.
- Do deep research around certain topics, ask A.I. to find reviews of apps and websites, summarise large content, and more.
Don’t listen to too many people!
This one is personally very close to me, since it is something I understood on my own. When you are starting out, or even progressing in your career, you will get a lot of unsolicited advice that might not work for you. I would say just follow your gut, but there is so much more to it.
It was easy for us to be influenced by someone in a position of authority, especially when it is your career at stake. Here are some things to do when you get advice from anybody:
- Always try it out — you never truly know what works until you do it. However, don’t go too deep into it all at once. You have to play it slow when it comes to feedback or advice. Blindly following advice isn’t the best thing to do. For example, if someone asks you to do a particular type of project, try it out as a side project or a short one.
- Only catch advice which is thrown at you with the correct intention — I’ve sometimes received advice that seems to come from a place of worry and personal bias. I was a young adult trying to take risks and doing something new, and a lot of advice was nudging me to play it safe or go for something less challenging. I get where such advice comes from, but people will not completely understand you and what you want.
I hope you liked this article and would care to leave a comment! Did any advice you receive change your life? Let the community know.
