The Journey of Being Self-taught - Part 1
Do you ever start a journey without knowing where you’re going? without knowing the real cost and when it’ll end? I certainly don’t, and if someone ever told me that my career would feel like this, I would have laughed. Everyone that knows me understands that I’m a planner because I go on a vacation trip with a year ahead of plans, reservations to attend and carefully chosen flights. It gives me the freedom to enjoy the trip without worrying about the road because it’s clear of roadblocks, or at least those that depend on me, all the while I can have serendipity during the time spent on each place I visit.
It turns out that my professional career was nothing like that, especially the part where I assumed that my learnings from the university would be the main tools for my future job, whatever it was going to be. Looking back where I started and where I am right now, it can’t be farther from the truth.
When I was just starting the university, career pivoting was a foreign concept for me. We’re taught from a young age that what you study in the university will be determinant of who you become, but as the years went by, I found more and more people switching gears to something that made them happier than their original plan, and it was totally ok. I’ve met Graphic Designers that turned out to be amazing Software Developers, Operations Managers, and even Data, Analysts. So this is how I pivoted my career from Graphic Design to Product Design, and more recently, a leader and manager with a soft spot for Business Design.
This article is part of a series where I explore my journey of learning Product Design on my own, you can check chapters two and three to read the full story.
Call to Adventure
It all started when a friend of a friend asked me if I wanted to do freelancing during my second year at the university. I was extremely busy at the time, or so I thought, but the idea of freelancing for international clients that promised to pay better was appealing, at least to get my hands dirty and learn how to freelance on my own.
The term “fake it ’til you make it” perfectly described the way I felt when I found out that the client wanted me to do UI Design, which I didn’t even know existed, but it involved technology and everything related to it fascinated me since a child, so I decided to give it a go. My very first designs were done with Photoshop, cranking up dozens of website redesign proposals for potential clients of the company I was working with, it was fast-paced scrappy work but taught me to iterate quickly and also realize how much manual work was needed in the process.
I was just starting in the field, back when it was still being called Web Design and no one was talking about UI or UX Design (at least not in El Salvador), so maybe it was just the lack of sense of community that made me consider it a temporary gig. My bookmarks folder was almost empty because I thought that deleting it was just a matter of time.
But curiosity got the best of me, and just like Alice, I entered into a rabbit hole where I slowly but surely encountered great resources to guide the first steps of my newly discovered path.
1. Articles, Articles, and More Articles
It started with a couple of “How to optimize Photoshop for Web Design”, “How to design buttons” and “Mobile Design best practices”, but I never expected to end up with hundreds of articles with up to five levels of nesting due to the number of categories needed to organize the content. My rule of thumb was simple: If it’s related to Web or Mobile Design, I have to read it.
I read as much as I could, bookmarked everything that seemed useful enough to come back again in the future to re-read, and started to discover a whole new world in front of me. Nowadays, I’m much more intentional about what I’m reading because I’m focusing on certain topics, but I know that I wouldn't be where I'm right now if I hadn’t read as much as I did during the first couple of years.
2. Looking at Inspiration Every Day
I’m not sure if it’s a common feeling among young designers, but I knew when I was just starting that my work could be far much better than how it looked like. During that time I came across with From up North (back when it was a blog and not a Pinterest board), a curated source of inspiration with many categories to choose from, and decided to challenge myself to go through every single entry of the +100 that already existed. Guess what? I did it.
I reached the point where a teacher at the university would show some references in a class and I have already seen it before. I wanted to see good the design more often because I knew that by doing so I would develop a better perception of how to improve my designs, and it certainly did.
Nowadays, I look for inspirations mostly in real products and explorations of feasible concepts that can be adapted to new use cases. These are some of the places where I get inspired while searching for new ideas:
3. Tool Testing
The nature of working solo and remote gave me some freedom to decide which tool I liked or not, rather than what was best for others. In my pursuit of trying to create something that felt “more real”, I started looking for options built with UI Design in mind. No offense Photoshop.
That’s how I found that prototyping tools like Pixate — which was shut down in October of 2016 — and Webflow existed. There weren’t that many tools back then, especially not for Windows, but tools like these led me to believe that I could find more ways to achieve better results.
This constant experimentation made me realize that there were many other tools out there, so every time I came across a new tool I gave it a try, to test how it would incorporate into my ever-evolving workflow. Every year I would found new ones, replace existing ones and that approach helped me define a reliable personal toolkit that I could trust.
A really good way to stay in the loop of current, new and even non-related but still useful tools is to check databases and communities like these:
