Design Details
347: Overcoming Skill Gaps
Episode Summary
This week, we talk about how to overcome skill gaps. What should you do if you are bad at visual design? What if you can't make icons? Should you play into strengths or develop upon your weaknesses? We explore these topics, and more!
Episode Notes
This week, we talk about how to overcome skill gaps. What should you do if you are bad at visual design? What if you can't make icons? Should you play into strengths or develop upon your weaknesses? We explore these topics, and more!
Golden Ratio Patrons:
Are you still using spreadsheets to plan your projects? Float is a resource management software built for creative teams. Add your team’s roles, departments and work hours, schedule time-off, public holidays and remote work days, so you always have the truest view of your team's availability. Learn more at float.com/designdetails.
Latest VIP Patrons:
Huge shoutouts to our latest Very Important Pixels!
- Sabine
- Yi He
- Mo Cups
- Nicole Tallon
- Shelley Huang
- Omid
- Liz Chen
The Sidebar:
The Sidebar is an exclusive weekly segment for our Patreon supporters. You can subscribe starting at $1 per month for access to full episodes going forward! Sign up at https://patreon.com/designdetails.
In this week's Sidebar we discuss digital gardening, personal knowledge management, and learning in public.
Follow-up:
- Divya Tak added another point of wastage in low quality software: wastage through over-processing.
- Yuyang Luo shared their first app design that shows how safe your local area is.
- Jordan Koschei shared his college startup / side project, Shadoodle. See the pixels.
- We turned last week's episode into a blog post: Quality Software.
- Marshall has been tinkering with our audio balance – so far, nobody has noticed...until now?
Tweets:
- Vincent van der Meulen built a very neat recommendation engine on top of the Design Details website – this is so cool!
Listener Question:
- Fabio Giolito wanted us to talk about something we said on a recent episode, "I'm not a great graphic designer."
- Design is a visual medium but there's a misconception that all designers should be good at making pretty things (marketing pages, illustrations, icons, logos…)
- I love systems and flows, solving problems and designing interfaces. When I try to make a marketing page or logo I feel frustrated and impostor syndrome kicks in.
- I guess I'm not comfortable with the subjectiveness of visual stuff. You know when something is bad, but the gray area of taste and trends is way too big. While in UX there are more rules and logic involved.
Cool Things:
Design Details on the Web:
BYEEE!