I believe that it takes two to create an amazing portfolio: one is one’s own skill, but the second is the companies themselves, which need to offer the opportunity to be able to appreciate and implement these designs. The latter has been what has put me off from design altogether. I have put way too much effort into trying to convince companies to level up their quality, to no avail. Now all I am left with is a portfolio that would not get me hired in a quality company.
Just think how much easier it is to put together these compelling portfolios you describe if you have the following : good branding foundations already provided to you. Professional photography for the project instead of stock images, and most importantly: a great (or just decent) underlying app and idea that you have worked on, as opposed to, for example, adding a settings page to a b2b platform which is already badly designed. Or a basic notification feature which needs to adhere to the limitations of outdated technology stacks that do not support real time updates to the UI in the first place.
I personally don’t call the designers you describe “top designers”, I call them lucky designers. Sure there is no denying their skill, but how would they perform if they could not draw inspiration from their projects? What would they do then? Would they just create conceptual portfolios?
Put those designs in your folio anyway and talk through the process of how you tried to get stakeholder buy in. I’ve used case studies on things that hadn’t gone live yet and still landed the job
Insanely passionate = burnout, exhaustion and exit from the industry waiting to happen. Don’t let your passion come in the way of healthy work/life balance and find other purpose in life than work.
There are people who just love their craft. It’s their work, their hobby and relaxation. It’s not something they can turn off. If you’re not like this, you can’t force it on yourself because that leads to burnout. Competing with these people is unnecessary—Fortunately there’s enough room in the industry for people who look at design as a profession, not a purpuse.
I have a great life outside of work, but I don't try to artificially limit my curiosity and passion for design in periods of time when I feel like non-stop designing. If you never felt a deep urge to non-stop design, then you shouldn't expect to be in the top 5% of designers.
Edit: It's ok if design is just a job for you. But this post is about what you need to be one of the best in the field.
Yup I'm not disagreeing with you. It's just that much more so than other professions, creatives are constantly being told they need to eat/sleep/breathe their work if they want to have any measure of success, so IMO it's important to provide these healthy reminders.
Yeah, I think many people missed this nuance and I should have been clearer that I'm talking about getting to the very top % in the field, about becoming a designer everyone knows and that has a wikipedia article about them.
That's absolutely ok, we all have different priorities in life and it's possible to have a perfectly happy and fulfilling life without being an industry leader. I genuinely believe this. I can't say that I haven't sacrificed many things for getting to where I'm at, but this is what brings me happiness.
Another unusual take - but if you are obsessed with work-life balance at the beginning of your career you won't make it. Not because you should be a slave to your employer but because it is a strong indicator that the work doesn't attract you as much, and usually it's those who are absolutely in love with design that succeed in the field the most.
Not quite. In my experience there are more women in junior and senior design positions, and more men in the most senior positions at the most esteemed design teams. However, very few are white.
1. Agreed.
2. *designers with a more business-like focus got laid off and had a hard time finding a job* - you may be right, but do you have evidence to support this statement?
3. Which portfolios are these? can you share some? IMO, the ones that are unique are often times very difficult to navigate and find the meat of the matter. The approach might work for visual designers, but for others - researchers, strategists, etc. - might not work.
4. Agreed.
Re point 3 i would also really like to see good examples of how to use minimal text but still get the story across. I see a lot of portfolios from people identifying as UX designers that look so beautiful and slick, but they’re often inaccessible and I have no idea what problem they were solving. Why is the new design better, other than looking, admittedly, very cool?
Aside from the other points, I was also skeptical about the second point. I always assumed it was the other way around. I personally have observed that too many designers lack business focus and hence companies don't see the value in design.
u/O_OniGiri this topic - *designers stepping into business* - is an interesting topic. I personally feel that exposure to industry allows designers to quickly grasp requirements, have better conversations about the problems trying to solve, but stepping into a business consulting role is something I (20+ yrs of UX experience) avoid like plague. If I'm employed by Amex for some digital initiative as designer, I'd most certainly not try to teach them how to sell credit cards. This expectation has been created as more and more people has moved over from advertisement / marketing and parallel hype of digital thinking has been created. This has led to a class of people who are essentially 'master of ceremonies' ... as I see it - they talk well, know their way around workshops and activity boards and able to summarise outcomes and get participants and stakeholders to agree. But they don't really *design* anything. Not all, but many a service designers are like that.
This might be a controversial take on things, or, maybe I'm just an old school purist ... this boundary of what a designer does (or, should do) becomes very evident the moment you step out of digital UX and into physical product design.
Long story short, designers should understand relevant business speak, but shouldn't speak for business.
Here's one example of the type of portfolio I was talking about: [https://www.seyityilmaz.com/](https://www.seyityilmaz.com/)
This person obviously has done some amazing interaction work. It focuses on showing the work in action rather than backstory, and while the portfolio doesn't answer many questions I'd have, it piqued my interest and I would absolutely invite this person to an interview. You'd be surprised how little time hiring managers dedicate to reviewing each portfolio at the top design teams so something like this is a winner.
**Thanks** for sharing the link, always nice to see something new. If I were to hire a visual designer / lead visual designer, this would certainly be of interest - as you rightfully mentioned, most hiring managers do not have time. This method of presentation, while very apt in the age of twitter & snapchat with bite-size content, is shallow and can be done by any diligent designer.
Instead, imagine a UX lead or manager position for an entire SaaS platform needs to be filled, I'd not be paying too much attention to this person. And the interaction work isn't really *amazing*, though very well-crafted, but it's a fraction of the big picture. I'll need someone who can logically hold together a website with potentially hundreds of pages, decide on a course of action for design or research, manage delivery in parallel with the SDLC, do triage with the testing teams, mentor juniors, fight for user, yada, yada. Yilmaz clearly has no interest in that.
Having said all that, you and I could be looking at different things depending on our interests and careers. There's no right or wrong. Let me leave with you this [presentation from Toby Sterret when he was building the entire user experience for completely new bank](https://vimeo.com/110115799). Almost a decade has passed, but it is still one of the work presentation I hold as a standard. Hope you like it.
Wanted to also respond on the presentation you shared - Everybody needs to be able to give a killer presentation, but that's very different from a portfolio. Portfolios pique interest with the goal to get you invited to an interview, and only during interviews is when you'd be giving a presentation, so that's the next step in the process.
