Engaging in a thorough discussion of all job aspects early on is pivotal when it comes to negotiating a job offer. This proactive approach facilitates a shared understanding on both sides of the table, clarifying the expectations associated with the role. Rather than approaching negotiations as a confrontational affair, applicants and interviewers should embrace it as an opportunity to collaboratively shape the new role.

The pinnacle of negotiating lies in achieving a greater common understanding, even when certain aspects may not be negotiable. When crafting a job offer, it is the opportune moment to delve into a myriad of factors. Candidates should be well-prepared to navigate discussions around benefits, salary, duties, and other critical elements of the new job.

Continue reading to discover a comprehensive guide on how to negotiate a job offer from both perspectives. This valuable insight equips you with the knowledge needed to embark on each new job with confidence, setting the foundation for a successful journe

What is Included in a Job Offer?

Hiring design talent is not always as simple as a handshake. Many important factors have to be outlined to prevent confusion or dissatisfaction down the road. Some of the things both applicants and the company might want to consider when creating a job offer include:

• Salary
• Hours (Full-time, part-time, contract)
• Benefits
• Time off, including PTO, sick days, and long-term leave
• Company hierarchy
• Promotion opportunities
• Remote work or WFH
• Duties
• Authority (decision-making responsibility)
• Recurring and signing bonuses
• Technology and ownership
• Additional benefits (company car, gas card, stocks, etc.)
• Relocation costs, if applicable
• Severance procedure
• Start date
• Training

These specific things might not be necessary for every single job. Smaller jobs that aren’t viewed as long-term likely won’t have as many benefits to negotiate but you might still want to talk about the promotion process and training if the applicant is interested in turning the role into a long-term opportunity.

Creating a Job Offer: The Company’s Role

Businesses trying to bring in top talent should take the time to fully build the role before they start interviewing for it. In cases where it’s a completely new position or the company isn’t quite sure how the role will fit into the existing structure, using a creative staffing agency to bring in temporary talent can help flesh out the role.

One of the most important job offer tips for those on the company side is to decide what is and isn’t negotiable. Many times, budget constraints limit salary possibilities, but you might be able to offset that with other benefits like more work-from-home hours.

The last thing you want is to go through all your applicants and have the ideal choice withdraw from consideration because you can’t agree on a priority factor. While you can’t hope to meet every applicant’s highest hopes, it will help if you give a clear outline of what’s possible and give offsets to make up for places where the job offer comes up a bit short.

Priority Factors for Prospective Employees

So, what are the most important things people look for in a job offer? Salary is naturally going to be a significant part of the appeal, but some things can have a similar impact.

For example, as remote work skyrocketed starting in early 2020, many people found that they preferred to do their jobs outside the traditional office model. Some managers worry that productivity is impacted by remote work, but studies show that’s not the case.

In addition to flex hours, benefits can also turn a normal job offer into a gold mine for prospective employees. Larger companies who can give full health coverage to their staff are much more likely to have better retention rates and happier staff. Other benefits like sick leave, PTO, and vacation days will have similar benefits.

Understanding where employees find value in their roles will help the company retain its best staff and make the whole office atmosphere friendlier and less stressful. If you don’t already have questions to discover priority factors early in your interview process, make sure to add some.

Negotiating a Creative Job Offer

There’s a certain kind of etiquette to negotiating, especially if it’s to be done on friendly terms and not as adversaries. Starting a new job with a fight is guaranteed to bring the professional relationship to an early finish.

The key to effective negotiation is to know when to start. While identifying potential differences in expectations early on is crucial, there’s no need to start hammering out all the details right away. If you’re interviewing for the position, don’t try until you have a formal, explicit job offer from the company.

If the details outlined by the company seem overly malleable, the candidate might start to take the position less seriously. Once again, this is a great reason to have the job description written out and a clear view of what is and isn’t negotiable.

Job Offer Tips for Companies and Applicants

The whole process of hiring design talent can be derailed in the final steps before a creative job offer is accepted. Use some of these job offer tips to help facilitate a friendly professional discussion that works for all parties involved.

1- Be Grounded

Arrogance during the job application process is common on both sides of the interview table. Large pools of hopeful candidates give companies more choosing power and that can go to the hiring manager’s head. Once a candidate has secured a creative job offer, they might get overconfident.

Creating a job offer and accepting one both require a realistic look at what needs to be done and the best way to make sure it happens. Rather than focusing on either side, focus on the job that needs doing and be frank about what kind of remuneration it’s going to take to have someone perform that role.

2- Know Your Worth

For applicants, each demand should come with a corresponding reason why you deserve what you’re asking for. For many interviewers, hearing personal tales explaining the need for a higher salary doesn’t go nearly as far as professional accomplishments and illustration of how you create value and why you should be rewarded for it.

The company should also have some idea of its value. Don’t think about your stock prices. Rather, honestly appraise your company culture and how happy other people are to work there. If you have a high turnover rate, you’ll likely have less room to negotiate.

