What I Wish Someone Told Me When I Started Design
I'm mostly self-taught.
I picked up Photoshop making AIM buddyicons on my Sony Viao desktop.
What took me years longer than it should have was the stuff nobody puts in a tutorial, because it's not teachable in a tutorial. It's the quiet stuff you only figure out by doing the work, annoying some clients, and paying attention.
So here's what I'd actually tell a junior, if we were grabbing a coffee instead of arguing in a comment thread.
1.Nobody cares how hard it was to make something.
Early on, you fall in love with the effort.
You spent nine hours on a mesh gradient and you want everyone to know. But the client, the user, the person looking at it for half a second — they don't see the nine hours. They see whether it works or not.
These days with AI, effort is in freefall. That said, the best thing I ever did for my work was stop being precious about how much labor went into something.
If it's not serving the piece, the nine hours don't save it. Cut it. This is brutal at first and freeing forever.
Next.
2. Learn to be charismatic.
When starting, I would just email clients PDFs — ta-da, here it is. Then the client says "I don't know, can you make the logo bigger," and you die a little.
The fix: never present a design without its reasoning. "I made this smaller because your audience reads it on a phone." "I went bold here because you said the competition looks sleepy." When the client can see your logic, they respond to your logic instead of their gut — and the feedback gets ten times more useful.
3. Ask annoying questions.
The most expensive mistake I made repeatedly as a junior: getting a brief, nodding, and immediately designing.
I'd solve the problem I assumed instead of the one they actually had, and then eat three rounds of revisions finding out.
Now I ask the annoying questions first. What's this actually for? Who's it for? What have you already tried? What does "good" look like to you? It feels slow. It's the opposite of slow. The questions are the job — the design is just what you do after you understand the problem.
4. Get comfortable being bad.
The scariest trap isn't being a bad designer — it's getting decent at one thing and hiding there forever.
I know designers who found a look in year three and have been running it ever since. In 2026, that's fatal: AI can spit out the generic version of a one-trick style in seconds. The only durable edge is range — staying curious, staying a little uncomfortable, being willing to be a beginner at something new even after you're good at the old thing.
The designers who last aren't the ones who mastered one style. They're the ones who never stopped being students.
5. Feed yourself something other than work.
You can't make interesting work while consuming nothing interesting.
When my work goes flat, it's almost never a skill problem — it's that I've been grinding with my head down, not looking at anything. A menu, a game, a weird sign, a movie, a walk. Inspiration is raw material, not a reward you get after the work's done.
Go outside. Steal a little from everything. The canvas will still be there when you get back, and you'll actually have something to put on it.
