Brand, UI, AI & Visual Designer
Creative Director
Mindset Coach for Digital Creatives

Some designers are obsessed with spacing tokens, naming conventions, the newest plugin and the ‘correct’ Figma file structure — and they’re genuinely great at it. But strip away the software and the math and there’s nothing left. No point of view, no eye, no instinct. Honestly, they’d be just as happy and just as good doing finance or accounting. Precision isn’t creativity. A lot of ‘technical’ designers just never had the second thing.

Most persona decks aren’t discovery. They’re theater used to justify a decision someone already made. Nobody wants to walk into a room with evidence against their own idea, so the study gets built backwards from the answer. Watch behavior over stated preference. People lie about what they want. Their actions don’t.

If you can’t separate the work from your ego, every piece of feedback lands like an attack instead of information. Design is a service — people are allowed opinions on it. If that still stings by year five, it’s not the client’s taste that’s the problem.

Nine out of ten designers I’ve met play it safe — mood board, dissect, remix, ship. A collage of taste they already know they can pull off. Almost nobody picks the direction that might fail. Nobody sits in ‘I don’t know what this looks like yet’ long enough to actually find something.

I rarely meet a designer who’ll say, ‘This is how I’d do it. This is the taste I built it on,’ and just own it. Everyone hides behind the brief, the data or the client. Somewhere along the way, taste turned into a liability instead of the actual skill.

I’ve watched a lot of designers finally land a process, a style, a ‘way of working,’ and then just… stop. Calcify. Every new piece of feedback or fresh information stops being input and starts being an attack on the identity they built. Ironic — the process that was supposed to make them better becomes the thing keeping them stuck.

Some designers are incredible at tearing apart other people’s work — sharp, articulate, always knowing exactly what’s wrong. Ask them to make something themselves and it falls apart. Critique isn’t a creative skill. It’s a verbal one. Don’t confuse the two.

A lot of ‘seniors’ got there by sticking around, not by getting better. Then they defend decisions with their title instead of a reason — ‘Trust me, I’ve been doing this for ten years’ instead of actually arguing for the taste behind it. Nobody ever taught them how, so authority became the substitute.

Nothing gives me a red flag quite like a designer with an immediate answer. Ask a hard question and get an instant response — that’s not confidence, that’s a template firing. It makes me wonder how much actual digging they do when something is genuinely unclear. Immediate answers optimize for looking good in the room right now. A real process optimizes for the work being right, which usually means sitting with ‘I don’t know yet’ longer than feels comfortable.