Both parties should also know the value of the role. Hiring design talent, for example, requires the applicant to understand exactly how business goals can be met with design thinking. If the interviewer doesn’t share that understanding, the applicant must be able to explain it.

3- Talk It Out

Open discussion is the best policy and critical for creating a job offer that works for everyone. If a certain aspect of a creative job offer doesn’t suit you, stating why can help avoid sounding petty or shooting down the other party.

The most common hangup is the salary. There’s usually very little reason to detail why you want more money – it’s a fairly universal desire. But if the company is limited by a hiring budget then owning up to that can help offset a low salary with other benefits.

Similarly, applicants should be straightforward without being too blunt. If you want more remote hours or additional training, support those desires with clear ideas of how it will help you succeed at the company.

4- Be Personable

While the negotiations might involve a big company entering into a contract with the employee, the people at the table will still be people like everyone else. The fastest way to cut through corporate jargon and avoid misunderstandings is to talk to each other as humans first.

A higher level of understanding and frank discussion is possible from this perspective. The interviewer might personally agree that the applicant deserves what they’re requesting even if the company can’t provide it. Rather than pretending to doubt the applicant, the interviewer can simply say the demand is not feasible even though it’s reasonable and suggest a workable alternative.

5- Give the Benefit of the Doubt

When it comes to budget constraints and other limitations, there’s often no other course of action that to take people at their word. Unless it’s a disreputable company, they’re not going to lie outright about their budgets. After all, they know if they can give you what you want you’re more likely to stay with them longer, so good companies try to oblige when they can.

Some things require a little proof, especially when it comes to past experience and the logic behind company policies. If you genuinely do not trust the interviewer, it might portend negative vibes in the company more generally and you might not be the best fit for the job.

6- Research

All parties need to have a complete understanding of the job to effectively negotiate its particulars. For applicants, information about the company should be gathered beforehand so you can ask more detailed and informative questions. Continue the research during the interview by asking related questions.

Interviewers should have a good idea of everything the prospective employee has submitted as part of their application. It doesn’t have to be memorized, but draw interview questions from the information submitted and refer back to the resume and other materials like case studies to foment discussion.

7- Admit Uncertainty

Both sides of the table can benefit from acknowledging when they aren’t sure about something. For example, the interviewer might ask whether the applicant will accept an offer if it’s extended. If the applicant would like to take some time to consider, that’s a fine and reasonable response.

The company will hopefully be able to say with some certainty whether the position is permanent and what the role will entail, but in cases where that remains to be seen, the interviewer should be up front about it.

8- Prioritize

If there are some benefits or criteria that are especially important to you as either the applicant or the interviewer for a business, focus on them at the beginning of the discussion. It might help to make a list of the most important factors before the meeting.

One of the best job offer tips out there is to be open about this list of priorities. Beating around the bush is only going to take up unnecessary time, while an open discussion of what each side believes to be most important will speed the negotiations up considerably.

9- Ask Questions

Job offer tips often focus on how to one-up or outsmart the people you’re negotiating with, but this tip is meant to help everyone stay friendly and on the same page. Rather than making demands or setting hard limits, ask questions that are geared toward finding the most mutually beneficial solution.

Hiring design talent is frequently tricky for non-creative hiring managers because they don’t have the perspective to understand the full value of design work. Rather than taking offense, the potential hire could ask a question about how the salary offer could be increased or offset with other benefits.

10- Negotiate Holistically

Creating a job offer is much easier if you look at the whole offer rather than focusing on certain parts. For applicants, this is the only way to visualize what working for the company will really be like. It will also help speed up negotiations most likely since you won’t have to go slowly from one item to the next.

More balanced creative job offers are the product of these types of negotiations. Potential problems and possible fixes are easier to identify with a broader scope.

11- Take Time to Think

This is one of those job offer tips that doesn’t only apply to the final offer itself. Take time to think through answers and questions during the interviews and negotiations too. It will lead to more thoughtful answers and reasonable solutions instead of knee-jerk first ideas.

When the final offer is on the table, take a couple of days at a minimum to consider everything. This goes for both sides of the table. Everyone should review what was agreed upon to make sure it still sounds good.

12- Plan for the Future

If there are some hangups in the discussion, the solution doesn’t have to be immediate. For example, a creative job offer with significant hiring budget constraints can be improved by a definite plan for performance reviews and raises within the first year.

Identifying opportunities for promotion can also give new hires the impression that they can build a long-term career with the company, inciting them to stay longer. Make sure these plans aren’t built like false promises but rather like concrete courses of action.

13- Leave Room for Adjustment

Although a final creative job offer with everything figured out is ideal, you can also leave room for growth in some areas. That doesn’t mean you should leave it completely untouched, but you can agree that some aspects of the job are temporary, even for an introductory period, and will be changed or improved later.

The most important thing about this tip is to make sure everyone is clear about what will change and when. Don’t assume it’s clear. If you’re going to use this tactic, make sure it’s beneficial and completely agreed-upon by everyone involved.

