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Communicate Value over Long Hours of Work as a Designer

from Oykun Yilmaz [alt+shift+b] in design

The tagline for my newsletter goes as below: Grow As Designer | Helping Designers Grow Their Value and Income. It's a bit unclear, right? What the heck is "Value" anyway? How can you grow it? Well, there are many meanings to it and ways to grow it for a designer, but let's focus on how you can grow your value by communicating the work you do in the right way. First, let me make something very clear: You don't get paid for your work or time. Read that again, please. A few times actually. When you apply for a job, you might be thinking, "I'll work 8 hours a day, 5 days a week, do some design work that's assigned to me, and get paid $40k a year." The business owner thinks differently, "Oykun is applying for a job. Can he solve our complex design problems? Design is crucial for this project, can he provide top-quality work?" Spot the difference in these two sentences. Yes, the whole f*** thing! You're focused on the input (time and work), but the business owner is focused on the outcome (value). Then you wonder why you didn't get the job or are not getting paid well. You can talk for hours about how hard you work, how many hours you put into your work... These mean nothing to very little to the business owner. Start talking about how you can improve their business with design, and they will be all ears. I need you to change the way you look at design. I need you to look at the design from the value perspective. Let me give you a clear example: In an agency world, you can often see junior or senior designers working damn hard for long hours, doing an amazing job and getting paid less than the creative director who does the usual working hours. Or you can work as a waitress 12 hours a day. It is noble and hard work, but you won't earn as much as an experienced designer earns in 1 hour. I don't mean to put the money as the core criterion here. There is more to what we do and why we do it than the money. However, this simplifies things to make a point here, plus let's be...
23rd May 2023

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