Are you still confused? Designers in the first 3 years of the bottleneck period to break through

Basically, every designer will encounter their own career “bottleneck” period, well handled, can find a new career development outlet, achieve greater success, but there are many people give up in this period to break through the efforts, resulting in career stranded or even backward.

This is a critical moment when you have time to reflect on whether you have made the right choice and pursued your career in the right way. From this perspective, not only is it normal to get stuck, but it can also help your career. So how do we make the right use of “bottlenecks”? First, you need to understand and anticipate the stages of “bottleneck”.

“Bottleneck period in the first three years of design” :

1. Confused period of graduation: Just after graduation, I feel helpless in the face of pressure from work and survival.

2. One-year deadline: Formal work for one and a half years. Limited by ability, vision and environmental sensitivity, I cannot see myself clearly.

3. Three-year breakthrough period: 3 years of formal work, creative work dried up, thinking about what to do.

I remember one day, a wechat friend asked me: Hello, Mr. Goodmoring, I will graduate soon, but I don’t know what industry I want to choose, advertising design, game design, UI design… I don’t know how to choose, don’t know how to go in the future.

I said: I can’t tell you what to choose, but I can teach you how to choose, how to choose. As a graduating student, you need to have a clear idea of what you want and what you expect to get in the future. Only when you think well can you know how to choose the road.

When you are very committed to your purpose, this belief will help you make choices along the way.

As the founder of Goodmorin, I also experienced confusion in the early stage of graduation. Now I would like to share with you how I made a choice at that time and how I broke through the “bottleneck”.

The ivory tower of college time is graceful and light, when I still indulge in it can not extricate themselves, it has gone with the wind. But who can write the White Head Taixuan Sutra? Naturally, LIKE most of my friends, I began my social life in the true sense of the word — “learning to practice”.

During that unhappy period, I kept a line in my mind: “He did what he did, the wind blew over the hills; The moon shines across the river.” I threw myself into the melting pot of society, hoping to be hardened into steel.

Soon, I was able to adapt to the new working and living environment well. In order to further improve my working ability, I chose to comprehensively enrich myself by “expanding inside to books, expanding outside to travel” — after all, what is needed to realize my dream is not thinking, but doing down to earth.

“Netoyishu”

In order to improve my literary literacy and meet the needs of the society, I went to all the big and small bookstores in Wuhan, especially the planning books, which I almost looked through. Fortunately, my efforts paid off. Through a lot of reading, I improved my literary accomplishment and learned a lot of skills in the work.

In addition to my own research, I also often consult seniors, especially senior masters in the design circle, to learn their life experience, which makes me feel a lot of benefit. I have kept this habit until now. No matter how busy I am at work, I will take time out to chat with senior colleagues in the company.

During this time, I have seen a lot of things, and I have been thinking. Start to consciously cultivate their own interests, and at the same time accumulate work experience, improve work ability. In addition, I decided to combine my outgoing personality and find my own way.

“Outbound Travel”

In order to broaden my vision and seek more inspiration in design, IN 2010, I started my design journey — a journey of life through travel and work. Travel, work and use the money earned in one city to pay for living expenses in the next. On the way, I gradually established the short, medium and long goals of life.

1. Short-term goal: Get a job in design.

2. Mid-term goal: Enter a well-known design company.

3. Long-term goal: To establish a design company of my own.

Fortunately, I have now achieved the first two goals one by one. Just along the way, lengnuanzizhi. All your efforts will be rewarded in the future.

A few days ago, a wechat friend communicated with me, the details are as follows:

I was born in the ancient city of Pingyao, a small county town. Now I am a junior in a very unknown b-class university in a prefecture-level city, majoring in graphic design. Personally, I love design, and I will read it carefully when I see good works on the Internet. But there are many obstacles in real life:

My father died of work-related injury when I was in the fourth grade of primary school. My mother stayed at home alone and got a pension of more than 2000 yuan a month for me to go to college. My two sisters were married, and my eldest sister still suffered from mild mental illness. Now I am in a small company when the art editor, just applied for less than a month, the boss is very good to me, open 2000 salary plus commission. Work sometimes busy have no time to eat, sometimes idle day have nothing to do. However, the company only has me as an artist, there is no partner to discuss with, and my design ideas can not play a great help.

I sometimes wonder what kind of life I want, and I want to be secure enough to support my family. I didn’t want to be mediocre. I gave up my dream of being a designer. Family conditions are not good, want to go to training classes can not afford to go, only a little PS skills or their own play out. I didn’t listen well to the theory courses in my freshman year and sophomore year. Now I feel that theory is also very important and I want to make it up again. I learned something on my own in the summer. How to do? Confused?