14- Empathize

We already know that the person across the table is a human being. But we should also understand their professional perspective. The potential new hire, for example, may have all the passion in the world for their line of work, but at the end of the day, the salary is also their way to live.

Similarly, the interviewer is paid to conduct the negotiations in a particular way. People too often forget this and take a too-adversarial attitude to creative job offer negotiations. Understand that both parties would probably love nothing more than to reach an agreement and get to work.

15- Stay Likeable

Of all the job offer tips in this guide, this last one is the most important. Likeability is the fastest way to reach a mutually agreeable creative job offer and it starts the relationship on the right professional foot, so to speak.

You don’t have to pander to others, but openly communicating, empathizing, understanding, and working together to find solutions will make you likable. Don’t underestimate how much people love for this process to be streamlined.

Conclusion:

Hiring design talent takes some work because the new hire and the company are so frequently at odds about certain aspects of the job. It’s not only the salary that can get in the way of bringing new talent on board. Many other factors also have to be considered.

Use the tips in this guide to build the best job offer possible. Both the company and the new talent will benefit from planning and communicating clearly with one another at this critical early stage of the professional relationship.

Competition for promotions, raises, and other benefits from management is a healthy part of the traditional office. Working remotely takes employees out of supervisors’ physical line of sight and that can cause some confusion. Figuring out how to stay visible and progress your career after a transition to a digital office just requires a little bit of cleverness.

Even though all or part of the team might be working remotely, it’s still very much possible to try too hard to get on the good side of higher-ups. Communication is crucial to team cohesion when remote positions are involved but there’s a fine line between staying in touch and badgering people.

Whether you want to know how to get a promotion in general or you want to update your tactics for a new remote job, you can use this article as a guide to help shape your short- and long-term strategy to progress your career.

Standout Qualities for Promoting Remote Workers

Particular companies and managers will differ in their preferences for various qualities in all their workers, not just remote ones. However, there are a few things that all companies look for in remote workers that it will help to keep in mind if you’re working toward a promotion or a raise and you want to outshine the competition.

Motivation is a huge factor. In the office, there might have been several people who would stay more or less on top of you and keep you on your deadlines. Remote work doesn’t completely erase oversight potential, but it doesn’t work quite the same way as the traditional office setup.

That means remote workers have to be self-starters who can motivate themselves to produce their best work and do so on time. The more the higher-ups see that work is being done well and on time without their having to intervene, the better your potential for a management role where the same behavior will be expected.

But they also don’t want to see people who fall into a groove and stay there, not progressing or taking on any new responsibilities. That kind of behavior probably won’t get you let go, but depending on your current role in the company it could certainly limit your promotion prospects.

Teamwork is essential for creatives who work on a marketing team, in an art department, or alongside many non-creative stakeholders who need to be kept up to date on project developments. But what should remote teamwork look like?

How to Get a Promotion With Superior Communication

The first thing new remote workers in all fields need to know is that communication is much more intentional in digital workspaces. As important as it is to brainstorm, strategize, cowork, and present results to everyone on the team, you have to reach out to explicitly gain and share such information when people are working remotely.

Promoting remote workers probably won’t hinge solely on how good they are at communicating, but you can bet it’s going to be high-priority. A consistent trend amongst managers who are anxious about making the switch to remote work is that they fear productivity is going to plummet when they aren’t physically there to goad their employees on.

The good news is that this has been proven to be untrue. But if you want to convince your stakeholders and bosses that going remote is a good idea, you have to show them that your productivity is still as great as it ever was, if not better. When you’re on a creative team, your productivity is likely tied directly to communication.

Remote Work Tips for Better Communication

For some people, reaching out enough without overdoing can be a tough balancing act. That’s because it taps directly into your personality – people who love to chat with coworkers will naturally do so in the group chat and might risk bothering others while naturally reserved people will reach out less and might be viewed as overly distance, detached, or flat-out not hard-working enough by everyone else.

Here are a few ways you can boost your communication skills when you’re working remotely in a creative field:

• Reach Out More Often
  

Get in touch with your coworkers and management when you have information for them, especially when they haven’t asked for it yet, and you’ll be saving them a significant effort. Don’t needle people with incomplete updates or fill up the chatbox with irrelevant things, but update them regularly. You’ll be showing that you’re available and open to communication.

• Define Your Work Day
  

This is one of the most important remote work tips. Be clear about when you’re on the clock and when you’ve logged off for the day. Nobody should have to be on call all the time. This is important for work-life balance, especially on remote teams where different members might be located in different time zones.

Management should have already agreed to the working hours for the various team members, but use status updates and visible schedules to let everyone know when you can be reached. Everyone on the team can do this in a single document to make everything easier.

• Make Room for Leisure
  

As long as it doesn’t distract from work, creating a #breakroom or #watercooler chat where the team can have conversations about things not related to business is a good way to keep everyone on friendly terms even when they don’t see each other in person very often or at all.

