I spoke to dozens of designers this year at Config about their deepest difficulties, hopes, dreams, and aspirations. Guess what I learned? Our people are suffering. But not from design problems. We're suffering from problems beyond the craft. Not a single person told me their greatest difficulty was

One day, a rich patron of Leonardo Da Vinci came by to inspect a statue he had commissioned. The wealthy aristocrat was amazed by the radiant quality of the piece: A beautiful marble statue of the human form in motion. But there was something off... the nose was too long.

We are all consumers of design. We all have feelings about what we like or don't like. Those feelings are valid and informed by a lifetime of product experiences. Unfortunately, as a designer, hearing "your design is bad" doesn't give you enough information to

You're a noble designer roaming the land in search of ugliness to quell. You come across a hapless product manager, desperate to slay some pernicious product monster. Virtue dictates you must help them. You pull out your shiny laptop and descend into the cave of terrors to unleash

You're coasting along feeling good about your design skills. You're producing good work on demand, with ease. You decide to see what's going on today on design twitter and... there's an army of incredibly talented designers out there producing masterpieces without batting

You’ve meticulously designed a beautiful interface to solve a user problem. You proudly present it to product and engineering… and it gets brutally demolished. They think you haven’t designed a coherent workflow. They're calling out all sorts of seemingly trivial details that are incorrect or haven&

Influence is a critical skill for us as designers whether we're trying to get designs implemented correctly, eliciting a clear vision from the team, avoiding late stage blowups, or evangelizing design best practices. But how do you actually influence others? I think we all know that in practice

Are you a good designer? How can you tell? We all want to progress, master our craft, and win the respect of our peers. We also want the autonomy, financial rewards, and plethora of fascinating work that comes from mastery. But design is a subtle profession. We can’t just

Creative block can be exhausting, incredibly painful, and for professional creatives like us, financially devastating. We all go through it on some level. Some worse than others: “I haven’t been able to produce anything in the last two years and it’s getting worse. I stare at my screen