While investors seem to be going all in on Web3 at the moment, I’ve been noticing an interesting trend that has its roots firmly in the Web 2.0 era — namely the Multi-Player Web. Before exploring this trend in more detail, I thought it would be worth taking a quick step back to explore where it originated from.
As a Seedcamp VP from a design and product background, I'm regularly asked for hiring advice. Especially from folks who have had an open role for several weeks (sometimes even months), but haven't been getting the quality or volume of candidates they've been hoping for. The first thing I usually do is ask to take a look at the job ad, as this is generally where the problem starts.
The design recruitment market is really hot at the moment. Largely because founders and leadership teams are beginning to understand the importance of a well designed and well conceived product. As such I’m constantly being asked by leadership teams to help them find early design hires.
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.