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Designers & age

over 5 years ago from Joao Carvalho, UX Designer

  • Joel Cook, over 5 years ago

    Hey Joao great question. This thought has also been running through my head lately. The couple routes I have thought of are: 1. Move into an art director or design management position. 2. Work towards opening my own studio and bringing on younger talent.

    Over the past few years I've been involved in the interviewing process at my company when bringing on new designers an I've been seeing younger designers starting to edge out older more "experienced" designers.

    It's been a tough juggling act because in some cases a designer applies and has 10-15+ years of experience but you can see in their portfolio that their design style is way behind the times and looks very outdated. While some of these younger designers come in with very "beautiful" projects but you can tell that they are just for show (aka dribbble and behance) and wouldn't actually function well in the real world.

    So do we take on the older designer and work on teaching them new programs and catch them up on modern design trends. Or do we take on the younger designer but know we'd need to really work with them on the UX side of things?

    I know my personal experience in no way represents the entire design job market but over the past 5-10 years there has been such a big software boom it seems a lot of the older designers just haven't picked up on the new tools companies are looking for.

    I'd be curious to hear other peoples experiences on this topic.

    7 points
    • michael arguello, over 5 years ago

      @joelcook Your response resonates with me. I agree 100%. Speaking from experience, you must gradually move into a more directorial role in your environment. And I say environment, because the behavior should extend past "work". The way I like to think about it is, as what is your personal "brand experience" you want people to have with you? Do you want to simply stay in your lane as a designer? Or do you want to be more influential in your department? And by doing that, your performance as a designer is the expectation, so being great at it won't be enough. Its your words, your actions, your motivation, your inspiration, that you can provide to the people around you, which will help elevate you to the next level.

      0 points