Goodmorin: Everyone has constraints when they go into design, so the question arises: do you pursue your design dream, or do you compromise with reality? We all know you can’t have your cake and eat it. You want to continue to pursue your design dream, but you’re stuck with your family. In addition, you said that your theoretical foundation is not solid, the road of design is more difficult, but this is not impossible, need you strong perseverance.

In your case, I have the following suggestions:

1, since you can’t choose your dream now, it’s better to accumulate fund support first, and pursue your dream after a few years of accumulation. But the time should not be too long, within three years is better.

2, theory foundation, you can strengthen the study of theory, the spirit of the college entrance examination out, work during the day, study at night, with others playing time for your dream.

3, as for your design software is not skilled, there is no shortcut, is more practice, many online tutorials enough for you to learn, but this requires you to have perseverance, can insist. Otherwise the love of design, the desire to improve, is bullshit.

Children, do not always complain about reality, do not always feel helpless, you have to have a sense of crisis, more time on the design you love. The website has a lot of design QQ group, design communication group and so on, make more friends, learn more. Believe in yourself, develop your greatest potential, since design is a dream, it is necessary to make a dream. Don’t just say it.

Work more than a year of designers, familiar with all the work need to use the software, the basic skills has no problem, and with a little creative experience, a portion of them began to self-righteousness, ace, started very identity to the point of view that the customer think they importune, unreasonable, they don’t understand design, treat their works like son, Even when the director suggested changes, they would start to resist, as if anyone had any objection to his work was a provocation to him. In addition, there are some emotions, such as complaining about boring work, no technical content, can not see the future, no development and so on.

These actions are a sign that you are hitting your first “bottleneck” in your career. This stage, you can’t let go of my heart to accept to your proposal, for only a year of work, you are exposed to things haven’t accumulated to a certain amount, including design skills, communication skills, creative process, etc are very lack, this time what kind of work do you complain about boring, repetitive, no space, all this will only hinder the development of you, affect your state of mind, Restricting your space!

A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step.

At this time, you should strive to cultivate “internal skills”. Lay a solid foundation and move on. , errands, will not affect your growth, and every success in the workplace, from the basics, from you every day now complain about boring, tasteless, an entry-level position does not have the space to do – but the difference is that successful people are often able to work through this learning and constantly advance, but failure will only complain about!

I, myself, made mistakes at this stage, and here’s the thing.

Less than a year after graduation, I found a job in a design company in Hangzhou. But maybe because of my limited ability at that time, my superiors didn’t give me a chance to show my talents. I just helped the main designer to find information, QQ map and do some chores.

Every day he laments his boredom and lack of passion. Powerful psychological gap fills my heart, since oneself have technology, have experience, why always let me do these miscellaneous miscellaneous 8, do a name card for a while, buckle a graph for a while, this is not wasted time, overqualified for a job?

I hope to do projects and big projects, but I don’t know how to express my frustration. I vent my anger on people around me and play “cold war” with colleagues and bosses. Fortunately, at that time, the director of the company was very familiar with the mood of the novice designer, so he talked to me. When he understood my idea, he gave me a chance to participate in a logo proposal I had recently made.

However, when I finished the logo design of a pharmacy with great joy, I took it to the director for a look, only to get a cold reply from him: Do you think this is like the level of a designer? Of course, he received an immediate, if somewhat persuasive, response from me, as I would not allow my efforts to be questioned in the slightest.

Fortunately, the director was more tolerant and did not argue with me. Anyone else would have said: Do you like it or not?

Now after a few years to think again, he is actually too bold, not open-minded enough. As if the heart is made of glass, a stroke on the flower, a touch on the broken. Whenever confronted with the doubts of the director, I always refuted them with righteous and solemn words, only knowing to shut my door and flatter myself. At that time, I was probably very unbearable.

Back to the big aspect, “one-year deadline” stage, designers should do, is to improve their design level, mainly from nine aspects to develop: think, see, practice, review, inquiry, knowledge, diligence, ethics. The above method is borrowed online.

Personally, I think, to improve their design level, can be divided into the following five points:

1. Read books with good design works

Reading books, in fact, the most important is the process, you need to think. This work is good. Why is it good? What’s creative about it? If you were to do this piece, what would you do? How do you arrange the combination of dots, lines and planes? How should color be used? But such books are advertising books, the price may be on the high side, you do not have to buy, if the store allows, to the bookstore browsing is also ok.

2, from the Internet to understand and absorb the essence of others’ design

In design, it’s not about what someone else does, it’s about why they do it. Internet is a free space, you can better, faster to find what you need, even the latest foreign design works.

3, communication

And peer communication is very important, for example, everybody here sends his work to let everybody comments, although each have different views, but always on behalf of the audience’s view, others after the opinions and Suggestions, to listen to their opinions and Suggestions, to improve their design work, the future is no longer make similar mistakes or do the same inappropriate design.

