8 tips for a self-taught designer

Getting started without formal education is tough. There’s many unknown unknowns, so even forming questions can be challenging at first. Here’s a few realizations that guided me in my squiggly path to becoming a self-taught Visual Designer, then a Product Designer and eventually landing at Google.

🏋️♀️ Get ready to crunch

Skipping school is not a hack, it’s actually the harder path with often nobody to guide you. Before signing up to a life as a self-taught designer, make sure you don’t underestimate the power of formal education and understand the trade-offs. School provides a learning structure, brand association, and networking, without which you’d be at a disadvantage.

🦸♀️ Identify your superheroes

Observe carefully and find designers you admire. Understand their work and why you like it. Analyze the choices they’ve made and spot their strengths. Try to adopt these qualities, improve upon them, and make them yours - let them become a part of who you are.

 ✍️ Learn by doing

One way to learn from your superheroes is to get into their superhero outfits. They made a poster you like? Try making one just like it. A cool logo? Recreate it. A nice landing page? Reverse engineer it. This way you can pick up on a lot of heuristics that are hard to put into words, but easy to figure out by doing. However, be careful to only use this for learning purposes and never publish this work as yours, as plagiarism is kind of a big mood-killer.

🛠 Focus on skills, not tools

As a newb designer I was so proud of my tool mastery that I blasted it in a giant font on my resume. It only took me years to realize that tools are just a means, not a goal — I could be designing pixel-by-pixel in Paint or just be a swarm of sentient machine learning algorithms that churn out good design, but as long as I can get top-notch work done in time, no hiring manager would bat an eyelash. So, highlight your skills or achievements instead of tools!

👏 Be proud of being self-taught

It took me a while to stop feeling embarrassed of being self-taught. I’d bury it in a tiny corner of my resume, or brush over it in interviews. I thought lack of formal education meant I was professionally doomed. Wrong. We live in a world where learning materials are just a few keystrokes away and companies are increasingly focused on the quality of the work above all. Being self-taught means you are a hustler, and this speaks volumes about your ambition and character. Proudly weave this into your story to stand out and show your dedication.

💎 Know your value

A client demands lower prices because you don’t have a degree? Run. A company won’t hire you only because you lack said piece of paper? Red flag. These experiences can feel deflating, but remember to immediately inflate back knowing you dodged a colossal bullet representing an unwelcoming culture. Don't settle for a work environment that won't appreciate you for what you can do because of how you learned to do it.

🐣 Overcome the chicken and the egg problem

You need a portfolio to land a job, but you need a job to create a portfolio. If you’re not a fan of silly loops of chickens and eggs, you can take matters into your own hands. Identify a problem you find interesting, and develop it into a design project. It could be a redesign of a popular app or a product you wish existed. Alternatively, you can try finding smaller freelance projects, or helping out a friend with a website, or even taking part in a design competition. Sooner or later, you’ll end up with something you’re proud of that’s just great for your portfolio.

💼 Create your personal board of directors

Just like every company needs a board of directors, every person needs one too. Your board of directors is a handful of people you know well, who can tell you when you’re wrong, genuinely critique your work and care about you as a person, and they don’t all have to be designers. One of the “directors” on my personal board is a PM, and throughout the years we’ve exchanged lots of advice, talked openly about our salaries, shared negotiation tips, discussed big career moves and strategized together.

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Hope any of this is useful. And hey - as wild as things might be for you right now, it all gets massively better with time. You’ll eventually be where you want to be. You got this! 🦾