What is my brand? Who am I?
I just had a session with my Designlab mentor, Stephen Bau, who is a huge inspiration of mine. He has been designing for 30+ years and it shows. His portfolio reads “I am exploring how we imagine, design, and build the future together. I founded Builders Collective to build leaders to design a resilient society. I write about the evolution of design at stephenbau.com. I work as a mentor for UX Academy at Designlab.”
How does this tie into me? Well, I was introduced to UX Design about 8 months ago. After considering where I was at, my interests, and my capabilities, I decided that taking on a UX bootcamp would be my next move. My design experience is limited, and I only started paying real attention to UX once I started UX Academy through Designlab. Since then, I have gone up and down a thousand times, doubted myself, and wondered what I was doing regularly. Design for me is challenging, exciting, helpful, confusing, frustrating, and everything in between. I think thats why I like it. On top of that, good design is beautiful, captivating, intelligent, and considerate.
So why am I writing this? I am at a place now where I am finishing UX Academy, and currently working on my final capstone. The next steps I see ahead of me are iteration and more iteration. Whether it be my capstones, case studies, or portfolio, iteration is needed.
My conversation with Stephen helped me to see outside of the projects at hand. I often find myself getting wrapped up in whats in front of me, causing me to loose sight of design and its beauty as a whole. Stephen mentioned design systems, which I understand in UX to be all of the elements making up the final product. Good design is not easy, but it often looks simple.
Stephen also talked about how he has slowly been building his brand and area of expertise, the Bauhaus, over the years. This got me asking myself, “What is my brand? What is my area of expertise? What do I want that thing to be?”
Thats why I’m writing this article. I have found myself doubting my capability throughout my entire time at Designlab. On top of this I have told myself lies about where I will end up and what I will get to design. I even convinced myself that design wasn’t for me and that I failed once again at finding career path I am passionate about. Thank god I was wrong.
When I think about my brand and my interests, the first things that come to mind are: surfing, skateboarding, music, photography, snowboarding, rock climbing, and the expression that exists within all of these. Everything I enjoy, and everything I know for that matter, was designed.
As a designer, I must also consider what I value. As a human being, I value kindness, service, diversity, honesty, and connection with others through these actions. Moving forward in design, I hope to keep both my interests and my values at the forefront of what I am creating. How do I do this? I am unsure at the moment, but figured right here, right now, would be a good place to start.