Within our profession one of the unspoken, golden rules is that forward momentum must always take place. A lack of movement, of growth, of development over just a short period of time could serve to professionally cripple us given the speed at which the design industry is changing. If our abilities and skill sets do not continue to evolve at a steady rate we cannot expect to stay relevant in our jobs and the marketplace—we will become stagnant and institutionalized.

In order to combat that personally, I try to set aside an hour or so every day to hit great sites like lynda.com, Smashing Magazine or other inspirational/how-to sites for tutorials that I can use to expand my horizons a bit. I try to grab tuts from a variety different areas of interest because I’m a bit scatter-brained and frenetic to begin with, but I also have a huge area of personal interest that I need to satisfy. The added benefit of carving this time out of my day, aside from keeping my edge from dulling, is that it provides me with a chance to work on things that are not client related, which I find is another unspoken need, and one that designers so often ignore.

The practice of doing personal, non-client related work is critical to a designers well being and state of mind. The work you do doesn’t necessarily need to be fit for public consumption, but the need to create on one’s own terms should not be passed by. These projects, while perhaps nothing more than personal studies or experiments, can free the mind from the constraints of designing and creating according to a brief and allow us to mentally step away from our client concerns for a short period of time. I’ve found that when I spend time working on my own experiments/projects it helps me to work through other client problems that I was unable to navigate because I was too close to the project.

I know this is all stuff that probably seems rote and repetitive, and I’m sure that it has been said on other sites at other times, but we too often don’t think about the value of personal development. You never know when one of those little side projects will become a big side project and perhaps that will then become a part-time job or a whole-time job. I mean weirder things have happened—just look at Twitter.

This entry was posted on Monday, May 26th, 2008 at 11:27 pm and is filed under Business, Design, General, eljl. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.