Are you stuck as a designer? Don’t have any idea how to progress through your design career? You have to exercise a few skills in order to shift your career to autopilot.

You may feel like you’re stuck as a designer. Also, you may not aware of how to move forward. But it’s a well-known problem that most of the designers are facing today. Becasue It’s doesn’t matter if you’re a senior or junior designer. So it’s important to practice these qualities to be a great designer.

It’s all about distinguishing you from the rest. Because all the technical knowledge about design software, graphic design principles, and methodologies will stay the same. Where is the difference? So it’s crucial to know how to increase my value and demand over another.

Start to practice active listening.

You’re a problem solver, not just an artist. Being a good listener will help you understand the client’s specific problems. You can have a depth perception of their business objectives. It will create an opportunity to provide a tailor-made solution for your clients.

As humans, we are extremely defensive and regularly listen only to respond but not to understand. So It’s vital to a designer to listen well, absorbs everything in and provide a better answer. I imagine that is what is important

We must listen and understand clients’ specific business problems and come up with a solution to it. So practicing how to listen well will change the way you’re looking at your design approaches. So It will certainly create more doors for you to improve and be more productive in providing design solutions. Because you’re fully aware of the problem before you start to design.

Increase your communication skills.

Communication is the key to any designers. If you don’t have a great communication that means you’re just an artist. In commercial graphic design, that is what designers are usually doing.

On the other hand, great communication skills will help you tell stories better. So you can express your ideas smoothly without any hassles. Because of that, it makes sense to increase your communication skills both verbally and written to enhance your design career.

Ask Questions

Your fundamental objective as a designer is to solve business distinct problems with design solutions. So solving complicated problems can be quite exhausting. Therefore, It’s necessary to identify the pain points of your client. So to archive that you must be ready to ask good questions that make natural conversations. Furthermore, free to ask about their pain points, the consumers, net profit, and critical circumstances that matter to their business. Becasue it will definitely enhance your value.

Your value will be defined by the questions you asked. Therefore, let’s talk about what are the high-value questions vs low-value questions.

Examples of High-value questions

1. What is your target audience?
2. What is your business pain point?
3. Why now you want to do the change?
4. How do you come to the conclusion that you need this?
5. What makes you think you need to do this today?
6. What is your end goal?

Okay, so let’s talk about what are the questions that can reduce your value.

Examples of Low-value questions.

1. What typeface do you want to you?
2. Do you like the red color?
3. Do you like fonts to be bigger or smaller?

You can definitely see the contrast between. Certainly, you might need those questions answered, but the type of questions you are asking will reveal your personality, knowledge, and expertise.

Attitude

The right attitude plays a bigger role in your design career. Because if you have a right kind of attitude it will drive a positive impact on your design. Furthermore, It will settle the way of thinking or feeling about something. So your right attitude can bring excellent result and create more opportunities for you.

Passion

It doesn’t matter how talented you are if you are not passionate about it. Becasue in 12 years of my career, I never felt I was working because passionate about what I do. So it’s important as a designer to be passionate about what they do to have a successful career.

Commitment

You must keep practicing your design skills mastering the techniques and latest design tools. Because the industry is evolving day by day and if you don’t fully committed to your design career, there will be a great chance for you to have a difficult time.

You must commit to your design and always and treat like it’s your own projects. Meanwhile, you must respect the client’s requirements and in line with what they need. Ability to commit to coming up with such good solutions will streamline the process of your commitments.

I believe in what makes you make you. So treat every project as a key to your success. Becasue end of the day, those works are the works that help you identify you as a designer.

Be Open Minded. 

You may have the upper hand determining what design methodology works for those specific problems. But it’s necessary to understand clients original mission and vision about the business. Always be open to understanding their mission and vision to align your design style and methodology. It’s crucial to be open-minded to change.

I strongly believe that the world needs a thinking designer vs a robot designer. Because there will be artificial intelligence taking over those robot type of designers who do designs without purpose. It’s important to embrace those qualities to your design career to become a successful designer. Furthermore to start your own business.

I’m sure you can think of more qualities that can help designers to enhance their design careers. Please let me know them in the comments below.