Advice for making the most of an indirect career path to design

How to weave the threads of past experiences into your work

Illustration by Ellen Porteus

In the following years, I took on every bit of work that was remotely design related, went back to school for a graduate degree in design, became a co-owner of a design studio, and eventually ended up at Adobe.

While career switches to design can lead to missteps and self-doubt, they can also provide the space to uncover what will bring you joy and fulfillment at work, the insight to identify the quirks that will forever make your approach to design unique, and the time to experience things that will be folded into your design practice throughout your career. Even now, as an experienced designer, I can see how the threads of that varied experience, that formed while cultivating a career in design, are woven into my work. Although I couldn’t see it clearly at the time, that indirect path was a gift.

Whenever I talk to people who are coming to design from a less direct path, I assure them that for every one of us, it’s often these seemingly unrelated threads of experience that form our careers.

Learn and explore as much as possible

A few months after getting the internship I got hired full time... in customer service. But I was ecstatic, it was my first real job out of college, I was working for what I thought was the coolest company around, it was a zeitgeist moment in publishing where writers had celebrity status and lines formed out the door for literary readings, and the books were beautifully designed.

Over the next seven years, I did many jobs—from PR to managing the online store—but I never became a designer. Well, not officially. It was during those years that I realized the best way to get more involved with design and art was to actively seek it out. Because different days brought different challenges, what I was “seeking” depended on the day, but there is a process that works when trying to set yourself up for a career shift:

• If you’re not skilled in the tools of the trade, learn them. Take classes to get proficient in design software and volunteer for every design job (from magazine renewal cards to web banner ads) that other people are too busy (or too uninterested) to work on. You’ll not only become well-versed in the language of design, you’ll also gain practical experience.
• If you want to know the quality of your work or skills, ask. When you’re new to something, and don’t know what you’re doing, it can be difficult to know when something’s “right.” I knew that to get better I had to get others to help me, and I had to listen to the feedback. Although hard at first, it got easier, and I got better.
• “Practice” your new skills as much, and as often, as possible. You’ll start out making some basic things, but as you become more comfortable with the work, the complexity and challenges will increase (I eventually designed catalogs, laid out the online shop, and worked with screen printers on T-shirt designs). By the time you’re ready to move on, you’ll have a growing base of design knowledge and typography—all of it learned on the job.
• Become as well-rounded as possible. Take on any job that will get you closer to becoming a designer, even if it’s not glamorous. Seize every opportunity to practice design because every odds-and-ends project will broaden your knowledge and your understanding of the different ways to think and create.
• Keep your eyes open for the next step. Wherever you are, when you're ready to move on, spend some time looking back at what you've learned and forward to what you want to learn next. One of the things I wanted to pursue was a deeper understanding of design theory and design history. Although “next steps” are different for everyone (mine was to attend grad school in the Design MFA program at California College of the Arts), you can't go wrong if you align your passions with your pursuits.

Fast forward to when I first joined the Adobe Express team and we were designing a set of printed themed workbooks: each one was 30+ pages, and included Express templates, plans for scheduling content, and lots of tips and tricks. Because of my publishing experience, I was uniquely positioned to lead the project. It was a merging of both my book layout skills and my digital design skills, with a smattering of brand design tossed in—the threads of my past experiences were already being woven into my work.

Jump at every opportunity

The design industry thrives on varied experience. The ephemera of publishing—paper, printing techniques, bookstores, and a robust literary scene—expanded my world. And although an MFA program eventually provided theoretical design knowledge, it was an interest in typography and book design that became the foundation of my career. With those pieces as my building blocks, I’ve dabbled in many different things—from starting my own studio to landing at Adobe—and on that journey there are three things I regularly remind myself of.

Try new things (even if they scare you). Trying new things is scary. Try them anyway. After grad school a peer-turned-friend and I spent the summer dreaming of working for ourselves. We eventually took a leap and opened our own design studio. It wasn’t easy, but during the five years I ran the studio alongside her, I learned more than at any time since. A studio practice isn't for everyone but don't be afraid to try things that could grow your design skills, affect your ability to make good business decisions, teach you to better navigate workplace relationships, or give you experience selling your ideas. Experience is valuable. Even when it's challenging. While running a design studio, I'd not only become a better designer and a better speaker (we both presented at AIGA events), I learned the worth of my work, how to bill appropriately for it (admittedly, that lesson took a long time), and how to pitch to big clients (and how to walk away if they weren’t a good fit).