Creatives have a unique opportunity here because they likely all share a dedication to various art forms. A chatroom about craft questions and tips will foster teamwork and build better brainstorming. One great idea is to have space for people to post what they’re working on that week and share critiques.

• Organize Video Calls
  

Zoom meetings give people a visual that is lacking from other conference calls. People with work-from-home fatigue might be tired of face-to-face meetings, but if they’re done correctly they should help people stay engaged with one another. Plus, they allow people to get a limited glimpse into the personal lives of their coworkers.

The trick here is not to overdo it. Having morning meetings is a great remote work tip to get everyone motivated, especially on Mondays. But if you have too many video meetings people could start to grow tired of them, especially if most of the participants are a passive audience.

• Keep Records
  

It’s not necessarily to have proof or evidence as much as it’s a way to look back at what has been done or agreed upon, by whom, and when. No one is going to pour back over the whole hour-long meeting you just had, but assign someone to keep minutes and encourage all team members to calendar their new tasks and deadlines.

This is also the best way to show progress, which is something remote teams are always trying to do more of. If you have a note of where you started, you can see where you wind up much more clearly. That’s a great motivator for the whole team.

Remote Work Tips: How to Get a Promotion With Ace Videoconferencing

Facilitating any of the remote work tips we just discussed is sure to get you noticed as a proactive member of the team. But if you’re participating in regular videoconferences, there are a few other things you can do to leave a consistently good impression.

1- Don’t Talk Over People

Even when you’re on great wifi, the number of people on the platform can cause some delays or skips in the sound. Don’t jump into speaking too quickly and make sure everyone has had time to finish their thoughts before you weigh in with yours. This will not only make you look better to your superiors but it will also make your coworkers like you more.

2- Help Keep Things In Order

Offer to run a continuing list of speakers so everyone can go one-by-one and finish their thoughts. Ask questions for clarification and make sure to explicitly cover all the actionable conclusions from the meeting at its conclusion. Just remember that unless you’ve been given authority to run the meeting, you’re not in charge and so you shouldn’t get too bossy.

3- Volunteer for Projects and Help

Every team member should have a contribution to the team effort. If you have spare time, volunteer to spearhead new tasks or projects as they come. Make sure people know you can also be a supporting player by offering to help when someone else is spearheading things. This is another great way to leave a good impression on both the bosses and your coworkers.

4- Offer Consistent Deliverables

Stakeholders are probably only going to know what you’re working on by the deliverables you send them. UX designers might have new research findings to present or some prototype wireframes, for example. Whatever your position, you can streamline the communication between stakeholders and creatives by always having the same type of deliverable ready for them to see.

5- Humanize Your Coworkers

When all you see of people is a rectangle with their photo in it, it can be difficult to remember that they’re real folks with unique interests and hobbies. Make an effort to note the quarks your coworkers have and not only will they like you better but you’ll also be more comfortable with them. The whole remote office environment can change for the better that way.

Embrace Technology for Great Creative Remote Work

Managers looking at promoting remote workers always look for innovative people. After all, most businesses have growth as one of their central goals, and innovation is how you get there.

If you’re a remote creative worker, learn all there is to know about all the software you need to do the job. If you have extra time, figure out what some competitors are using to make their products and learn a bit about that as well.

New tech can also help people stay more connected. Videoconferencing platforms are put to great use in presentations by people who know how to use them. Other software that’s used to hold remote conferences and seminars can provide continuing education to creatives that understand the host platform.

Always Be Networking

Remember that you have a personal brand just like the company has its employment brand. Staying in touch with other professionals will help you build new skills and make you a more versatile problem-solver, which any company will love. Just make sure that your supervisors don’t mistake you for someone on the hunt for a better position somewhere else because that will probably not have a pleasant effect.

Sites like LinkedIn are a great way to build a web of professional contacts. You can also build out your profile on that website to give a clear picture of what kind of creative you are. In case you do need to look for work, having a LinkedIn already set up will streamline the whole process.

Want a Promotion? Ask for One

Just like when you want to ask for a raise, badgering people isn’t going to help you get a promotion. However, if you take a different approach you’re likely to be more successful.

Don’t ask for “a promotion” and see what gets thrown at you. Prepare and wait until you see a clear opening. If you identify a pain point before management has seen it, they’ll know you’re a serious contender.

When there isn’t a specific role that you can step into, you can always look for new responsibilities to take over. In smaller offices, you might even be able to request additional tasks from higher-ups. Just make sure you’re finishing all your other work well, otherwise, you could embarrass yourself by getting in over your head.

Stay Humble

Your achievements should be self-evident so that you don’t have to go around bragging or trying too hard to highlight what you’ve done. Furthermore, it’s never a good look to pretend you’re the only one on the team having a positive impact. Give credit where it’s due and don’t make yourself the center of attention.