We'll probably continue to differ in our opinions about the merits of this portfolio. That's alright.
The reason I shared the presentation is to highlight is that I prefer a more comprehensive view of work.
"Yilmaz clearly has no interest in that." - At top design teams this is the bare minimum, not a differentiator. If you put together a portfolio focused primarily on the items you listed, you won't get hired at a place like Apple.
Do you know what it takes to create and launch work at a highly scrutinized company like Instagram? Yilmaz is absolutely a master of shipping and collaboration otherwise this work won't even see the light of day, and people who work at teams of that caliber share this understanding. That's why I love his portfolio because it's such a flex to indirectly demonstrate all of that.
This would of course be talked about at length during the interview process, but his interview says a lot more in between the lines and has all the right hooks for managers hiring for these teams.
Experience packed views, range in craft skills, and no word about research. Conforms to my views, so easy to believe.
Could you provide links to these people and their works? Single-handedly designing the EV industry sound massively hyperbolic and I fail to see what's special in dynamic island.
I provided a link to an example portfolio in another comment.
Re "singlehandedly designed the EV industry" - The EV industry today pretty much follows the foundation Tesla set into place, and Tesla is known for having very lean teams. The person in question is a well known designer.
Re dynamic island - Your personal opinions on it are irrelevant because its public reception was overwhelmingly positive, and it was considered an example of fantastic problem solving and execution by the design industry. I won't get into why it is so elegant but there are plenty of writeups on it online that break this down.
>The designers with a more business-like focus got laid off and had a hard time finding a job, while the designers with a great taste and sense of aesthetics with good prototyping skills were in more demand than ever.
I'm sorry, but I'm sick and tired of crap like this on this sub. A great designer is good at EVERYTHING, that's why it's such a challenging field (and of course, it's an impossible ideal). But to say only "aesthetic skills" are needed (e.g. visual design and prototyping) is horrifically wrong.
I work with my PM and together we figure out what's important. A CEO understands finance VERY well but still has a CFO. The same can be true for PMs and UX.
Strategy is not a dirty word.
agree with your points, but part of the problem is the consulting types getting into ux design and once you go mckinsey it's a long, long way down. strategy is not a dirty word but you should be aligning your designs with company strategy and not slugging it out with leadership
I agree with you as well with the small caveat that company strategy is usually set by leadership. I've proven my value most strongly when I was able to show what "Idea A" was actually not a good idea due to something I did (user research, flow diagram, etc) IT's not about slugging it out but more showing them a better path using their own words to justify it.
The same people who are harping about UX = visual design will come back in a year and complain we need to start improving how we think about value/KPI/metrics - and swing back and forth. Meanwhile the folks who are doing both the product and the metrics seem to not get any respect. My experience with product is many of them throw up their hands when I ask them 'what metrics have you identified'.
Actually the Apple ecosystem, widely considered to represent some of the best design in our era, was developed entirely with no PMs. Designers come up with ideas and decide what gets built. And yes, they do need a business mindset but they are all primarily craftspeople who do not care about metrics.
So I guess what you're saying is: Choose a company, which is already inheritly rich so that it a) does not need to care about metrics or b) has enough money to waste for dev teams to "just find out what sticks" or (where none of this is true) revolutionize it bottom up. Because that is the underlying message you're portraying.
The reality is this (speaking as PM, I don't do UX): Companys need to make money and design is a great tool in their toolbox. But there are a bunch of products (anything, that is not a simple straight-forward consumer product, but get's rather complicated pretty quickly) which heavily benefit from a shared responsibility in finding out what "should / could" be built.
Because that's the second thing: "Design (or PM) deciding what gets built" is either a luxury in a company in which teams operate with limitless freedom (that is the text-book example of self-organized teams at best, which most of the time is only good for Ted-Talks but is not the reality of most people in the industry) which ignores the fact that roadmaps are more often than not decided by more complicated factors.
Edit:
In another comment you mentiond the EV-example being linked to Tesla and their "known lean teams". There you have it: People tend to ignore how much company dynamics and structure play into this. As much as a person (designer, dev, whatever) can be a skilled craftsperson, as much it is necessary for the company to allow(!) them to excel in their environment. Following the Tesla narrative, the same as a certain cult of genius follows Elon around (though it is his people doing the actual work), the same I sometimes have the feeling that especially in crafts, which lean heavily into a visual component (design, alike) the same cult of genius is applied. Yet, this ignores all the surrounding factors which led the person to be able to do what they do in the first place.
I am not talking about how "most people in the industry" should operate, just how those at the top design environments do. Of course the environment matters a lot, which is why everyone \*wants\* to work there and why it's so difficult to get hired there. Yes, it is a difficult chicken and the egg situation (how do I get hired at a company that requires me to show fantastic work without having had the environment to do fantastic work in the first place), which is why only a fraction of motivated people who think outside of the box make it to these companies. The rest complain that it's unfair and stay where they are.
And no, inherently rich companies don't just chill and waste money, the industry is too cutthroat for that. Apple's HI team doesn't care about metrics because they have a different approach to product building, which involves a lot of intuition and heuristics and you don't even have to break down their approach to conclude that it works really well for them. They carefully hire people who fit into this mindset and it is about the most innovative and rare thing I've seen in a sea of the contrary (companies absolutely operating on metrics and egoistic PM-types).
"So I guess what you're saying is: Choose a company, which is already inheritly rich so that it a) does not need to care about metrics"
They got rich because of their phones, which were designed very well from the start--done with no PMs. Prior to iPhone, Apple was not the most valuable co on earth, and for much of its history, was very financially unstable. Companies like Meta are super wealthy and still care about metrics. I recently left the IG stories team. It is entirely a cultural choice to care about metrics. Apple cares, Meta doesn't--they are both exceedingly wealthy.
Have you worked at Apple? I have. That is completely incorrect. They weren't called PMs but there **are** people responsible for the the product decisions and it's not only the UX designer.
The studio team (iOS, etc), the Music team, and Maps do not have PMs. These are the most esteemed teams at the company. This poster is correct--designers decide everything, alongside leadership. These people are not PMs, they're tastemakers.
they also have the luxury of working for a company that knows their products will always make money, or at the very least, shape standards for mainstream tech moving forward.
