The life of a designer sucks
Being a designer has its peaks and troughs but generally sucks. 40% of your day is spent ensuring your work is world-class, on brief, strategic, culturally relevant and crafted well enough to increase conversion, brand awareness and is operationally efficient.
Your endorphins are boosted when you get paid well for the work you do, get recognition for your efforts and laugh well, eat well and get-out while doing it.
Things begin to suck when you work long hours for little money, your ‘client’ doesn’t get it, the team you’re working with are unbearable and you’re stuck at your desk eating homemade lunches and drinking free office beer.
It’s depressing — what’s more depressing is the way the system is set up.
Free work
The free pitch, the free proof of concept, the free ‘pre-sales’ workshop. Somehow working for free is part of our industry’s DNA.
Hiring Process
The three ways to get a job are through referrals, recruiters or direct. If you go direct you have to deal with an applicant tracking system (ATS) and then (most likely) someone who doesn’t understand fully what you do very well. If you go through a recruiter, they do know your field very well but are primarily focused on sending candidates that have a higher propensity of getting hired. It’s their job and the way their industry works. The referral process is the most likely way of getting hired. You get through the ATS, the recruiter and then the hiring manager looks you up and is bound to know someone you worked with. That person might have been one of the arseholes you found unbearable and they say you suck. If you got on well with them, then boom you’re 20% there.
Interviewing
Designers are generally bad at interviewing. They spend 40% of their lives meeting other people’s objectives and have specific things they are looking for. The problem is, they only have your portfolio to go on, which rarely conveys the full capabilities of the designer. No two engagements are ever the same, so it’s difficult to showcase things that will be a carbon copy of exactly what they are looking for.
Interviewer arrogance sucks, you know, the interviewer that turns up 10 minutes late but holding a hot cup of coffee. Then proceeds to tell you that they don’t have a particular role for you, but wanted to meet you to see if you can fit in. Hello! You have a frickin advert on Linkedin, why the fuck am I in this room?
Candidate arrogance sucks too, you know the ones. The people who only can do after-hours interviews and then proceed to tell you they weren’t sure about the role but wanted to ‘expand their network’. Fuck-off, I have better things to do, then use my out of hours time on someone I don’t know just so you can ‘build your network’. Just fuck-off.
Design tasks
Because you don’t have a carbon copy of what they are looking for, people set design tasks. Please refer to Free work, don’t do it and value your profession and skills. Design tasks only work if you have the time and they pay you for that time.
The multi-step interview
Why so many interview rounds? A three-stage process should be enough. Phone screener, Face-to-face or phone with the hiring manager and team chemistry meeting. The last step seems to take an age and the higher you go up, the more people you have to meet.
But sometimes overanalysis can lose you great candidates and great candidates crumble because of financial pressures, finding time to interview and maintaining their current job.
Negotiating your offer
You’re looking for a new job because your current salary sucks (or see above for the other reasons). You have a figure in your mind, but you’re forced to play cat and mouse. Employers need to tell people what budget they have, but this does have to be competitive and realistic. The UK design sector brings in 3.949bn a year and exports 461m. Pay your designers more.
Vertical integration has caused businesses to try and drive down costs to meet market demand, but squeezing the pounds out of your designers is probably a bad idea.
Onboarding
You got the job, but on day one guess what? IT sucks, it isn’t rocket science. Order the right machine, install the software they need, set-up access to emails, servers and other logins. This is simple stuff, but why does it suck every time?
Manager alignment
Your manager hired you for a specific task. Make sure you get them to write it down and ask for a 30-60-90-day plan. Many relationships break down because of communication, and you own 50% of that relationship.
Bad managers don’t know how to communicate or explain the pressures they are under. If they are required to achieve sales targets of 18–20 million or 20% of your overall global revenue target, get them to tell you. Anyone who has ever worked for a boss who is disorganised, scatterbrained, or simply overworked knows how difficult it can be to figure out exactly what’s expected of you.
Bad managers have no strategy and are only focused on tactical firefighting — latest pitch, team conflict or next internal meeting they’ve been pulled into.
You generally have two options. You could either grit your teeth and try to endure the uncertainty or you can try managing up.
Establishing communication lines your manager is comfortable with is the best place to start. Put together a summary of your last week and a quick plan for the next week. It’s impossible to overcommunicate, so highlight roadblocks early on so you can work.
Understand what makes your boss tick and discuss problems right away. If you have a problem with the way your boss manages the team, you don’t want to start by insulting their managerial style. But you can’t let problems fester out of control. Let your boss know politely and helpfully. Good managers like the initiative, it helps and it generally creates a strong working relationship.
Bad managers due to the uncertainties surrounding their role, feel threatened and may lash out. A toxic manager like this will push you away and may avoid communicating with you. If they’re not going anywhere you will need to work on the relationship and see what makes them tick, but if it gets personal move on.
At the end of the day, you are in charge of your career and managing up is sometimes required for getting through the day and aid your progression into leadership.
Getting shit done
I hate to break this to you, but design is subjective. No matter which way you turn it, sometimes the concept isn’t going to stick. Sometimes it doesn’t meet the brief and sometimes the work is just bad. It takes humility to accept feedback and leadership to ensure that the quality of your output is in line with the strategy and delivered to a consistent level of excellence.
Effective leaders know when to work towards consensus and when to end the debate and make decisions. So suck it up, keep yourself in check and get shit done. Your work is still respected, but if it does get personal, move on.
Moving on
20% of why you’re in the building is your actual work. The remaining 80% is your personality and what you’re like to work with. Don’t be a dick, keep your ego in check and aim to be pleasant to work with.
If you’ve been kind, but found it difficult working with management, the team or the account you’re working on, move on. Staying in an unhappy environment is bad for your mental health and not worth it.
If you have been a dick and are asked to move on, leave the right way and know your employment rights. Make sure you’re treated fairly and paid the correct notice.
Leaving a job, when it hasn’t been your decision is the suckiest part of being a designer. It sucks, but ask for some sort of exit interview as it is the only way you will improve.
Conclusion
The life of a designer has its peaks and troughs but no other industry is treated with the same level of contempt. Creative work goes unpaid and is undervalued. While we enjoy our work when we get paid well and when we gain recognition for our efforts. We hate the politics and the system that surrounds it.
Until that improves, the life of a designer will continue to suck.