Promoting remote workers is a much easier decision when management knows who the team looks up to. For that kind of respect, you need to point out when your coworkers do something well and compliment them on it. Don’t just leave it at that – take the time to suggest some ideas about how that success can be emulated in the future.

If you want to know how to get a promotion, it comes down to being personable most of the time. It’s not only that people notice you more when they like you. Personable people are also more effective in creative roles because they foster better communication on the team.

Keep Track of Your Achievements & Examples of Great Work

If it’s not a good look to put the spotlight on yourself in a group meeting, you can still do so in one-on-one meetings when you’re specifically going out to ask for a raise or a promotion. When management hears you want a raise, their first question is going to be why you deserve it.

A concise answer with samples of your work as evidence is just about the best answer you can have to such a question. It’s even better if it’s so evident that you deserve the raise or promotion that management already knows it and agrees, even if budget constraints make the reward unfeasible for the time being.

Pretend you’re building up your portfolio. You should be keeping it refreshed with updated case studies anyway just to be prepared for the worst. Those same case studies can be used to provide evidence that you’ve been an effective creative worker and added value to the company and its products.

Conclusion:

People in all lines of work are curious about how to get a promotion after the transition to remote work. The criteria for promoting remote workers varies from company to company, but the pointers discussed here should be widely applicable for creatives in a variety of remote workplaces.

Hopefully, some of the remote work tips in this guide have illustrated how creatives can demonstrate their value to stakeholders and the company even when they’re no longer working out of a traditional office.

With a critical eye at the year that passed, creatives can set professional goals that will keep them active, searching, and imaginitive in the year to come. New Year’s is a great time to take this retrospective view, although setting goals can be done at any time throughout the year.

Planning for the year ahead helps concentrate creative energy and builds a metric that can be used to see how far you’ve developed or give you direction during creative droughts. There are many ways creatives can use New Year’s Resolutions to outline the immediate future, but it all starts with an honest reckoning of the current situation.

Read on for some creative New Year’s Resolutions and some tips for how you can critique the old year in order to set challenging professional goals for the new one.

Resolutions Rule #1: Think Outside the Box

Many popular New Year’s Resolutions are the same year after year. We all know the most common ones: lose weight, go to the gym more, put more effort into hobbies, and things like that. They vary from person to person but they’re usually about health, happiness, or family.

On occasion you might find people with a specific goal, like saving up a certain amount of money for some reason or finally getting back to the Spanish they started learning in high school.

We can’t say that these aren’t worthy goals, but if you find yourself making the same or similar goals every year, that might be an indication that you haven’t been making significant progress so far. That can get pretty discouraging after a while, but creative New Year’s Resolutions can help you stay motivated and accomplish whatever it is that you set out to do.

Resolutions Rule #2: Don’t Be Too General

Everybody wants to eat healthier, be nicer, or get out more. But the thing about these types of resolutions is that they’re so broad that they’re impossible to keep track of throughout the year. Let’s say it’s the middle of June – can you remember how nice or healthy you were every single day?

It’s much better to set a more specific goal and, if necessary, to keep a journa of how well you’re doing. With the health example, maybe you should keep a food journal. A diary might help you keep track of how kind you’ve been or how often you’ve gone out.

Indulge In the What-If’s

As you take a look back on the past year, take the time to imagine what could have gone differently, even with the things you consider a success. This will help you think outside the box and create professional goals that are specific to you.

Let’s say you’re a UX designer and you created several designs that outshone the competition and you’re really proud of them. Look back through your notes and project files and try to remember what did or didn’t work. Imagine what could have gone differently – not just in a bad way, but imagine something outlandish that might have happened.

From these possibilities, maybe you can come up with a more concrete goal. Maybe you’d like to branch out into different kinds of user research or get away from a certain design style you’ve been over-reliant on recently. Either of these goals is more practicable and acheivable than a broad, routine one.

Resolutions Rule #3: Set a Target

Hand-in-hand with the specificity rule, setting a target will give you a real, attainable professional goal. The last thing you want is to find yourself next New Year’s Eve wondering whether you succeeded at your old resolutions or not. The only definite way to know is to give yourself a reachable target.

The target you set might be more or less specific depending on what your particular goal is. For example, if you want to try and branch out into new areas of your profession, you might set a target to get hired or promoted into a new role.

If you have a general goal, to be more creative, for instance, you could set a target to get through X number of projects using a brand new style you haven’t used before. Or, you could dedicate yourself to reading at least 30 minutes of new design thinking each day to help you think up more creative ideas.

Resolutions Rule #4: Critique Your Past Year

The best way to find resolutions that apply specifically to you is to closely reconsider what they last year or two has been like for you. You don’t have to go back in time and dwell on mistakes, but it will be very helpful to remember times when you had a creative block, learned something new, or went through big changes.

These relative upheavals reveal times when you were likely pushed into some of your best creative moments. If they weren’t, they might at least reveal some room for improvement.