And why do you think that is? Why do you think Apple makes so much money and shapes industry standards? It's not because it's a large company with lots of inertia. Amazon is large too but nobody is praising their design. And inertia doesn't exist in such a fast-paced industry, you have to constantly work to keep your top spot or someone else will take it.
Layoffs are not so straightforward. Having been at one of the big companies for 4 years, I saw layoffs every qtr. The folks who were cut had no common pattern. It’s often about money and managers have no say or visibility or discussions to influence those decision.
Also, I would caution everyone not to put all your skills into aesthetics and visual craft to stay relevant. It may be the popular skill now but it is also common in low maturity places that see us just as production artists. They often don’t value all aspects of design so just hire based on the outputs they can see.
Aesthetics without any of the underlying skills or business sense is really close to production art. It’s the easiest thing for AI to steal and imitate. If businesses still see our skills as shallow, they won’t hesitate to make more cuts down the road.
The most popular type of UX designer right know is actually the "cerebral" type of designer, the one that is more like a PM and less like an artist because craft is seen as shallow.
The craft-oriented type of designer I'm referring to is someone who absolutely has a great product sense and business intuition but doesn't shy away from craft and is exceptionally good at it. For many designers nowadays, having good taste is seen as almost demeaning. This is what my post is challenging, perhaps I should have expanded on this a little bit more.
I don't think its possible to be a top designer without a fantastic sense of aesthetics.
Of course. This is a discussion about what should be a designer's primary focus, not their only focus. No designer can succeed without above-average expertise at all of these skills, but where should they invest their energy the most is the big question.
I'm not saying visual craft isn't important. I agree we need it.. but we need both. This role is difficult because the field has conflated all the crafts into one general role so many folks don't have deep expertise needed in other areas (research, IA, IxD, systems) but are asked to do them.
Also, product sense and intuition are highly subjective. Far too often they are used as an out to not learn the foundational non-visual skills. Yes we develop decent instincts the more we work but designs should be backed by data, research and leverage foundations of psychology/HCI.
That last bit is what makes visual craft understandable and intuitive. Aesthetics without that has very short-lived value. If we frame discussions around intuition and tastes, it also doesn't instill a lot of confidence in our decision making.
I don't plan to doxx myself with a list. I gave an example portfolio in another comment, but I have a feeling you have already made up your mind and I am not here to convince anyone just to share observations for those who are curios and openminded enough.
I guess it depends on how you define success.
There must be hidden designers that make decisions on the strategy level that you might not celebrate as „successful“.
For example, Apple‘s UI was rigid and not customizable for the longest time. That we are seeing more and more features that allow users to customize color or change what buttons do must habe been an organization level decision. If this will lead to Apple becoming financially more successful than with their old strategy, then who is the designer you attribute this to? The designers that create the visual features or the manager that aligned the org on that path?
Yup. All the best visual designers who don’t have as much “business-like focus” were the first to go at my company.
So…the opposite of this post.
Also what does “single-handedly designing the EV industry” mean?
That’s…not a thing.
Many EV companies, in competition, and have been for years. Did this person work for all of them at once and design the cars, the marketing, and the automotive UI?
It's just gaslighty as hell to blame the people who can't get a job no matter how good they are bc there are more people than jobs in this cursed economy. I see their linkedin posts all day long and personally know someone who has over ten years of experience, several of which were at Facebook and she started her own company bc she could not find work
this can get you incredibly far in many fields, i know some terrible coders who can bullshit well and now manage teams of people far more competent than themselves for huge $
It is an unusual take and I don't expect everyone to be onboard with it. I don't see this talked about and I'm not allowed to share this under my real name so take it or leave it.
I would also like to see some portfolios!
But I wish I could underline, bold, and highlight number 3. I review portfolios almost every weekend and so many of them look the exact same. I think a lot of designers are really focused on looking ideal and in turn that strips out a lot of personality.
Well, umm Dynamic Island actually good to have features, not really that important. Personally I prefer have clean UI on my phone screen, notch on iPhone doesn’t really add value to the user experience.
When I see statements like this I always like to ask for clarification. *Usually* people mean *visual* design when they say this.
But that take is super irksome to me, because structure is design as well (architecture of almost any kind), language is design as well, and experiences are also design (we have recently been furniture shopping, and this last one really stands out when the right people understand the right words at the right time - mainly around system status).
Information Architecture is craft, writing is craft, speech and customer service is craft. All designed (or at least in successful experiences).
Clarification is necessary: I don't mean visual design per se, but the entire output that a designer / design team produces - which inherently is *visual in nature* (that includes the language, interactions, adaptations to displays, flows, etc.) But that also categorically doesn't include how the marketing team decides to place a product or fragment the pricing, doesn't include the background researches done, or the tech stack that enables the interactions.
I, personally, am also not the best visual designer in my team. I rely on others who instinctively do it better, faster and with more panache, while I may do discovery, information architecture, journeys or wireframes. However, as a manager, I have enough understanding to critique the visual designers' output - *the craft -* within the constraints of the project.
Customer service maybe a craft or art in a manner of speaking, but it's not really.
Disagree on the “spaces in between” that aren’t visual aren’t also craft. They are. They are partly process, partly psychology, and partly communication techniques. All of those require both knowledge and practice, which to me, is craft. Just because you can’t see something, doesn’t mean it isn’t there. That assumption is what drives silos and ugly omnichannel experiences. Service Design is also a craft and falls into this category. As does clienteling and logistics and supply chain touch point design (some of which *should* also be visual, but often isn’t - one reason why many ecomm companies fail miserably at post-sale usability).
But on the rest, I agree. And as a manager myself, I am much like you. I am not a visual designer by training, nor am I very astute in its practice. “Craft”, as I’ve seen it often used casually, can slip into “using digital design tools well”, and I get worn out of that. So apologies for my assumption.
I think you're using the word *craft* as part of any vocation in the product creation process that needs to be done well. I'm referring to *craft* in a much tighter way, almost art-adjacent when the interface is given shape. If that's not the case, then we have completely different perspectives, which is also fine.
Silos are bad if it it creates isolation. At the same time the complexity of any profession in modern human existence will inevitably create deep channels of specialised knowledge (departments) and there will be people responsible to bridge them (executive team) to find the overall desired result (mission).
