Examining an organizations leadership and discovering your beliefs can help shape your career path — Good designers invest a great deal of passion and energy into exploring solutions for better design outcomes. Sometimes we strive to produce designs that inspire people to improve the world. Or perhaps we are interested in making their lives easier. Nonetheless, our ultimate goal is to solve significant problems using…

Why designers have ditched the art persona and hijacked the UX industry — Designers have been trying to shake the misconception that design is not art for a long time. Only recently have companies started to recognize that design is an essential component to a successful business approach. And with large companies such as IBM and Fidelity adopting “design thinking” strategies, things are…

How designers can use philosophical thinking to create meaning. — Whether studying psychology for user experience or learning programming for web development, designers are always acquiring new skills and perspectives to improve our careers and personal growth. To interpret the meaning of life and discover who we are as individuals, the study of philosophy strives to best answer these questions…

The struggle of keeping up to date with evolving industry standards. — This September 2022, I will be 40 years old. And for the last few years, I have had this lurking fear in the back of my mind about whether or not designers have expiration dates. I have found it more difficult than ever to keep up with the industry —…

How employees from different backgrounds bring culture, perspective, and empathy to the table — It would be an understatement to say that the pandemic has changed the world and permanently shaped how we operate as a society. However, there is a silver lining amid recent events. It seems the design industry has quickly adapted to creating various remote job opportunities, ushering in a new…

How to integrate communication, reasoning, and empathy to solve business and user needs — Designers are responsible for pleasing various groups of people. The two most common are the users who interact with our designs for a product or service, and the other is the business stakeholders who represent and market the same products or services. Each group has a distinct set of values…

Aiming for authenticity over social validation — To some degree, being perceived as strange, odd, weird, or misunderstood is a prerequisite for creative professionals. And in many ways, we are expected to be eccentric. After all, to be highly creative, one has to think differently and break the rules to develop new ideas and formulate unique connections…

As technology and efficiency improve, our products have become less beautiful and unique — Design influences the world in many ways, from user experience and branding to architecture and engineering. A practical and elegant method of implementing design is by utilizing the well-known principle that form follows function. This notion implies that design decisions are quantified with purpose and grounded in efficiency and practicality…

Using storytelling to sell your designs to stakeholders — In many ways, designers are like salespeople, regularly pitching our design solutions to clients, stakeholders, and non-designers to make a sale, so to speak. Some designers are pretty good at this. Being extroverted helps a great deal. As an introvert myself, I have had to learn various communication skills and…