Things it took me way too long to learn as a designer

I’ve been doing graphic design professionally now for over a decade. Most of that time was for corporate in-house marketing teams, but most recently, as a freelance designer and business owner. I still consider myself to be early in my career, and I learn new things every day, but there are a few lessons that I consider “things it took me way too long to learn as a designer.” In case it helps someone save years learning those same things, I’ll share a few here.

It’s okay to spend a couple dollars to save a couple hours

For the longest time, I wouldn’t consider putting a dime into pre-created graphic assets like brushes, stock photos, icons, etc. If I couldn’t find it for free, I would attempt to create it, which nearly always ended up with me spending way too much time and creating a subpar graphic. I just don’t have the skills or the means to illustrate, photograph, etc. every type of image or graphic I may need. There are so many great resources online to get these from talented people who have already done the work. And most of these resources will sell that work to you for dirt cheap - $2, $4, $7 - these are common prices on sites like creativemarket.com. Save yourself hours of time and just shell out the money.

Spell check your designs!

Designers are notorious for being bad spellers, and I’ve always taken pride in the fact that that wasn’t me. I bragged to a client about my background in Journalism, my excellent spelling and grammar, and my attention to detail. And then I submitted a design for approval with a spelling error right in the middle of the graphics main copy. It was so embarrassing. Just like that, all my credibility as a designer who “isn’t like the others” went out the window. And I could have caught that mistake with a simple review before sending. It’s easy to miss this stuff when you’re working under a tight deadline or dealing with massive loads of text. But if you want to stand out as professional, intelligent, and capable, spell checking your work and giving it a solid review before sending is never a bad idea.

You can turn down projects that you don’t feel like you can do well or efficiently.

I’m still working on learning this one, to be honest. For example, I’ve always felt that logos aren’t my strong suit, but as a designer, you get asked to do them a lot. For a long time, I took these projects, stressed out a lot about them, and even though I finally came up with a result that the client was happy with, I lost a lot of time. Logos are just not a profitable project for me. I’ll still do them for friends and family occasionally because I want to be able to help them out, but I’ve started to turn them down for clients, and more importantly, I’ve started to be okay with that.

Take baby steps if you’re not feeling motivated.

Sometimes I just don’t feel like working. A deadline is creeping up but I’m unmotivated, uninspired, and unlikely to get much of anything productive done. When that happens, it can help to just take the smallest baby step towards work on that project - in the case of graphic design, that usually just means creating a blank canvas in Photoshop with the right dimensions, and saving it in the project folder. Or maybe it’s just pulling everything that needs to go in the graphic on to the canvas, but saving the layout and design for later. Those may seem like insignificant steps, but it’s still progress. And almost every time, by the time I returned to the project, it was easier to dive in because the foundation was done.

Don’t hesitate to ask for clarification or inspirational designs.

You’ll save so much time if you can get in the head of your client early on. I’ve had times I would fret over “will they/won’t they” like my design or the direction it’s going in, when a simple check-in to get their input would have saved me so much time and stress. Same goes for asking them questions if you don’t understand something about the project expectation. The earlier you ask, the quicker you can clear up what you need to know and make progress on the project. Waiting around on that sort of thing will only make you stress as the deadline approaches. Almost all clients are happy to answer questions and eager to see works-in-progress, so they’ll be happy to be included in steps along the way.

These are just a few things I’ve learned in my time as a designer, and I hope they are helpful to others as well. If you’ve got similar lessons to share, I’d love to hear them in the comments below.