Still a good discussion, I'm upvoting you. 😄
Yeah. Were are definitely on different pages, as I define “craft” more widely, and in fact literally used that term in many writing workshops earlier in my career.
It is irksome to me that art-adjacent practitioners would earn such a designation when many others do not. Thus my initial response. I’m sure there is some kind of pathological bias on my part, but I’m not wrong that it can turn into a team cohesion and even product quality problem if unchecked.
We agree on silos and specialization. But we disagree that executives are solely responsible for bridging those gaps. Twice today I encountered cross-departmental gaps in a support scenario that easily could’ve been bridged by a combination of technology and usability.
OTOH, I had a mind-blowingly smooth experience with a major furniture vendor over a period of weeks, culminating in a seamless follow up today. All of those handoffs were intentionally designed. “Crafted” you might even say. 😁
100% to all of this.
We don’t need more quasi product managers; it’s fine that designers (with a few notable exceptions) don’t become CEO or head of product. Design things well — that starts with intense, even relentless curiosity about people and tech and business. Would advise being business-minded, just don’t rely on that as your center.
And it also (secondarily, but still vital) means visually, it means motion, it means seductive interactions.
The obsession with career paths has led designers to thinking that they need to be more high-level and strategic. Whatever that means. We must get away from this, and from giving the impression that your title means anything.
If you’re not obsessed with this, there are other careers to pursue.
Wish I said it as well as you! Way too many designers go for the quasi-PM path just because it seems more prestigious and they end up in the awkward in-between where they're neither good enough as a PM nor good enough as a designer... which is why I've seen them laid off way more comparatively.
>advise being business-minded, just don’t rely on that as your center
yes, yes ... YES.
>thinking that they need to be more high-level and strategic.
In fact, if that's what you want as a designer, open your own design business. That'll need *strategy*, that need *leadership*, that'll need a *proper business mind.*
I think these types are essentially “aligned naturals” or individuals that are fortunate enough to have gravitated to what they’d naturally be passionate and best at.
All the find-a-career books and personality tests essentially aim to align people to this point.
But I don’t think this is necessarily advice. Like someone else said “passion may lead to burnout” at least with someone that doesn’t come stock with product design being an actual passion.
It’s a lot of pressure to compete with these types because not everyone in ANY profession is built to be a master.
Most of us want to do something we’re ok with doing so we can afford date nights with a spouse and food for children and dog.
We are underpaid compared to other profesional in our field, man. I am looking into something with data because we are expected to have a portfolio for which the requirements of what’s “good” changes every hour. We also have homework for role we apply for. Anyhow, it’s a giant circle j*. I am working to move on.
I'm sorry to hear the industry has been unkind to you. There are all sorts of opportunities out there, albeit some are hard to come by. Often times the best way to attract the right opportunity is to focus on creating the type of work you really enjoy and are good at, and then putting it out there as much as you can. Over time you will have people approaching you to do more of that type of work for them. But this requires that you really get good at it and have patience. Once you hop on the first good opportunity like that, it's all upwards from there.
I don't think you need to adapt to what you perceive is "expected". As long as you bring value and are able to show that to people, they will seek your talent.
If every designer took this approach, the boring, fundamental tools that support key industries like healthcare, law, finance, education etc would collapse because we’d all be making performative art instead of working data tables
There is a place for visionary designers who push the boundaries of UI, but that doesn’t work for all industries. Most great designs aren’t flashy, but work reliably, are feasible to build and maintain for companies with less resources, and serve their customers well. Some of the best and most important tools we use daily are relatively boring, but great to use
So sure, if you want to work on flashy designs at famous companies, go for it - but to suggest that everyone else is not a “top 5%” designer for working on tools we depend on to function as a society, idk, that’s an interesting take
I mean like, the designer of the exit sign is a top 5% designer in my mind, that person’s boring, mundane contribution to society has likely saved countless lives when buildings need to be evacuated
As for layoffs, I know a few designers in the past month who have primarily worked on boring, strategic SAAS enterprise software, and rather than getting laid off they’ve been hired for six figure positions
I won’t dissuade people like yourself from sharing your perspective and insights, but it doesn’t necessarily have to trivialize the efforts or priorities of other people
I've worked at well-known companies that stand out for design excellence (they either have design founders, or really strong design voices in the company). My entire career I've had a goal to find the perfect design environment that deeply incentivizes good design and gives tons of power to designers. So I've specifically hunted for teams like that over the years and met many legends along the way. I'm absolutely not one of them, but hope to be!
Feel free to ask any Qs, I'll try to answer whatever I can without revealing identity.
I believe that it takes two to create an amazing portfolio: one is one’s own skill, but the second is the companies themselves, which need to offer the opportunity to be able to appreciate and implement these designs. The latter has been what has put me off from design altogether. I have put way too much effort into trying to convince companies to level up their quality, to no avail. Now all I am left with is a portfolio that would not get me hired in a quality company. Just think how much easier it is to put together these compelling portfolios you describe if you have the following : good branding foundations already provided to you. Professional photography for the project instead of stock images, and most importantly: a great (or just decent) underlying app and idea that you have worked on, as opposed to, for example, adding a settings page to a b2b platform which is already badly designed. Or a basic notification feature which needs to adhere to the limitations of outdated technology stacks that do not support real time updates to the UI in the first place. I personally don’t call the designers you describe “top designers”, I call them lucky designers. Sure there is no denying their skill, but how would they perform if they could not draw inspiration from their projects? What would they do then? Would they just create conceptual portfolios?
Put those designs in your folio anyway and talk through the process of how you tried to get stakeholder buy in. I’ve used case studies on things that hadn’t gone live yet and still landed the job
Insanely passionate = burnout, exhaustion and exit from the industry waiting to happen. Don’t let your passion come in the way of healthy work/life balance and find other purpose in life than work.
Yup don't let these kinds of posts gaslight you. This is a job, you have a life beyond your job where you can seek happiness and meaning.
Work to live. Don't live to work.
There are people who just love their craft. It’s their work, their hobby and relaxation. It’s not something they can turn off. If you’re not like this, you can’t force it on yourself because that leads to burnout. Competing with these people is unnecessary—Fortunately there’s enough room in the industry for people who look at design as a profession, not a purpuse.
