Designer Identity

Idham
2 min readSep 24, 2022

There are 5 must-have aspects of a designer.

Tuesday morning, September 20th, I was watching a new video from Borrys Hasian, it’s just a casual video called Ngobrol Spontan Design Chit-Chat. But the takeaways aren’t light as the talk itself.

Photo by Cookie the Pom on Unsplash

There are many notes I took, but here are some of the important ones to help me remember, that’s why I wrote this mini article, and maybe I’ll do much more like this in the future.

Critical Thinking + Design Thinking + Creative Thinking

The first identity of designers is these structural thinking. As a designer, of course, we need to be critical about the situation/problem we’re currently facing, not only focusing on the problem solving as the Design Thinking suggests (I’m not talking about the Design Thinking process like we always know).

Collaboration

We can work alone, but it is always great to have a broad view of perspectives by working with other people, our decision may not be good as what others had, and a great phenomenon is when we can align the perspective to innovate on something new.

Communication

As a designer, we need to be able to communicate our design decision, personal values, and many more. With communication, not only can we work with people better but it will help us to understand things better.

Craft of our design (Design Taste)

Everyone can design, but only some of them can design with a wonderful taste, design taste is something that we build on an everyday basis, not just by practicing design but as simple as just looking at others' work. Train your eyes and brain to define your own “aesthetic”.

User-centric (supported with User Research)

At the end of the day, we help people with our design. Always focusing on your design decision from the user perspective from the early phase can give you an easy foundation to move to another one. It keeps us stay away from bias-dominated.

So, do you have all of those identities?

--

--

Idham

Write about craft, collaboration, strategy, and impact as a designer.