I wrote this at a dark moment in my career and it is what it is, not false but dark. Years later I moved up to a position where I had the chance of protecting a designer from the same problem I suffered but... that's another article in the works.

I come from the last generation that didn’t pay £20.000 for a BA. I hacked my way into this profession with unpaid work, books and jumping into any job that could teach me what I didn’t know. I learnt many things for which I am grateful but sometimes I think that maybe some have proven to be a professional negative. For example, I know how to code but that has removed me form the position of taking certain responsibilities.

Designing professionally means that you are able (and willing) to do something your client can’t and because your client can’t, they trust you and trust is blind. Does the VP, sales guy, executive or whoever know how or why what you do is good? Do they know the proper way of designing things? Do they really care about designs or just about not screwing up and losing their job?

Figuring out who to trust is the job of the people who don’t know how to do anything but decide everything (the people at the top) and once they decide to trust this or that agency, the stakes are too high and there you will find yourself, coding and grumbling.

FIRST PROBLEM

Knowing how to code (or any other difficult specialty) is vital and if you know how how to do it, you will be asked to do it (a lot) and if you are there doing that, you will not be doing anything else. You will be DOING because someone must and everyone knows you can.

Learning to code will make you a much better designer, sure. It will open up your mind to systemic and abstract thinking but remember this, you won’t become a boss by being a great worker. Let me repeat that again, you won’t become a boss by being a great worker.

Knowing how to do useful things won’t land you that promotion, it will only make you more indispensable at the end of the production chain. Your salary will be very safe because you are indispensable but it won’t be great. Think about it this way, you have one person who knows art direction and another person who knows how to art direct and how to code. Then you have one job to code and one job to art direct, who do you think is going to do each job?

There are too many orchestra conductors, not enough violinists and only violinists are indispensable. If you want to become an orchestra conductor, think about the skills you are advertising.

SECOND PROBLEM

Creativity is understood by most (including the business guy hiring you) in a mythical way that for sure it is wrong but it is also very prevalent. People tend to think creativity is a touch of magic mixed with a god-given potentiality received randomly at birth and these two are always mutually exclusive to technical knowledge. That is, people think that the more formal technical you have, the worse designer you must be.

To become a better designer in the eyes of your future employers, you must avoid advertising technical knowledge. Also, appearing a bit out there also helps, Frank Gehry arrived late to meetings on purpose to build his aura and it worked for him. I wouldn’t recommend arriving late to meetings but I can recommend not talking so much about the technical side of design. I know real design depends on plumbing but people want to believe in magic.

Nothing kills the magic like talking about plumbing. Don’t spoil the magic.

THIRD PROBLEM

The more you learn, the less you’ll be sure of anything. You begin to learn because you think you don’t know enough, then you keep learning because you know you don’t know enough and then when you finally know something, you realise you don’t know much (this is not even my idea). This is and sounds deep but I can tell you it does not sound very reassuring.

The more you know about something the more you are going to end up answering most questions with “it depends” and you will be right but remember that people buy certainty, not wisdom. Wisdom pushes you further and further away from the simple answers people actually buy and you have to remember that “maybe”, “it depends” and “nobody knows” are hard sells.

Pretending you suffer a bit from Dunning–Kruger and charging ahead with a bit of dumb confidence can sometimes help.

FOURTH PROBLEM

Every team is a mess of personalities, dreams, aspirations and emotions. People do what they can to build great things, make money and not be miserable. That is life and it is hard and many times boring so when someone needs to take care of the plumbing, there will not be many takers precisely because it will be hard and boring.

If you become the guy who knows how to do the plumbing, you will become the plumber and when the opportunity arises to do something more fun, someone will take the spot because plumbing goes first in the scale of necessity.

When the team discovers you know how to do something vital, boring and essential, you are going to stay there and nobody will pull you out of there. Nonetheless, I’ve been lucky enough to be in the position to pull a designer out of there and force the rest of the team to pick up the slack and to skill up (even though they grumbled) but remember, that is very unlikely to happen.

If you become essential, most likely nobody will pull you out of there to earn more doing something less essential.

CODA FROM AN OLD MAN

At the end of the day someone needs to steer the ship and someone needs to guide and support the passengers. Careful what you know, most salaries don’t depend on your capabilities but you position in a hierarchy. If you know how to do something essential and you want to do more than that, keep it secret for a while and find a boss that is not an idiot. They are rare but they do exist.