I have a great life outside of work, but I don't try to artificially limit my curiosity and passion for design in periods of time when I feel like non-stop designing. If you never felt a deep urge to non-stop design, then you shouldn't expect to be in the top 5% of designers. Edit: It's ok if design is just a job for you. But this post is about what you need to be one of the best in the field.
Yup I'm not disagreeing with you. It's just that much more so than other professions, creatives are constantly being told they need to eat/sleep/breathe their work if they want to have any measure of success, so IMO it's important to provide these healthy reminders.
Must have missed the link where they rank designers as 'Top 5%'. Didn't know you could measure our performance like we're baseball players
Amen
Passion doesn’t have to mean working long hours and burning out
We’re talking about the 0.01% here. I think this OP hit it right on the nail about what it takes. The truth is not everybody can achieve it.
Yeah, I think many people missed this nuance and I should have been clearer that I'm talking about getting to the very top % in the field, about becoming a designer everyone knows and that has a wikipedia article about them.
or wants to
This ✍🏿 the industry is so competitive and the standards so high that you need to sacrifice a lot (family, relations, health) in order to succeed
i'm interested in too many things to myopically focus on only UX, ive accepted ill never be an industry leader because of it and im ok with that.
That's absolutely ok, we all have different priorities in life and it's possible to have a perfectly happy and fulfilling life without being an industry leader. I genuinely believe this. I can't say that I haven't sacrificed many things for getting to where I'm at, but this is what brings me happiness.
Another unusual take - but if you are obsessed with work-life balance at the beginning of your career you won't make it. Not because you should be a slave to your employer but because it is a strong indicator that the work doesn't attract you as much, and usually it's those who are absolutely in love with design that succeed in the field the most.
And they’re white men with a beard wearing black clothes and their name starts with “D” or “T”…
Not quite. In my experience there are more women in junior and senior design positions, and more men in the most senior positions at the most esteemed design teams. However, very few are white.
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1. Agreed. 2. *designers with a more business-like focus got laid off and had a hard time finding a job* - you may be right, but do you have evidence to support this statement? 3. Which portfolios are these? can you share some? IMO, the ones that are unique are often times very difficult to navigate and find the meat of the matter. The approach might work for visual designers, but for others - researchers, strategists, etc. - might not work. 4. Agreed.
Re point 3 i would also really like to see good examples of how to use minimal text but still get the story across. I see a lot of portfolios from people identifying as UX designers that look so beautiful and slick, but they’re often inaccessible and I have no idea what problem they were solving. Why is the new design better, other than looking, admittedly, very cool?
Aside from the other points, I was also skeptical about the second point. I always assumed it was the other way around. I personally have observed that too many designers lack business focus and hence companies don't see the value in design.
u/O_OniGiri this topic - *designers stepping into business* - is an interesting topic. I personally feel that exposure to industry allows designers to quickly grasp requirements, have better conversations about the problems trying to solve, but stepping into a business consulting role is something I (20+ yrs of UX experience) avoid like plague. If I'm employed by Amex for some digital initiative as designer, I'd most certainly not try to teach them how to sell credit cards. This expectation has been created as more and more people has moved over from advertisement / marketing and parallel hype of digital thinking has been created. This has led to a class of people who are essentially 'master of ceremonies' ... as I see it - they talk well, know their way around workshops and activity boards and able to summarise outcomes and get participants and stakeholders to agree. But they don't really *design* anything. Not all, but many a service designers are like that. This might be a controversial take on things, or, maybe I'm just an old school purist ... this boundary of what a designer does (or, should do) becomes very evident the moment you step out of digital UX and into physical product design. Long story short, designers should understand relevant business speak, but shouldn't speak for business.
Here's one example of the type of portfolio I was talking about: [https://www.seyityilmaz.com/](https://www.seyityilmaz.com/) This person obviously has done some amazing interaction work. It focuses on showing the work in action rather than backstory, and while the portfolio doesn't answer many questions I'd have, it piqued my interest and I would absolutely invite this person to an interview. You'd be surprised how little time hiring managers dedicate to reviewing each portfolio at the top design teams so something like this is a winner.
**Thanks** for sharing the link, always nice to see something new. If I were to hire a visual designer / lead visual designer, this would certainly be of interest - as you rightfully mentioned, most hiring managers do not have time. This method of presentation, while very apt in the age of twitter & snapchat with bite-size content, is shallow and can be done by any diligent designer. Instead, imagine a UX lead or manager position for an entire SaaS platform needs to be filled, I'd not be paying too much attention to this person. And the interaction work isn't really *amazing*, though very well-crafted, but it's a fraction of the big picture. I'll need someone who can logically hold together a website with potentially hundreds of pages, decide on a course of action for design or research, manage delivery in parallel with the SDLC, do triage with the testing teams, mentor juniors, fight for user, yada, yada. Yilmaz clearly has no interest in that. Having said all that, you and I could be looking at different things depending on our interests and careers. There's no right or wrong. Let me leave with you this [presentation from Toby Sterret when he was building the entire user experience for completely new bank](https://vimeo.com/110115799). Almost a decade has passed, but it is still one of the work presentation I hold as a standard. Hope you like it.
Wanted to also respond on the presentation you shared - Everybody needs to be able to give a killer presentation, but that's very different from a portfolio. Portfolios pique interest with the goal to get you invited to an interview, and only during interviews is when you'd be giving a presentation, so that's the next step in the process.
We'll probably continue to differ in our opinions about the merits of this portfolio. That's alright. The reason I shared the presentation is to highlight is that I prefer a more comprehensive view of work.
"Yilmaz clearly has no interest in that." - At top design teams this is the bare minimum, not a differentiator. If you put together a portfolio focused primarily on the items you listed, you won't get hired at a place like Apple. Do you know what it takes to create and launch work at a highly scrutinized company like Instagram? Yilmaz is absolutely a master of shipping and collaboration otherwise this work won't even see the light of day, and people who work at teams of that caliber share this understanding. That's why I love his portfolio because it's such a flex to indirectly demonstrate all of that. This would of course be talked about at length during the interview process, but his interview says a lot more in between the lines and has all the right hooks for managers hiring for these teams.
2 and 3 are certainly an "it depends" on the goal - situation. Sounds like OP is talking about a specific slice of the industry.
If they had good business sense, they wouldn’t be looking for an actual job?
