How I Learned to Enjoy Design Again
By the end of my third year at my school’s Industrial Design program, I was feeling absolutely burnt out. I felt like an imposter, amongst so many passionate people, I was trying to force the passion out just to get through my workload. Mentally, my mind had stopped enjoying design a long time ago. The periods in a project that I actually enjoyed kept getting shorter, and I wasn’t feeling very motivated to do much design.
Like many other tired designers out there, it’s not that I hate design. But as they say, sometimes too much of a good thing can be a bad thing.
Through trial-and-error and many identity crises, here are some of the things I did while in school that helped me find enjoyment in design again.
1. Find people who design for the same reason you do.
When I was feeling the most down, part of me felt terrible because I wasn’t enjoying what I understood design to be.
Hearing things like
“When I have a nicely crafted product in my hands, it makes the whole process worth it”
didn’t really work for me. Because often times, I find myself pondering why I am designing in the first place. I am motivated by intention and purpose, more so than the promise of having a nice product at the end of the process.
Find your group of people that you can connect with on a motivational level. I’ve come to accept that I’m a designer who’s much more motivated by the impact of design than the design itself.
There are lots of things that drive different designers. I’ve met designers who are in love with the craft — they love making a beautiful and elegant product. I’ve also met designers who have aspirations of improving the lives of those around them, designers who want to work on complex products that stretch their brain and designers who aim to simplify.
I found people within the social impact organizations I joined at my school and through programs, companies, and volunteering opportunities that attracted like minded designers. The most transformative thing I did in college was join Bits of Good. Within the design team, I met peers who loved design for the same reasons I did and I also found mentors who cultivated and challenged my idea of what human-centered design could provide for people.
A year later I spent a semester working at the NIH through a fellowship I heard about through my Bits of Good network. Now admittedly, the people with me during my time as a Civic Digital Fellow were a mix of software engineers, data scientists, and designers but we all had a common desire to create ethically and with social responsibility.
It was amazing having people to talk to not just about our work but what drives our work. I left these conversations feeling a sense of renewal and purpose. These connections help me remember the bigger picture behind why I design when I start getting caught up in the minutiae of how to design.
2. Connect with people who are just beginning their design journey
The glamour that surrounded design had all but worn away by the end of my second year. By then I had long forgotten what it felt like when I had first entered the program, enamored with my expectations of what I would be doing as a designer.
When I started teaching a design bootcamp this semester, I was passionate about the idea of helping others start their design journeys. I hadn’t expected to feel so motivated to learn by my bootcampers in return.
Much like how if you stare at an essay you have been working on for too long and miss obvious, critical mistakes, I’d been designing on autopilot for too long and lost my beginner’s perspective.
The thing is the bootcampers were uninhibited by design industry doctrine. Their ideas had an attractive lack of professional polish — not mandated by years of industry knowledge or common practice and expectations. Ironically, my design experience had whittled down my ideas until I was afraid of taking any risks that stood out from what I understood to be the “design industry status quo”.
Now I’m not saying that design know-how is useless, far from that. But being able to see the bootcampers approach design with such a fresh mind allowed me to recall when I was the same way. I remembered a time when design was just fun for me, not work. I now try to channel some of this beginner’s energy into all the work I do. Rather than killing unrefined design ideas, I try to cultivate them now.
3. Take time to have fun (No designing allowed!)
I know people have told you it’s important to keep a work-life balance. I think this often gets lost in translation for designers after all, if you love design is it ever really work?
To answer that: Yes, yes it is work.
No matter what you might hear, if you are a design student or working as a designer, your designs are inherently tied to work.
Working on designs 24/7 didn’t make me love the field more. If anything, it made me resentful. The more I worked the more I felt deprived, and the less passionate I got.
After a particularly bad semester of being overworked, I made a conscious choice that I was going to give myself more room to breathe. I was going to take time to eat good food, watch good movies, and enjoy time with friends. And I decided I would not use that time to work on my designs under the pretense that “since I love design this isn’t really work.”
There is a pervasive attitude in the design community that we shouldn’t view our work as well…work. But I think this prevents designers from developing healthy work habits and discourages people when they feel their enthusiasm slipping. Every designer is first and foremost a human being. As a human being your mind and body demand care and nourishment.
Once I began using more of my time to enjoy life, I began looking forward to my work more. The cool thing about design is that your inspiration is often tied to your real world experiences. By spending all my time at a computer playing around on Figma I was depriving myself of the opportunity to be inspired by the world around me. By enriching my life with positive experiences, I was able to recenter myself and come back to work with a natural enthusiasm that didn’t feel forced. Even better, I felt that the quality of my ideas was improving now that I was imbuing my life with new adventures that broadened my perspective.
Concluding Thoughts
Just because you don’t love design all the time doesn’t mean design isn’t for you.
You should be taking breaks! You don’t always have to love every single thing you do for your design projects. You aren’t always going to be passionate about every project you work on. All of these are completely natural.
I’ve found that passion that is cultivated not forced is a lot more reliable in the long run.