As somebody who has been lucky enough to not only experience a number of online trends—early Web adoption, The Web Standards Movement, the emergence of UX Design, Web 2.0, the Mobile Web—but to benefit from them, I can see why folks are excited about the rise of Crypto.
While this article is titled “The 7 Ways Designers Make Money” it’s fair to say that it’s really about how people in general make money. It just so happens that I come from a design background, so this article has an inevitable design slant. It’s also safe to say that this article is pretty basic. In fact I suspect a lot of people reading this will be thinking “duh, yeah”. However I wanted to write it because while the contents may be a little business 101, it’s also stuff I didn’t really think about when I was a practicing designer or running my own design studio. Had I thought a bit more systematically about how designers make money, it’s possible I might have made different life or business choices. As such I’m writing this in the hope it’ll give people a little more perspective on some things they may currently be taking for granted.
When I started Clearleft in 2005, we were arguably the first UX agency in the UK. Sure there were folks practicing various elements of User Centered Design; there were dedicated research agencies, dedicated IA agencies, tons of visual design agencies and even folks partnering on CX. However few if any had bought these threads together under the guise of “User Experience Design” as our friends at Adaptive Path in the US had done a few years earlier.
Most industries have their own professional language — often described as “jargon” by the less generous amongst us. Some may point out how ironic it is that designers—who pride themselves in making things easy to understand—use language that deliberately obfuscates meaning. They’ll claim that this is done by gatekeepers attempting to shore up their positions in order to keep new entrants out. This may be true, but In the spirit of Occam's razor, I suspect there’s a much simpler (and less nefarious) explanation.
I’ve long believed that, rather than Heads, Directors and VPs of design being the pivotal team role, we actually need to focus on hiring more Lead Designers. In this article I attempt to explain what a Lead Designer is, what they do, and why they play such an important role in high performing teams.
I'm super interested in how the rise of automation and agentive technology may affect the role of the designer over the coming years. In this article I attempt to make sense of some of the current trends and outline one potential future (if we're not too careful).