Grow Your Value & Income As a Designer

Technical skills will get you so far in Design. You need to focus on soft skills such as Communication, Time Management if you want to grow and stand out.

Dear Designer, You have done an amazing job this year! Maybe you didn’t achieve everything you wanted. Go easy on yourself. Design is hard! You are expected to touch everything from stating business problems to communicating your solutions to developers, stakeholders. You work hard on making sense of data

Meticulously structured design courses are valuable. Study them, learn them, but if you ever get overwhelmed (and you will), bear in mind that the real work environments are not that strict, you will have room to break the rules you learned, explore and make your own rules.

Enjoy your time with video games, do not see it as a waste of time as society thinks. This is YOUR time, use it as you like it. It will make you a better designer.

Don’t undervalue your service and experience, you will be amazed to find out how much some businesses are willing to pay for it.

Treat every design project as an opportunity to improve and show your craft, creativity, attention to detail, not as a paycheck. Especially if you are a young designer.

Constraints are your clues to a good, accessible, consistent design. Use them for your strength and do your best to express your creativity within these lines. There is so much you can use your Creativity to contribute to your clients' businesses and users' life.

Be honest and estimate a reasonable timeline based on your experience and enable your client to go live earlier than other designers' estimations. That’s what will prove your value as a Designer, not a surprise early delivery.

Ask questions to understand the client, business goals, competition, problems, the VALUE and offer your solution based on that, not on your hour.

Introvert Designers; Educate your managers, colleagues about what introversion really means, that you need your space to be creative, that you need your time to think, that you don't need to change and you are a great value to the team with your introvert qualities.

I love reading! It is crucial for growth, however, it is greatly effective only when you actually apply your learning from these readings. So, reading and executing should run in parallel.

Invest in long term, Diversify, Don't stress to time the market, Stay calm ... It is not that complicated.

Replace your smartphone with a book.

We all have 24 hours in a day. Entrepreneur to 5 products and 4 kids with well balanced life or a single full time employee who struggles to find time to do a simple reading/writing.

Don't fear to take new challenges bigger than you've ever dealt with. Remember, we don't grow when things are easy, we grow when we face challenges.

It is not What you know but Who!

We do not need to be in active communication with our heros (which would make them mentors), however we can follow their work, blog, Twitter, etc. to have an understanding of what they are up to, how they are approaching to certain situations and learn from them.

An overlooked factor in keeping a good mood while working from home

In the early days of the internet, .com was the king. It was an unconscious extension for any person. It was also an important factor to rate well at search engines. Then with the explosion of websites, finding the domain name with .com has started becoming a nightmare. Countless new

"Being self-taught is all about working hard yourself on the path of your passion with endless patience and curiosity."

White spaces in design are not wasted spaces. They clean the environment around the important element and gives better, easier, direct focus