The designer’s dayjob dilemma

There’s probably only a handful of job titles as disputable as “designer” when it comes to what the person actually does on a day-to-day basis. With such widely varying career options from visual design to user experience research to prototyping guru, it can be a paralyzing decision for a young designer to make about which fork in the path to pursue.

Schools don’t even teach the primary skills — UI/UX, that designers today proudly flaunt on their LinkedIn profiles. Designers just kind of end up learning it all through experience. All designers were attracted to the field likely due to an interest in art at an early age, which they converted into some sort of graphic design degree and landed an internship doing branding at some agency.

As industries get disrupted, the artists pivot. The web brought about an influx of designers turned HTML/CSS cargo cult programmers. As mobile now explodes to dizzying heights, designers start thinking about content way more than ever, thanks to the tiny real estate available on a mobile device. This in turn involves significantly more UX thinking than the designer has ever had to do before.

From here, the field is wide open. The designer could hone their client relation and entrepreneurship skills to try their hand at becoming a product strategist. They could dive deep into further studies on type and human emotion, becoming an expert at visual design. They could try hacking away at some code to bring their visions to life, becoming a hybrid prototyper and semi-developer. They could study and observe what makes creative teams bloom with energy, becoming a manager of a design team.

So, it’s an easy choice, right? Not quite. The discrepancy between the idealized vision of the job and the everyday grind of it is so huge that it doesn’t hit most people until they start doing it. The designer may love to code and animate UI elements on the screen, but there will be weeks or months when they are so focused on solving some technical architecture issue that they lose sight of the higher goal and start longing to go back to the world of pushing pixels.

They may love brainstorming and leading whiteboarding sessions, but after an entire day of talking and attending meetings, they will miss some part of just sitting down, putting on their favorite jam, and obsessing over fonts and colors for hours on end.

The point is, there’s a huge trade-off to be made when picking a path of specialization. And since this sort of disruption within the industry is happening so quickly and so unexpectedly, no-one’s sure if there’s actually one best path. Designers who perfected their HTML/CSS skills with the rise of the web are now finding themselves scouring for positions as web prototypers for mobile designs because the web is not growing as fast as apps are booming in popularity.

No-one knows what the design industry is going to look like five or ten years from now. And that’s both terrifying and exciting. The designer doesn’t have to make the right choice now. He just has to make a choice. In a way, we can pride ourselves for being part of a world where our skills allow us to pivot so effortlessly from one endeavor to the next. It’s an amazing skillset that is quickly ripening for one of the most bountiful harvests that world has ever seen.