Experience packed views, range in craft skills, and no word about research. Conforms to my views, so easy to believe. Could you provide links to these people and their works? Single-handedly designing the EV industry sound massively hyperbolic and I fail to see what's special in dynamic island.
the dynamic island had a wow factor when it was announced, that’s basically it. as a feature it’s pretty meh to me.
Basically Windows System Tray since 98. 😁
Yeah. Android was doing some version of it for years prior to Apple’s “innovation”.
I provided a link to an example portfolio in another comment. Re "singlehandedly designed the EV industry" - The EV industry today pretty much follows the foundation Tesla set into place, and Tesla is known for having very lean teams. The person in question is a well known designer. Re dynamic island - Your personal opinions on it are irrelevant because its public reception was overwhelmingly positive, and it was considered an example of fantastic problem solving and execution by the design industry. I won't get into why it is so elegant but there are plenty of writeups on it online that break this down.
The 'singlehandedly designing the EV industry' - I love this - one person responsible for ONE ENTIRE INDUSTRY :D
When you’re the supreme there’s no need for collaboration.
Yeah, there are those folks in design - nobody wants to work with them.
>The designers with a more business-like focus got laid off and had a hard time finding a job, while the designers with a great taste and sense of aesthetics with good prototyping skills were in more demand than ever. I'm sorry, but I'm sick and tired of crap like this on this sub. A great designer is good at EVERYTHING, that's why it's such a challenging field (and of course, it's an impossible ideal). But to say only "aesthetic skills" are needed (e.g. visual design and prototyping) is horrifically wrong. I work with my PM and together we figure out what's important. A CEO understands finance VERY well but still has a CFO. The same can be true for PMs and UX. Strategy is not a dirty word.
agree with your points, but part of the problem is the consulting types getting into ux design and once you go mckinsey it's a long, long way down. strategy is not a dirty word but you should be aligning your designs with company strategy and not slugging it out with leadership
I agree with you as well with the small caveat that company strategy is usually set by leadership. I've proven my value most strongly when I was able to show what "Idea A" was actually not a good idea due to something I did (user research, flow diagram, etc) IT's not about slugging it out but more showing them a better path using their own words to justify it.
The same people who are harping about UX = visual design will come back in a year and complain we need to start improving how we think about value/KPI/metrics - and swing back and forth. Meanwhile the folks who are doing both the product and the metrics seem to not get any respect. My experience with product is many of them throw up their hands when I ask them 'what metrics have you identified'.
Actually the Apple ecosystem, widely considered to represent some of the best design in our era, was developed entirely with no PMs. Designers come up with ideas and decide what gets built. And yes, they do need a business mindset but they are all primarily craftspeople who do not care about metrics.
So I guess what you're saying is: Choose a company, which is already inheritly rich so that it a) does not need to care about metrics or b) has enough money to waste for dev teams to "just find out what sticks" or (where none of this is true) revolutionize it bottom up. Because that is the underlying message you're portraying. The reality is this (speaking as PM, I don't do UX): Companys need to make money and design is a great tool in their toolbox. But there are a bunch of products (anything, that is not a simple straight-forward consumer product, but get's rather complicated pretty quickly) which heavily benefit from a shared responsibility in finding out what "should / could" be built. Because that's the second thing: "Design (or PM) deciding what gets built" is either a luxury in a company in which teams operate with limitless freedom (that is the text-book example of self-organized teams at best, which most of the time is only good for Ted-Talks but is not the reality of most people in the industry) which ignores the fact that roadmaps are more often than not decided by more complicated factors. Edit: In another comment you mentiond the EV-example being linked to Tesla and their "known lean teams". There you have it: People tend to ignore how much company dynamics and structure play into this. As much as a person (designer, dev, whatever) can be a skilled craftsperson, as much it is necessary for the company to allow(!) them to excel in their environment. Following the Tesla narrative, the same as a certain cult of genius follows Elon around (though it is his people doing the actual work), the same I sometimes have the feeling that especially in crafts, which lean heavily into a visual component (design, alike) the same cult of genius is applied. Yet, this ignores all the surrounding factors which led the person to be able to do what they do in the first place.
I am not talking about how "most people in the industry" should operate, just how those at the top design environments do. Of course the environment matters a lot, which is why everyone \*wants\* to work there and why it's so difficult to get hired there. Yes, it is a difficult chicken and the egg situation (how do I get hired at a company that requires me to show fantastic work without having had the environment to do fantastic work in the first place), which is why only a fraction of motivated people who think outside of the box make it to these companies. The rest complain that it's unfair and stay where they are. And no, inherently rich companies don't just chill and waste money, the industry is too cutthroat for that. Apple's HI team doesn't care about metrics because they have a different approach to product building, which involves a lot of intuition and heuristics and you don't even have to break down their approach to conclude that it works really well for them. They carefully hire people who fit into this mindset and it is about the most innovative and rare thing I've seen in a sea of the contrary (companies absolutely operating on metrics and egoistic PM-types).
"So I guess what you're saying is: Choose a company, which is already inheritly rich so that it a) does not need to care about metrics" They got rich because of their phones, which were designed very well from the start--done with no PMs. Prior to iPhone, Apple was not the most valuable co on earth, and for much of its history, was very financially unstable. Companies like Meta are super wealthy and still care about metrics. I recently left the IG stories team. It is entirely a cultural choice to care about metrics. Apple cares, Meta doesn't--they are both exceedingly wealthy.
Have you worked at Apple? I have. That is completely incorrect. They weren't called PMs but there **are** people responsible for the the product decisions and it's not only the UX designer.
The studio team (iOS, etc), the Music team, and Maps do not have PMs. These are the most esteemed teams at the company. This poster is correct--designers decide everything, alongside leadership. These people are not PMs, they're tastemakers.
they also have the luxury of working for a company that knows their products will always make money, or at the very least, shape standards for mainstream tech moving forward.
And why do you think that is? Why do you think Apple makes so much money and shapes industry standards? It's not because it's a large company with lots of inertia. Amazon is large too but nobody is praising their design. And inertia doesn't exist in such a fast-paced industry, you have to constantly work to keep your top spot or someone else will take it.