Rethink how to apply existing skills. Today, I’m a growth designer for Express and every day I answer questions about our product to create the best possible user experience: How will people navigate our product? Is our product easy to use and to understand? Will people know what to do next? It’s a similar mindset that I’d use for laying out a book: How are the page numbers treated? What are the signifiers that a new chapter will start? Will the design of this book interfere with readers’ intentions? A book is a user experience just like a digital product—and the ways we “lay out” a book or “navigate” a platform are translatable. This is one of the first things I tell designers coming into UX with more traditional graphic or print experience: You already have many of the UX skills you need, you just need to rethink how to apply them.

Imposter syndrome is real for many of us. Do your best to ignore it so it doesn’t get in your way. I had my fair share of uncertainty moving from publishing to a fully digital design landscape but when I get that feeling, I think to myself that my perspective is unique, and I can see things that maybe other people can’t. And instead of getting anxious about seeing things differently, I remind myself that for designers, our strength is to be able to see things from our vantage point with all our threads trailing behind us.

Jumping into “newness” may be difficult, but every opportunity leads to the next, and eventually all of them become experiences you can bring to your work—and that is everything!

Make the most of every human experience you have

Making career changes or switching design disciplines can be unnerving. It helps to think of ourselves as lifelong learners absorbing knowledge, insights, and creativity from all areas of life. Education, hobbies, past jobs, travel, and almost anything else that can be named, can be brought into a design career to broaden our view. There’s no such thing as the perfect background for designers because we can all work on projects through the lens of our singular experiences. Everything you do enriches your creative life and adds more threads to pull from as your design career evolves. Use those personal experiences in your design practice to expand your approach and enrich your solutions.

Turn your hobbies into professional skills. My eleven-year-old daughter loves theater. Whether or not she ends up a professional actor, the performance experiences she’s having now will be a thread she can rely on later—because it’s true, no matter which career path we choose, we all end up in a performance of some sort. Some people’s paths to performance are not so linear or so simple. Many of us must learn tips and tricks to summon up a persona that makes the performative parts of our jobs more comfortable. (For me, as the co-owner of a design studio, it was the frequent presentations I had to make to clients, colleagues, and peers.) But the theater thread that will trail my daughter, no matter what career she eventually gravitates to, will go a long way toward making that easier.

Lean in to what you learned in school. What bits and pieces from a seemingly unrelated degree, or perhaps even an elective, can you pull from to enrich your work? What degree did you graduate with just before deciding to pursue an alternate career? One wouldn’t think that an undergrad degree in English lit with an emphasis in creative writing would have any type of an impact on a design career, but over the years I’ve turned to those writing skills often: for project proposals when I co-owned a design studio, for a stint writing design blog posts for Print magazine, and finally, for every presentation and email I’ve ever written to get a point across or influence a stakeholder.

Think back to teachings from your travels. If you spent a gap year backpacking through Europe or a summer traveling between the borders of North America, the tiny design details of those travel experiences will forever touch you. Use them in your design career. The details of Parisienne architecture, the splendid packaging of a box of macarons, and the thoughtfully embossed logos on matchboxes—discovered during a month-long immersive language course in France—make their way into my work often.

Use your passions in your projects. Until I chose my thesis project in grad school, and combined my love of visual history into a year-long design project, I didn't know how a personal passion (for San Francisco’s Sutro Baths and the archive of posters, tickets, bathing suits, and other design artifacts that remained after the physical site ceased to exist) would make its way into my work. Use your passions in your work. Maybe you've always been intrigued by the surrounding ephemera of certain places (an art deco typeface, a mustard yellow from the 1970s, or a mid-century graphic layout) but haven't known what to do with that interest. Connect to them to your designs.

When I think back about becoming a designer (still a work in progress) I think about how the threads of my experience are uniquely woven. It feels more valuable than ever to have taken a less obvious route to design. It was a little messy, and I was sometimes a little bit unsure, but I wouldn’t be the designer I am today if my course had been more direct. Everything we do enriches our creative life and adds more threads to pull from as our careers evolve. When we pull on the threads from our personal paths (the explorations, opportunities, and experiences) they add dimension to our perspectives, enrich our solutions, and create a singular approach to design.