Design Team of One

Surviving as a Solo Designer

Any designer who spends time reading articles on Medium will have read all about design teams in San Francisco with design leaders, creative directors, and multiple designers. Design is an important, valuable, and significant part of their businesses. It’s exciting to see what these teams are capable of and to learn about how they work — but it also makes me incredibly jealous. As the only designer on my team, most of the topics and process discussed in those articles simply aren’t a reality for me. I need to get creative about how I collect design feedback and grow.

Over the last two years in my latest team, I’ve managed to develop a greater understanding of and involvement in design with my non-designer colleagues. They have become a crucial part of my workflow and I rely on their opinions and feedback. Despite this, it can still be tough to go without another designer’s perspective, so below are a few techniques that have been my survival kit as a lone designer.

Create a Process

Creating your own design process within your team’s work is a great way to help educate coworkers and stakeholders about design. People frequently underestimate the time involved in design, but being transparent and consistent in your process is a great step towards educating those around you. When I first started as a solo designer this was one of the biggest challenges. I had to educate my team on what my process was. It took time to get into my own rhythm, and then to help my team see that these steps were essential to producing good design. A good technique for being transparent in the process was by including them in it — asking for feedback, sharing exciting inspiration, or debriefing after a stakeholder meeting.

This doesn’t mean you need a rigid, step-by-step schedule. You can have variation and change, and you should always strive to improve upon it, but it is important to have a few key steps that always take place. This provides a consistency that others can work around and increases the value of time spent designing.

Stay on Top of Design Trends

There are so many places to find inspiration, so this is probably the easiest way to continue growth on your own. As a lone designer (particularly an in-house one) it’s easy to get stuck in the rut of “what we always do,” but there are plenty of places to look for new ideas and ways to break out of the box. Below are a few of my favourites.

Muzli

Top of the list goes to Muzli, without question. I’ve been using the Chrome plugin for a few years now and checking what’s new there has been worked into my morning routine. Muzli gives me a quick glance of what’s new in Dribbble and Behance, as well as helping me find new tools that become integrated into my team’s process (Zenhub, Airtable, Zapier ❤️).

Dribbble

Dribbble is a great source of inspiration for digital products and illustrations, and it is really helpful when looking for very specific components of a design. The caveat is that it is filled with “design of the day” type posts which, while beautiful, are not designed with the same specifications and restrictions of real projects. They can still provide inspiration but should be considered with a grain of salt.

Behance

Behance is where I go for branding and print inspiration. While it holds much more than that, Behance is best for viewing polished, big-picture projects. As opposed to Dribbble, which has more process work and snapshots of smaller pieces, Behance frequently has more detail and multiple images or videos for a full project.

Get feedback from non-designers

Feedback and critiques are an essential part of the design process. It’s easy to get too close to a design so you can barely see what’s right in front of you. This is not revolutionary, I know, but what do you do if you’re the only designer?

Working with a team of non-designers you never know if they will be able to give you the type of feedback you need — honest, clear, and practical. What I’ve learned, as I asked them for feedback anyway, is that most people are bad at giving feedback, but will learn quickly and evolve into people who’s involvement becomes crucial to your design process. As my team learned about the way I worked, I was learning about how their expertise and ways of thinking could be invaluable to me. I started going to my project manager for her detailed eye to see what content I had missed, and the data scientist to push me to think about our users differently. I go to different team members for different parts of the process and different types of feedback I needed.

Even though I didn’t have a team of designers behind me, the challenge of doing it all solo gave me the opportunity to see how everybody’s unique focus and perspectives can inform design.

Conclusion

Working in an environment without any designers or set design processes challenged me to figure out my own process and design thinking. It forced me to seek new ways of getting out of my head and seek feedback. Finding a design team within my non-designer team pushed me into being a better designer because I needed to be able to communicate clearly what I was trying to do and say in my work — and to do that I needed to know it inside and out myself. Now, as I read articles on Medium about dream design teams I know that even more value can be found outside of them.

Be encouraged, lone designers: your design team might be bigger than you think.