Resolutions Rule #5: Talk It Over

Whether you’re close enough with coworkers or have to turn to personal friends, discussing your resolutions is a great way to workshop them. Everyone will benefit and you can also turn this into an ad hoc support group, or at least a way to check in throughout the year and see how everyone is coming along with their resolutions.

People might also be able to think of more examples from the past year and help you tailor your resolutions into attainable professional goals that will make a huge difference in your life and help you stay inspired and at our creative best.

Keep Good Records Throughout the Year

Coming up with creative New Year’s Resolutions often seems so difficult because we have to look back on tons of information from the past year with little or no resources to remind us what happened an when. Creatives especially are likely to miss smaller events such as prototypes or ideas that didn’t make it into the final product.

Taking the time to write down major events is a great way to build a reminder for yourself that you can take a look at when the year is over. A full-fledged scrapbook or diary isn’t necessary, although the more information you have about how you felt at crucial moments, the easier setting tailored goals will be.

If you haven’t tried this method before, consider setting out to do so as one of your resolutions for the coming year. Remember, it doesn’t have to be incredibly detailed. You can even keep a brief timeline of the year and keep adding to it, so long as it has enough information to help you set meaningful goals.

8 Best Creative New Year’s Resolutions

Popular New Year’s Resolutions might be general or personal, but creative New Year’s Resolutions can be a bit more unique, personalized, and specific. Here are a few of the best ones that will build your creative skillset next year:

1- Spend Less Time On The Computer

This has got to be one of the most popular New Year’s Resolutions at the end of 2020. With the huge increase in remote work and streaming services, many people have been living their professional and personal lives through a computer screen.

Step away from the computer screen and enjoy things like books, music, and activities done by hand like cooking, crafts, or small building projects. Creative burnout is a huge threat and staring at a screen for all your waking hours is a great way to zap your brain.

To make this a more actionable a measurable goal, aim to spend a certain amount of hours per day or week completely unplugged. Don’t let that smartphone sabotage your efforts – set the ringer on for emergency contacts and leave it somewhere you can’t check it every other minute.

2- Find New Role Models

Creatives need to get a new perspective as often as they can. Even if you don’t adopt it completely, viewing a new kind of design or programming can inform your own craft and make it more versitile. Unless you’re a fanatic, there’s likely to be tons of creatives in your field who you’re unaware of.

These creatives may not be from your country, but there are tons of books, podcasts, and websites that will help broaden your horizons. If you go into with the goal of more exposure and not radically changing your own style, even products you hate can be instructive.

You might burn out on a role model if you try to study them for a whole year. Instead, try to pick a new person, firm, or product line to study each month. That way, you’ll be sure to get a mixed bag and tons of new information by the end of the year.

3- Make a Lateral Move

Tons of creatives have made a move from one field to another. Moving from graphic design to product design, for example, takes a particular amount of skillbuilding and reframing the way you think about design.

Setting a professional goal to move into an area of the creative industry that interests you is one of the greatest creative New Year’s Resolutions because it affords you more time to make the change.

Break this process down into stages and set a course for yourself throughout the year. This is a great example of how talking over your resolutions can help you organize them. Find people who have made the same or a similar lateral move and have them help you make a reasonable plan for the year ahead.

4- Try Something You Know Will Fail

While we don’t recommend trying this at the office, you might try it on a personal project or create an iteration of a product that you know won’t work on your own time. While this isn’t one of the most popular New Year’s Resolutions, it’s a great one for creatives because it allows space for complete freedom.

If you know something is bound to fail from the start, you’ll not only be able to take risks but you’ll also be thinking along avenues that you might not get to tread very often. Plus, you won’t spend tons of time perfecting a personal project if you know it won’t come out to much in the end.

Even if you guessed correctly and it doesn’t work, you’ll still have learned a ton about freehand creative work. This is a great strategy for brainstorming, as well. If you want to turn this into a more measurable goal, try to purposefully fail at something a few times per year.

5- Explore Archaic Tools

This resolution ties into the first one in some ways but it will also fuel your creative mind in fantastic ways. Although remote work and the digitization of just about everything have led most creatives to primarily rely on digital tools, it’s refreshing and just plain fun to go back to some of the analog tools that were used before computers were so ubiquitous.

Although it might not be feasible at work when stakeholders are bearing down with deadlines and demands for deliverables, taking some personal time to tinker around with drawing by hand, painting, organizing layouts on paper, stenciling, and collage are all great ways to be creative and work with your hands.

Graphic designers, videographers, and programmers might not be able to go completely analog, but there are some ways to get a similar experience. Videographers might try flipbooks or, where possible, an old film camera. Programmers might try mods or pick up a book on old programming languages while graphic designers can dig up old magazines from online archives to find new examples of design.

6- Try New Mediums

That doesn’t just mean different aspects of your creative role. If you’re a content writer and spend a lot of time with words, carve out time each day or week to listen to music or look at some physical art in a gallery. Graphic designers who spend lots of time thinking about space can go listen to a live reading.