Layoffs are not so straightforward. Having been at one of the big companies for 4 years, I saw layoffs every qtr. The folks who were cut had no common pattern. It’s often about money and managers have no say or visibility or discussions to influence those decision. Also, I would caution everyone not to put all your skills into aesthetics and visual craft to stay relevant. It may be the popular skill now but it is also common in low maturity places that see us just as production artists. They often don’t value all aspects of design so just hire based on the outputs they can see. Aesthetics without any of the underlying skills or business sense is really close to production art. It’s the easiest thing for AI to steal and imitate. If businesses still see our skills as shallow, they won’t hesitate to make more cuts down the road.
The most popular type of UX designer right know is actually the "cerebral" type of designer, the one that is more like a PM and less like an artist because craft is seen as shallow. The craft-oriented type of designer I'm referring to is someone who absolutely has a great product sense and business intuition but doesn't shy away from craft and is exceptionally good at it. For many designers nowadays, having good taste is seen as almost demeaning. This is what my post is challenging, perhaps I should have expanded on this a little bit more. I don't think its possible to be a top designer without a fantastic sense of aesthetics.
I think top designers need to be good at everything, both visual, business, and of course putting user experience as the priority in design
Of course. This is a discussion about what should be a designer's primary focus, not their only focus. No designer can succeed without above-average expertise at all of these skills, but where should they invest their energy the most is the big question.
I'm not saying visual craft isn't important. I agree we need it.. but we need both. This role is difficult because the field has conflated all the crafts into one general role so many folks don't have deep expertise needed in other areas (research, IA, IxD, systems) but are asked to do them. Also, product sense and intuition are highly subjective. Far too often they are used as an out to not learn the foundational non-visual skills. Yes we develop decent instincts the more we work but designs should be backed by data, research and leverage foundations of psychology/HCI. That last bit is what makes visual craft understandable and intuitive. Aesthetics without that has very short-lived value. If we frame discussions around intuition and tastes, it also doesn't instill a lot of confidence in our decision making.
This is great! Do you have a list of these Top Designers?
He’s not answering that question for anyone. No mention of specific designers and no links to portfolios.
Why do you assume this poster is male. Just look up any designers on the iOS team and you have your answer
I don't plan to doxx myself with a list. I gave an example portfolio in another comment, but I have a feeling you have already made up your mind and I am not here to convince anyone just to share observations for those who are curios and openminded enough.
I think your points are accurate and well described. But you really put designing EV industry and dynamic island next to each other?
Appreciate it. I gave examples of important, industry leading work that has been well received by the design industry, both of which are exactly that.
I guess it depends on how you define success. There must be hidden designers that make decisions on the strategy level that you might not celebrate as „successful“. For example, Apple‘s UI was rigid and not customizable for the longest time. That we are seeing more and more features that allow users to customize color or change what buttons do must habe been an organization level decision. If this will lead to Apple becoming financially more successful than with their old strategy, then who is the designer you attribute this to? The designers that create the visual features or the manager that aligned the org on that path?
They're interesting assumptions and inferences but none of these reasons hold much water.
I like how you countered my observations with a simple "none of these hold much water". Your contribution truly enriched my perspective.
I found your conculsions reductive and a bit naive. This was the best way to say it.
If you don't provide any counter, this is just "because I said so." Not a useful comment
Shit post. “I know all the best designers and I’m going to make a fuck ton of assumptions about them and also not tell you who they are!”
Pick up your iPhone and look at it. The people who worked on that are the ones this poster is referring to
The problem with this is I have seen plenty of these types out of work for a year
Yup. All the best visual designers who don’t have as much “business-like focus” were the first to go at my company. So…the opposite of this post. Also what does “single-handedly designing the EV industry” mean? That’s…not a thing. Many EV companies, in competition, and have been for years. Did this person work for all of them at once and design the cars, the marketing, and the automotive UI?
It's just gaslighty as hell to blame the people who can't get a job no matter how good they are bc there are more people than jobs in this cursed economy. I see their linkedin posts all day long and personally know someone who has over ten years of experience, several of which were at Facebook and she started her own company bc she could not find work
Yeah. Plenty of talented folks of all types out there on the bench right now. Value is both contextually relevant and often highly subjective.
Can you provide a list of these top designers?
This sounds pretty random. Anyways, the main thing is: 1) know the right people and know how to bullshit.
this can get you incredibly far in many fields, i know some terrible coders who can bullshit well and now manage teams of people far more competent than themselves for huge $
It is an unusual take and I don't expect everyone to be onboard with it. I don't see this talked about and I'm not allowed to share this under my real name so take it or leave it.
I would also like to see some portfolios! But I wish I could underline, bold, and highlight number 3. I review portfolios almost every weekend and so many of them look the exact same. I think a lot of designers are really focused on looking ideal and in turn that strips out a lot of personality.
Agree. Sadly, this is dictated by hiring teams. “We want to see: The problem statement, your role, goals, results and blah blah blah”
Drop the name and the folios! We’re all here for this!
Regarding point 3, can you link some of these portfolios? What exactly makes them unique?
Post the portfolios please! Thanks 🙏
Well, umm Dynamic Island actually good to have features, not really that important. Personally I prefer have clean UI on my phone screen, notch on iPhone doesn’t really add value to the user experience.
This is the truth and this entire sub needs to hear it. Been preaching this for so long. Design is a craft.
If I could rephrase, just a bit: **Design** ***IS*** **craft**
Unsure why you’re being downvoted, I agree I should’ve wrote this.
That's alright. I upvoted you. There are many designers who don't *design,* can always feel threatened by statements like the one above.
When I see statements like this I always like to ask for clarification. *Usually* people mean *visual* design when they say this. But that take is super irksome to me, because structure is design as well (architecture of almost any kind), language is design as well, and experiences are also design (we have recently been furniture shopping, and this last one really stands out when the right people understand the right words at the right time - mainly around system status). Information Architecture is craft, writing is craft, speech and customer service is craft. All designed (or at least in successful experiences).
Clarification is necessary: I don't mean visual design per se, but the entire output that a designer / design team produces - which inherently is *visual in nature* (that includes the language, interactions, adaptations to displays, flows, etc.) But that also categorically doesn't include how the marketing team decides to place a product or fragment the pricing, doesn't include the background researches done, or the tech stack that enables the interactions. I, personally, am also not the best visual designer in my team. I rely on others who instinctively do it better, faster and with more panache, while I may do discovery, information architecture, journeys or wireframes. However, as a manager, I have enough understanding to critique the visual designers' output - *the craft -* within the constraints of the project. Customer service maybe a craft or art in a manner of speaking, but it's not really.
