Lessons learned as a designer from over 12 years.

2. Who are you?

3. Who am I?Today
How I got here.

4. #1
Where you start is not
where you have to end.
#1b
Figure out where you want
to start.

5. #2
Learn Psychology.

6. #3
Get good at facilitating
meetings.

7. #4
Establish a process.

8. #5
Get comfortable saying
“I don’t know.”
#5b
Followed up with
“But I can figure it out.”

10. #1 Where you start is not where you have to
end.
#1b Figure out where you want to start.
#2 Learn Psychology.
#3 Get good at facilitating meetings.
#4 Establish a process.
#5 Get comfortable saying,“I don’t know.”
#5b Followed up with,“But I can figure it out.”

11. #6
Interface users are not your
own user.

12. #7
Take time to explore other
experiences.

13. #8
Know your space, lingo and
keep up on research.

14. #9
Getting hired - create a
portfolio that tells a story.

15. #10
You are not designing for yourself.
In fact, you’re not designing at all.
You’re creating an experience.

16. BONUS!
• Walk around to get creative inspiration.
• Surround yourself with a few plants.
• Work on paper more.
• Watch funny videos or read cartoons
when stuck.
• Talk it through with someone else.
• Find a mentor.

17. Names for Inspiration
Dieter Rams
Saul Bass
Golden Krishna
Matthew Carter
Martí Guixé
Phyllis Pearsall
Fraser Davidson
Candy Chang
Hartmut Esslinger

18. Where do you want to start?
1. What type of designer do you want to be? If you don't know,
what's your plan for figuring it out?
2. How are you going to differentiate yourself from everyone else?
3. What's your ideal job? If you don't know, what type of jobs do
you want to try out in order to figure it out?
4. What type of environment do you want to work in? What do
you want to avoid?
5. What's your design process?

19. What developers want in a
designer.
• Provide detailed information. We can guess the colors and location of things you want, but most
likely our guess will be just a little bit off which means we have to go through several rounds of
refinement. That takes up time we could have saved.
• Give us specs in something we can easily consume, in places we can easily find. PDFs are great.
I don't have the software to open a .graffle or .psd. And make sure those files stay around because we
probably will need them later.
• When you update your requirements also update and republish the specs. If you say something
should be changed in a github issue or in person make sure the specs are updated to reflect that.
• Know the platform. There's a big difference in time and effort between the UI/UX aspects that apple
(and android) readily support, and those things we have to build ourselves. Know the difference
between these and make sure that if you want any UI/UX element that we have to build ourselves is
worth the extended amount of time/effort.
• Provide a list of defaults. For example the colors you gave us for the project - those are great,
instead of re-writing the color RGB we can just reference the list you gave us. We're lazy.

20. What developers want in a
designer.
• Listen to our feedback. We live and breathe ios/android/web. We pick up on good and
bad patterns we see from all the projects we work on and use. If we think something the
designers designed doesn't fit, seriously reconsider and/or provide a solid argument as to
why it's better the way you're proposing.
• Be relatively sure a design is final before giving it to us, and if not, let us know it's
a draft. It takes us a ton of time to get everything pixel perfect. If it's changed flippantly it's
rather frustrating (this is understandable when changing from release A to release B but
multiple iterations within one release cycle gets tedious). It is ok to test out draft on the
phone, but let us know if it's a draft so we don't worry about getting it pixel perfect.
• Figure out what your developer wants. Some developers like designs who are open to
discussion and feedback in both directions but there are other developers who are like "give
me a design to make and stop all the talking.”
• Some one that is approachable, open to feedback, and able to help you work out details
if for some reason something is really difficult to do.

21. Helpful Resources
• Luke W - mobile, forms
• Jon Ive - iOS
• Don Norman / Jared
Spool / Jakob Nielsen -
user experience
• Steve Portigal / Indi Young
• Leah Buley
Good Videos
• 6 principles of design
• Luke W talks about forms
and Conversion
Typography blog post

22. Helpful Resources
Universal Design Principles book