Where possible, a trip to see live music of almost any kind is perfect for getting your head completely away from your work. If you listen to lots of music already, you might try podcasts or a non-aural medium like photography. Crafts like stitching or puzzles are also a good option to switch gears.

7- Start Keeping a Journal

It can’t be stressed enough how much journaling can help creatives of all trades. If you’re a visual person, a sketchbook can help you keep track of ideas and also take your mind of whatever projects you have going at work. Writers can write whatever they please or keep record of ideas and samples that inspire them.

Even very technical creatives like UX/UI designers can benefit from jotting down ideas in a journal. If you have the right notebook, you can even take sample stickers and cards that you like and paste them inside.

In today’s world of filled bookmarks and downloads folders, keeping a short list of things you’d like to read later and marking them off as you do so is a great way to keep from getting overwhelemd.

8- Build a Better Mousetrap

Here’s a specific resolution that’s great for prompting creative thinking. Take something you already know you can do, a particular part of your creative job, and find a way to do it better. It will depend on the nature of the thing how you’ll define what better looks like.

Don’t get too general or you’ll never be able to be sure if you acheived this goal. UX designers might, for example, set a goal to make better personas. Give yourself time to explore new ideas, test them out, and then implement.

If you can handle it, this can be a monthly or seasonal goal. Alternatively, you can aim for a bigger target and give yourself the whole year to put it into practice.

Conclusion:

Most popular New Year’s Resolutions sound nice but they’re impossible to measure, which is why so many people have given up on them before spring even begins. Creatives can set specific and actionable resolutions to help them stay creative and imaginative throughout the year, all while meeting professional goals as well.

Try some of the tips and sample creative New year’s Resolutions in this guide to give yourself some fun projects that will keep you motivated and producing your best work for the year. Even if you don’t make resolutions at the end of the year, it’s never to late to start!

Stress can be caused by many factors in the workplace. For creatives, overworking under significant pressure may overwhelm the mind and stifle the imagination. In today’s increasingly digital world, signs of stress are more easily overlooked or misattributed to other causes.

Luckily, there are also many things you can do to reduce stress and avoid creative burnout. It all starts with realizing when you’re stressed and then identifying the source of that stress. There’s nothing more important for workers in a creative field to keep their minds sharp.

Read on to find out some of the telltale signs of workplace stress and some of the most effective stress relief tips for creatives.

Stress at the Workplace

We’ve all seen it happen to coworkers and more than likely had it happen to ourselves as well: irritability, exhaustion, and even panic related to our jobs. This anxiety can come from a variety of stressors, but no matter what its source, it can lead to serious physical manifestations and mistakes caused by neurotic and sped up work.

Even in a comparatively relaxed environment, there are plenty of stressors. It only makes sense. After all, our jobs are the main way – the only way, for many – that we can earn a living.

But stress doesn’t always come from the fear of losing one’s job. For many creatives, the pressure to outshine the competition and continue producing innovative work also causes plenty of anxiety. In addition, creatives have a special pride in their work that doesn’t always exist for people in non-creative roles.

Where Does Stress Come From?

Stress is actually a good thing in small doses. Our bodies developed the stress response to help us avoid predators and other dangers. Stimuli go from our ears or eyes to our amygdala, the brain’s emotional processing center, which then sends a distress signal to the hypothalamus.

The hypothalamus is like the captain’s chair for the rest of your body. Even if you don’t remember the specific sections of your brain that cause a stress response, you should know that blood pressure, heartbeat, and breathing can all be affected.

The hypothalamus also gives your body extra energy to fight or flee during stressful situations. That many have been well and good for our ancient ancestors, but in a workplace environment it usually just makes us jittery and probably causes us to work too quickly and make mistakes.

In terms of external sources of pressure, just about anything can cause stress if you let it. Traffic jams and other small inconveniences cause small amounts of stress or frustration. Larger problems like deadlines, customer service, termination, or money worries can provoke a much larger response.

Common Workplace Stress Factors

Studies on workplace stress have revealed many alarming things, but they also shed some illustrative light that should help us take a more rational look at what stresses us out at work.

For example, a quarter of people studied said their jobs were the most stressful thing in their lives. 80% stated that they felt some stress because of their work and half of that amount said they needed help to deal with the stress.

Four categories were identified as the most common source of workplace stress:

1- Workload – 46%

Creatives are under constant pressure to meet deadlines. It might be for a finished product, a prototype, or other deliverables like research or personas. Committing to too many deadlines at once is a surefire way to stress yourself out.

One common problem for creatives is that management doesn’t fully understand what the art department or creative team does. This causes them to have unrealistic expectations and assign too many deadlines or leave insufficient time for tasks to be completed. Remote work has increased this likelihood since management can’t see remote creative workers.

2- People Issues – 28%

Management might be overbearing, clients could be too demanding, or coworkers could be creeps or just unpleasant to work with. Whatever the specifics, other people always seem to be involved in stressful situations.

Learning how to work with people who have different political opinions or a wildly different approach to problem-solving is an arduous task, but it’s well worth it for all the stress it will save in the future.