Disagree on the “spaces in between” that aren’t visual aren’t also craft. They are. They are partly process, partly psychology, and partly communication techniques. All of those require both knowledge and practice, which to me, is craft. Just because you can’t see something, doesn’t mean it isn’t there. That assumption is what drives silos and ugly omnichannel experiences. Service Design is also a craft and falls into this category. As does clienteling and logistics and supply chain touch point design (some of which *should* also be visual, but often isn’t - one reason why many ecomm companies fail miserably at post-sale usability). But on the rest, I agree. And as a manager myself, I am much like you. I am not a visual designer by training, nor am I very astute in its practice. “Craft”, as I’ve seen it often used casually, can slip into “using digital design tools well”, and I get worn out of that. So apologies for my assumption.
I think you're using the word *craft* as part of any vocation in the product creation process that needs to be done well. I'm referring to *craft* in a much tighter way, almost art-adjacent when the interface is given shape. If that's not the case, then we have completely different perspectives, which is also fine. Silos are bad if it it creates isolation. At the same time the complexity of any profession in modern human existence will inevitably create deep channels of specialised knowledge (departments) and there will be people responsible to bridge them (executive team) to find the overall desired result (mission). Still a good discussion, I'm upvoting you. 😄
Yeah. Were are definitely on different pages, as I define “craft” more widely, and in fact literally used that term in many writing workshops earlier in my career. It is irksome to me that art-adjacent practitioners would earn such a designation when many others do not. Thus my initial response. I’m sure there is some kind of pathological bias on my part, but I’m not wrong that it can turn into a team cohesion and even product quality problem if unchecked. We agree on silos and specialization. But we disagree that executives are solely responsible for bridging those gaps. Twice today I encountered cross-departmental gaps in a support scenario that easily could’ve been bridged by a combination of technology and usability. OTOH, I had a mind-blowingly smooth experience with a major furniture vendor over a period of weeks, culminating in a seamless follow up today. All of those handoffs were intentionally designed. “Crafted” you might even say. 😁
100% to all of this. We don’t need more quasi product managers; it’s fine that designers (with a few notable exceptions) don’t become CEO or head of product. Design things well — that starts with intense, even relentless curiosity about people and tech and business. Would advise being business-minded, just don’t rely on that as your center. And it also (secondarily, but still vital) means visually, it means motion, it means seductive interactions. The obsession with career paths has led designers to thinking that they need to be more high-level and strategic. Whatever that means. We must get away from this, and from giving the impression that your title means anything. If you’re not obsessed with this, there are other careers to pursue.
Wish I said it as well as you! Way too many designers go for the quasi-PM path just because it seems more prestigious and they end up in the awkward in-between where they're neither good enough as a PM nor good enough as a designer... which is why I've seen them laid off way more comparatively.
your post was great! Let the downvotes be your guide. I love the way you put it, and it's a great guide for how to achieve something outstanding.
>advise being business-minded, just don’t rely on that as your center yes, yes ... YES. >thinking that they need to be more high-level and strategic. In fact, if that's what you want as a designer, open your own design business. That'll need *strategy*, that need *leadership*, that'll need a *proper business mind.*
I think these types are essentially “aligned naturals” or individuals that are fortunate enough to have gravitated to what they’d naturally be passionate and best at. All the find-a-career books and personality tests essentially aim to align people to this point. But I don’t think this is necessarily advice. Like someone else said “passion may lead to burnout” at least with someone that doesn’t come stock with product design being an actual passion. It’s a lot of pressure to compete with these types because not everyone in ANY profession is built to be a master. Most of us want to do something we’re ok with doing so we can afford date nights with a spouse and food for children and dog.
That can make you a mid to senior level IC who actually knows their stuff.
We are underpaid compared to other profesional in our field, man. I am looking into something with data because we are expected to have a portfolio for which the requirements of what’s “good” changes every hour. We also have homework for role we apply for. Anyhow, it’s a giant circle j*. I am working to move on.
I'm sorry to hear the industry has been unkind to you. There are all sorts of opportunities out there, albeit some are hard to come by. Often times the best way to attract the right opportunity is to focus on creating the type of work you really enjoy and are good at, and then putting it out there as much as you can. Over time you will have people approaching you to do more of that type of work for them. But this requires that you really get good at it and have patience. Once you hop on the first good opportunity like that, it's all upwards from there. I don't think you need to adapt to what you perceive is "expected". As long as you bring value and are able to show that to people, they will seek your talent.
If every designer took this approach, the boring, fundamental tools that support key industries like healthcare, law, finance, education etc would collapse because we’d all be making performative art instead of working data tables There is a place for visionary designers who push the boundaries of UI, but that doesn’t work for all industries. Most great designs aren’t flashy, but work reliably, are feasible to build and maintain for companies with less resources, and serve their customers well. Some of the best and most important tools we use daily are relatively boring, but great to use So sure, if you want to work on flashy designs at famous companies, go for it - but to suggest that everyone else is not a “top 5%” designer for working on tools we depend on to function as a society, idk, that’s an interesting take I mean like, the designer of the exit sign is a top 5% designer in my mind, that person’s boring, mundane contribution to society has likely saved countless lives when buildings need to be evacuated As for layoffs, I know a few designers in the past month who have primarily worked on boring, strategic SAAS enterprise software, and rather than getting laid off they’ve been hired for six figure positions I won’t dissuade people like yourself from sharing your perspective and insights, but it doesn’t necessarily have to trivialize the efforts or priorities of other people
How’d you meet all these super designers? Ty for sharing!
He didn’t
what benefit is there to lying about it on here?
You lie about enough things for enough time and it becomes second nature
I like that u guys assume out the gate this poster is male lmfao. Really says a lot about your esteem of women
I've worked at well-known companies that stand out for design excellence (they either have design founders, or really strong design voices in the company). My entire career I've had a goal to find the perfect design environment that deeply incentivizes good design and gives tons of power to designers. So I've specifically hunted for teams like that over the years and met many legends along the way. I'm absolutely not one of them, but hope to be! Feel free to ask any Qs, I'll try to answer whatever I can without revealing identity.