I was lucky enough to have worked for Apple, one of the biggest brands in the world, as a contractor. It was a bit of a shocking but proud moment of my career as a designer.
As you could probably guess, it wasn’t an easy job, not that I couldn’t handle it, but it’s the stress, the workload (my worst day was 18 hours) and the disciplines involved. I was proud that I was an organised person, a tidy freak even, the job made it worse (or better, depending on whom you ask). In the course of those 2 years, I learned a tremendous amount.
1. Organisation is key.
Non-designer, or even some designers, think the design is only creativity and not about being tidy.
Who cares if you have a messy work environment, right? We need to be free and creative, right?
But as a professional of the craft, organisation save you time looking for files, writing documents, handoffs or anything that is not the act of design itself, yet equally important. Thus, you guessed it, more time to create.
Imagine if you have 30 screens to create in Sketch and you didn’t get organised from the beginning, you’ll have a horrible time trying to make sure those buttons the same colours.
Or if you use Photoshop and you have 30 screens with a million documents to read, assets to use, good luck locating things after the 3rd screens.
So yeah, you’d better kick those habits soon.
Tips: Split your files into different folders. Mine are: Assets, WIP and _exports usually. I may have more with larger projects.
2. Tidy up along the way.
When you first started a project, everything is looking good. Still, you didn’t bother tidying up those odd pixels, or your artboards everywhere. Oh, boy, you’re going to a bad time. Why?
Unless you’ve never heard of handoffs are, or you work as a freelancer your whole life, you’re probably going to have to help your engineers do their jobs. No one likes people who dump Sketch files with no specs and/or off pixels. And you don’t want to do it at the end of your project either.
I know it may sound tedious, but it’s part of the job (not to me though, I looooooove tidy documents).
Tips: There are plenty of plugins for Sketch and Figma to speed up your process quickly tidy up your files with a click of a button.
3. Less is more.
This is not a new thing. But it’s not an easy thing either. When I was younger, I tend to do too much and I never knew when to stop. Working for this particular client forced me to do just that. The devil is in the details, one animation can be so tiny you barely see it, but it adds to the charm of it all.
Cliche, I know, but ask yourself every time you do something “Does it serve a purpose? Does it make my design better? Does this feature help my users?”
Tips: Atomic Design helps me a lot with this. I have bricks to build from instead of throw everything into the artboard and call it a day. You can also read more about Design System to expand your design horizon.
You can also purchase UI kits or Design systems to speed up your process.
You can also purchase UI kits or Design systems to speed up your process. From Cabana Design System.
4. Learn to code.
This has been a popular topic lately. No, I’m not saying you have to understand all the languages and frameworks (unless you want to), but understand the basics helps.
Firstly, you’ll know what are the limitations that you have to work with so you don’t have to iterate and iterate and iterate. No, it’s not going limit your creativity. In fact, having limitations help you focus and you can solve the real problems for the users.
Secondly, you can speak your engineers’ language. So instead of trying to explain what “leading” is and you can say line-height and everyone is happy.
Tips: Make friends with a couple of software engineers, or at least be friendly with them. They can probably learn something from you too ;).