On being a junior

Junior designers and creatives have it tough right now.

That much was already clear to me, but even more so after being invited by SUEDE onto a panel with fellow designers and researchers doing great things at Google, Dovetail, Commbank, and KPMG.

The aim of the panel was to share our experiences and learnings with anxious, yet excited undergraduate and masters design students that are gearing up to enter the industry.

Some advice I shared:

• If you’ve redesigned your portfolio website 5 times this year, it may be time to think PDF.
• Everyone has been a junior.
• Not everyone has been a junior with the amount of noise and unrealistic expectations that exist now.
• No one is up to speed with everything.
• Everyone is figuring it out as they go.
• Being genuine, confident, communicative, and curious helps – a lot.
• Designers are there to have opinions. Make them strong; hold them loose.

Lastly, and what felt most important to me: your creative profession is not the sole measure of your creativity.

Whilst they obviously overlap, it’s important now more than ever to keep some parts of your creative self separated from an industry that announces ‘designers are dead’, every other week. Hearing that messaging constantly is objectively not good for inspiration, or morale.

But if you can successfully insulate the core part of your creative self, it can exist whether the industry validates it or not.