skelephant

For most people, being good at one aspect of design is part of their profession and daily life. Most designers (web, graphic or motion graphic) are usually a part of a team that when working together creates amazing creative solutions that distinguish them from the others around them. Teamwork is essential if you’re going to work with others and learning how to work as a team and distinguishing your role in said team isn’t always as easy as it seems. It took me a while to learn what role I played and it wasn’t easy to accept my limitations at first, but after accepting them, it only made me much better at what I do today.

When I first enrolled in design school to study multimedia design I did so with the goals of becoming a master of all that is web, graphic and interactive design. Little did I know at the time all of the challenges and sacrifices that would arise from making such an assumption. At first I wanted to do everything, from web development and front-end design to graphic design, video production and motion graphics. I was ambitious as fuck, I’m not going to lie about it. I wanted to make the creative world my bitch with as much of the tools and languages out there.

Then reality set in.

I struggled with the back-end programming, didn’t have the money or time to invest in motion graphics and started losing interest in video production. I started to cling to graphic design and soon became infatuated with it and how it can be used on the web. Front-end web design was my calling, but I could barely hear it at the time. Either way, I had decisions to make.

Convincing myself to focus and refine my skills into one aspect of design was one of the harder decisions I’ve had to make. I was so convinced of the idea that I was going to be a jack of all trades designer that giving up just wasn’t an option. I had the passion, but lacked either the patience or the skills to do some of the things I imagined myself doing. I started feeling this lack of patience when learning server-side languages and creating back-ends for school projects. I realized that I was only doing the projects in order to pass my class. Even though I understood the concepts and how to apply them in practice, it felt like busy work. I soon started to grow bored and also started to doubt my own skills. Accepting the fact that there are just some things that I’m not going to be good at was hard at first and I left school in a daze not really sure about what it was I wanted to do with myself or where my strengths were.

That would change as I grew as both a designer and a person I started to realize that most people are in the same position that I am in at one point in their life and that all things would clear up as I kept on learning and practicing.

After college and at my first couple of gigs as a designer I noticed that most if not all design firms consist of a group of individuals that all specialize on one thing. Yes, there are those individuals that can amaze in all forms of media, but they are rare. This reassured me that what I was going through inside was just part of the life of a student/designer. I can firmly recall a conversation I had with a friend and ex-coworker after my brief stint at a marketing company in Santa Monica. The conversation was centered about what it was I wanted to accomplish. At the time I still torn between being a developer and designer and we talked about my strengths and my weaknesses and about what it was that I really wanted to do for a living. Even though I loved the idea of being a Web Developer it wasn’t what I was. My strengths were in the front-end aspect of the web. I could tinker around with anything else, but my money making talents were my design skills. It was a reality that at first was hard to swallow, but necessary for my growth.

Looking back, I can now see the lesson that I learned was that even though you have aspirations, there is always going to be some things that you are better at then others. Finding what you do best and pushing it as far it will take you is ideally what we are striving for. My advice for those that are starting out is simple: Don’t be afraid to do everything until you know what you do best. Once you know what that one thing or things are, be the fucking man at them. Leave other things on the back burner for experimentation or later times and focus on your strengths.