At some stage in your design career, you may find yourself at a bit of a crossroads. One path is the path of the craftsperson; a path you’re very experienced and comfortable with. Down the other path is the lure of management, and all the power and riches that entails.
Back in 2005, I wrote my first book—and learned the hard way why traditional publishing isn’t for everyone. The book, one of the first on CSS design, was published with Apress and turned out well, but the experience of working with the publisher was anything but fun.
Martial arts often distinguish between “hard” and “soft” styles. Hard styles focus on direct, powerful strikes—punches and kicks designed to break through an opponent’s defences through sheer force. This is the approach many design leaders take when "battling" their organisations for greater influence, hoping to raise design's impact by pushing hard for recognition. While understandable, this forceful, head-on approach can be counterproductive, especially when designers face opponents with more authority or entrenched interests.
Peter Merholz recently published a thought-provoking article suggesting that “Product Management is UX Design.” While this may hold in certain contexts, I believe it’s largely meant to spark debate rather than capture a broad truth.
Designers often look to design maturity models as benchmarks, comparing their own companies to idealised industry standards and thinking, “We’re so behind!” This can spark a drive to “improve” the company’s design maturity, which often translates into attempts to “educate” leadership on what they’re doing “wrong” or how the organisation can “catch up.” But is maturity really the most useful framework here? Or might labelling a company as “immature” potentially miss the point? 🤔
When we think about designers, two main characteristics often come to mind: craft skills and taste. Craft skills are the technical abilities that allow designers to manipulate tools—whether physical, like pen and paper in the early days, or digital design software like Photoshop and Figma today—to create their desired output. Taste, on the other hand, is the ability to perceive and refine quality in design, guiding the look and feel of an output toward something that feels refined and cohesive.