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This advice comes from countless trials, errors, failures, and over a decade of experience in the design industry.

What I Wish Someone Would’ve Told Me

Throughout my career I have always grappled with the uncertainty that is being a designer in the 21st century.

There’s so much to know and it can be very easy to get caught off-guard by the near-constant changes to specifications, paradigms, technologies, and business challenges.

What I will tell you is the one, sure-fire way that I have learned to actually get better, and get ahead in the design industry, and I wish someone would’ve told me this when I was starting out.

Create Every Day

It doesn’t have to be great, it doesn’t have to be good. It doesn’t have to be usable, or scalable, or accessible, or adhere to any standards; all of that comes later.

No, you are a designer; design.

Design things that you want to see in the world, design solutions to problems that you actually have. Design just because that’s who you are and what you do. Design with the intent to create, not the intent to impress.

Trust me on this one, the tools and technologies we sweat over will one day be a relic of days gone be.

Perfection is the enemy of progress

Every constraint or standard that you attempt to adhere to out of the gate will almost always stifle your initial creativity and kill your ability to just put pen to paper, or mouse to screen, and do it.

Some of the “rules” that I like to break

Sometimes I will use a 10-pt grid. Why? Because its easy and makes placement smoother.

Has it ever caused problems with the final product? Not even once.

I have also not used a vertical baseline grid (even though they can be convenient sometimes), and opted to place things based on margins, padding, columns, and programmatic line-height; its never been a problem.

We’re designers, we’re not sticklers. We’re here to create things that work for people, not work for the “rules.” Our main goal should always be to create designs that work well for our users, our teams, and our organizations, not fret about some arbitrary rules.

Memento Mori

No matter how “great” of a designer you are, how many rules you follow, how fantastic, “to-spec,” your designs are: you will die, we all will.

This is not to scare or intimidate, rather to set you free.

For years I struggled to learn the in’s and out’s of all the tools, and rules, and paradigms, and measurements, and specifications of all the platforms, and all the displays, and all the devices, and all of it was — drumroll, please — essentially meaningless.

Do what you can while you’re here. Design your heart out, and create things that really speak to your creative style. Be 100% authentic and don’t ever apologize for it.

And always remember the golden rule of design, outside of all paradigms and pretension: “if it looks right, and does what its supposed to do for the user, you nailed it.”

Nick Lawrence Design
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