Humility and self-confidence lead you to strive for quality no matter the task. Lose that pride, and you’re destined for design mediocrity.
Do you ever wonder why you can exceed your expectations on some projects, but feel no better than mediocre at others? Why sometimes you put in 110% to get the details just right, and on other jobs you can’t be f*cked to do any more than the minimum? It’s the difference between a job done, and job done right.
There’s one word that describes this difference. It’s the single most important factor in determining if anyone will perform their job well.
Pride.
I don’t care how well trained you are or how many years of experience you have. If you don’t take pride in your work, you’re no better than everyone else who coasts through their responsibilities waiting for the next weekend to roll around. If you don’t take pride in your work, you’re building a false ceiling that holds you at mediocrity and blocks your growth to expertise. …
What l learned about designing quickly from Malcolm Gladwell and The Queen’s Gambit.
What do chess, law school exams, and UX design have in common? As it turns out, a lot. They all judge skill — rightly or wrongly — in terms of speed.
Hikaru Nakamura is a grandmaster chess player. Not quite as good as Magnus Carlsen, the greatest chess player of his era, but still exceptionally good. One of the best.
Hikaru’s specialty is blitz chess — he played it 6 hours a day growing up in Westchester County outside New York City. Blitz chess, unlike classical, is ultra-fast. Each player gets only five minutes for the entire game. …
A rebuttal of Dr. Jon Younger’s accurate, yet platform-obsessed freelance revolution predictions.
It’s no secret that I’m not a fan of freelance platforms — Upwork, Fiverr, Freelancer.com and the like. I’ve written about it before. I simply can’t understand why you’d want to leave both your income and reputation at the mercy of a third-party who doesn’t always have your best interest in mind. Especially if you aim to build a full-time career from freelancing. It’s your livelihood — you want to be in control of it.
When I came across Jon Younger’s recent article on freelance “revolution” predictions I found myself nodding in total agreement and cringing in frustration in equal measures. …
Artists, designers, writers, and anyone else who produces creative work, this is a must-read essay by David Perell: Expression is Compression.
Some of my favourite passages (emphasis mine):
…people make sense of the world by making it simpler and more beautiful — by making compression progress…creators move towards compression progress not by following their rational mind, but by following their intuition for what’s interesting. In doing so, they compress large data sets into elegant deliverables which are easy to share and remember.
That means to ship something excellent, you have to be willing to cut what may have taken weeks or months to produce. As West Side Story composer Stephen Sondheim once said: “You have to throw out good stuff to get the best stuff.” …
If you’re rich, you’re more lucky than smart. And there’s math to prove it.
A new study that claims the predominance of luck over talent in the distribution of wealth has been mathematically confirmed. Two Italian physicists — Alessandro Pluchino and Andrea Rapisarda — and one economist — A. E. Biondo — make the case, and they’ve got a computer model to back it up.
“If it is true that some degree of talent is necessary to be successful in life, almost never the most talented people reach the highest peaks of success, being overtaken by mediocre but sensibly luckier individuals.” …
“Complexity is like energy. It cannot be created or destroyed, only moved somewhere else. When a product or service becomes simpler for users, engineers and designers have to work harder.”
In Why Life Can’t Be Simpler, Farnam Street brilliantly explains Tesler’s Law as it relates to what we’ve all experienced about digital product design.
Simpler isn’t always better
The first lesson from Tesler’s law of the conservation of complexity is that how simple something looks is not a reflection of how simple it is to use.
“People have an intuitive sense that complexity has to go somewhere. When using a product or service is too simple, users can feel suspicious or like they’ve been robbed of control.” …
10 rules to help you thrive when your design foundation is missing or moving.
Remember the good old days when you’d get a stable design brief, have the luxury of “big design up front”, and the time to produce a consistent, well-considered design system in a non-changing, pre-dev vacuum state?
No?
Neither do I. It’s been a while.
The design world has moved past that waterfall process because shipping, testing, and validation have superseded planning and prediction. As a result, our job has become a lot more challenging.
The struggle is real
One of my current clients is a multi-national corporation. But within that corporation is a small team that essentially runs like an agile startup inside the larger organisation. …
Money is not a goal, it’s a byproduct of success.
I’ve run my own one-person design business for 18 years. Through most of that time, I’ve never allowed money to influence decisions around which clients to work for or what design projects to take on.
I say “most” because there was a time when I did, and quickly learned it was a mistake.
New freelancers will know all too well that when you first start — when you’re building your business up from nothing — there is a time when you have to take every opportunity that comes your way. You work not for interesting design challenges or for fulfilling client collaborations. …
5 quick hacks for failing fast
New to freelancing and don’t know where to start? Fear not! With so many great gig marketplaces and collaboration tools, freelancing is easier than ever — anyone can do it, no matter your experience. The barrier of entry is literally zero.
Just ask your nephew. He earned $10 on Fiverr last week and all he had to do was design an entire website in a day. Easy peasy!
It’s so easy that everyone is jumping on the freelance bandwagon, and COVID is only accelerating the trend towards flexible employment and contracting options. …
Why freelance outsiders become critical design saviours.
One of my clients is the largest telecommunications provider in New Zealand. They command hundreds of employees and run multiple internal product design teams. Yet they’ve chosen to hire me — an independent freelance UX/UI designer — to lead a critical redesign of their entire digital design system (across websites and apps). Why trust a project that complex and important to a lone outsider?
Many of my other clients are fast-growing, well-funded tech startups with innovative digital products or data services. I’ve led them through design processes — sometimes lasting over a year — to discover and create their apps, products, and marketing websites. …
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