4, think more

Design of the so-called design, the first thing to reflect is your design ideas and your creativity, rather than “Mosaic” the same work. Before you design something, you have to think about it, figure out how to do it, sketch it, modify it, listen to suggestions, modify it, and when you have a clear idea, you can do it with a computer, not while you’re doing it. Otherwise, you don’t even know what you’ve done in the end.

5. Reevaluate yourself

After a period of time to their own past work to make some of their own evaluation, feel bad places to modify, to achieve their own satisfaction, so review the old to learn new, there will be better effect.

As our young designers to have lofty ideals, but in real life must be down to earth, measure their own strength, constantly adjust their direction, step by step to achieve their goals.

As a saying goes, “The age of three is greater than the age of seven.”

The “three years” of your career are also crucial for new employees. These three years will determine your career direction and set your career mindset.

Among them, career thinking mode is the most important foundation in career, and also the watershed of whether a person can become a dragon or a phoenix in the future. The core of the thinking mode is the formation of self-values in the first three years.

Three years in the designer’s career, it is easy to encounter a bottleneck, is the exhaustion of creativity and job-hopping problem. Why? Let me break it down a little bit:

Creative dried up

Having been engaged in design for three years, I am very familiar with the work I have done in the same company and know the creative process. However, because of this, you think about creativity with the same creative thinking every day and solve the same number of problems every day. You will feel bored with your career and sometimes don’t want to do design, or even hate to do design. Another situation is that you suddenly find yourself unable to do design and have no design ideas when you encounter a project. I can only say congratulations, you have reached the bottleneck of your design career.

If you experience the above symptoms, you are advised to consider the following aspects:

1. First of all, realize that you’re not really at your wit’s end

Sometimes, when you’re stuck, you worry that you’re going to stay stuck. What you need to understand is that your brain is actually an inexhaustible source of ideas. What you need to do is keep adding new things to your brain, keep giving it new information and stimulation.

2. De-stress, relax, and recharge

Sometimes stress and anxiety can get in the way of creativity. The more anxious you become because you can’t come up with new ideas, the more powerful the roadblock seems. Right now, the best thing you can do is get out there. Fixating on the problem won’t help you; in fact, it may make it worse. So get out and walk.

You can easily have new experiences along the way, and a simple conversation with a stranger may revive your creative flow and bring you back with many new ideas.

3. Stick to your goals, look at your competitors, look at the industry, look outside

Take the time to read up on the latest trends in your industry and understand what’s going on. What are people talking about in your field? What is the biggest topic of conversation among your prospects? What are they most worried about? Finding out what these questions are and what the leaders in your industry have to say about them will inspire you to think about your business, products, services, and presentations in a new way.

Spend some time researching the competition. What are they going to do next? What are the products and services they offer? How do they encapsulate things differently? How are their presentations different? Find out what’s new, what’s new and different about what they’re doing, how they find ways to innovate, and then follow their behavior patterns to carve out their own territory.

Sometimes industry can become insular. In that case, ideas are refined within the industry and then reused and replayed over and over again. But some of the best innovation happens when you incorporate ways and ideas from other industries into your own. You just have to look outside the industry to see how other industries are changing and doing things differently.

Ideas come to us all the time. You never know where you’re going to have a beautiful idea, and you don’t want to give it a chance to forget, do you? I always carry a pocket-sized Moleskine notebook so I can jot down ideas at any time. I sometimes have to pull over to the side of the road for a while to write down the title of an article or a new product I want to create. Creativity will come when you least expect it, so the best course of action is to always be prepared.

We’ve all experienced moments when creativity feels like it’s leaving us. Don’t be alarmed when this happens. Your brain needs to clear roadblocks, or it just needs to get new inputs. Stay calm and remember that there are many ways to reactivate your neurons, and start now!

The third year can easily be a watershed in an individual’s career development. In this period, the new recruits are already familiar with all kinds of work. If they are complacent in the “proficiency stage”, their work at this time is just a bargaining chip for them to negotiate returns to their superiors. Once there are other options, such new recruits will definitely jump ship and leave, and the leaders have no intention to retain such new employees.

I would like to offer two suggestions for job-hopping:

1. If you love design but have been working in a non-professional design firm, jump ship and go to a professional design firm to hone your skills as soon as possible.

2. If you want to make it in the design world, try to get into a big design firm. Small companies nurture talent for big companies, so don’t hesitate when you have the ability to move to a big company, where one year in a big company is worth three years in a small company.

The road of design is full of ups and downs, and every industry is the same. Have a clear understanding of your current situation, settle down, step by step, and you will eventually harvest everything you once desired.

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