3- Work-Life Balance – 20%

Remote work and the ever-evolving slew of messaging platforms are making it increasingly difficult to really unplug and get off the clock officially. If you don’t set a clear schedule, you’re much more likely to be answering emails at midnight.

For remote workers, building a dedicated workspace is also helpful. If you work from the couch, you won’t have anywhere to move to when you’re off work and want to relax. Getting to a good work-life balance is partly about mentality and partly about drawing clear professional boundaries.

4- Job Security – 6%

This particular stressor is bound to have a more significant impact at different times depending on the general state of the job market. But if your source of income is threatened then all the rest of your life is threatened, too. While it thankfully isn’t a recurring stressor for most of the study respondents, the potential for job loss is easily the most stressful situation any professional can find themselves in.

What is Creative Burnout?

Burnout is a term that was invented in the 1970s by an American psychologist named Herbert Freudenberger. After sustained periods of very high stress levels, people become so worn down that they aren’t able to deal with problems, have lost all excitement for their jobs, and may even be dealing with symptoms of severe depression. This listlessness is called burnout.

Workers in any field can experience burnout. From teenage cashiers who burn out because they’re tired of customers to creatives who burn out because they’ve just been at it too long, burnout is a serious concern. It could take a significant amount of time and energy to overcome burnout once you’ve had it.

Creative burnout is unique because it doesn’t necessarily have to be complete exhaustion with all aspects of the work. In fact, many people take comfort in the more routine tasks of their job when they’re blocked up and can’t think of any new ideas.

That loss of creative energy is the hallmark of creative burnout, which can cause designers and other creatives to lose faith in their profession entirely.

Early Warning Signs of Stress & Creative Burnout

Everyone experiences stress to some degree and we all have different ways of showing it. However, there are some clear signs that you’re under stress, and recognizing them will is the first step toward stress reduction at work. Look out for the following symptoms of stress:

• Headache
  

Your brain is working overtime when it’s stressed. Pair that with other physical changes that are part of the fight or flight response and you have lots of blood pumping and quick breathing going on. Plus, you might be forgetting to drink enough water when you’re stressed, which can help create headaches.

• Sleep Disturbances
  

Tossing and turning about unresolved problems is a common result of stress. If your brain can’t calm down, it’s hard to get to sleep. You may also be plagued by dreams about the stressful situation as your brain processes the events of the day.

• Short Temper
  

The physical and mental fatigue of stress can easily make even the nicest person a bit snappy with others. This is an unfortunate side effect because it often keeps people at a distance who could otherwise help resolve the stressful situation.

• Reduced Enthusiasm
  

Besides just feeling tired or mad, you could also start to lose the passion you once held for your job. This is very closely related to creative burnout and may spread to other areas of your life as well.

• Symptoms of Illness
  

Sustained stress can also put a damper on your body’s immune system. Losing sleep certainly doesn’t help. People who are prone to stress eating could also be cramming in unhealthy processed foods instead of getting the vitamins and minerals their bodies need to stay healthy.

Stress Reduction at Work: Identifying Causes

The most important thing you should do once you’ve recognized the early warning signs of stress is to find out what’s causing the stress. In most cases, the simplest answer is also the correct one. But sometimes there’s something larger going on behind the scenes that we’ve become blind to one way or another.

If your workplace has a very strict hierarchy, stress may be caused by ineffective management. Lack of support, perceived unfairness, poor communication, lack of appreciation, or a work-reward imbalance are just some things created by mismanagement that can cause stress for workers.

Sudden changes also provoke a stress response. That might not necessarily be in the workplace, but if there’s a big change in your personal life it could be affecting you in ways you weren’t expecting.

A lack of autonomy and control can also be very stressful. Creatives typically go to great lengths to learn the tricks of their trade but working with stakeholders who aren’t in creative roles themselves often stymies the efforts of creatives and makes their job more difficult.

The most important time to identify stressors is when you are experiencing the early symptoms and cannot logically identify why you might be stressed out. We tend to block out certain things so that we can continue on with our lives. We just get overwhelmed sometimes and don’t realize it until it’s too late.

7 Stress Relief Tips for Creatives

Losing your imaginative drive because of stress isn’t just bad news for your job. Creatives have a dedication to their craft the goes beyond the workplace. Losing a creative outlet to burnout can be a bleak process in your personal life as well.

If you do find yourself overwhelmed or consistently exhibiting some of the early warning signs of stress, try some of the following methods to overcome the stressful situation:

1- Say It Out Loud

One of the worst things about stress is that it isn’t always a logical response. It also makes us irrational, which means our response to the stressful situation can far outweigh the real impact of the stressor itself.

Sometimes the thing that has us stressed out is kind of silly or has absurd humor to it. Stating the problem out loud not only helps us recognize when we might be overreacting, but it also helps us clearly identify the central stressor.

If you don’t want your coworkers to think you’ve snapped and started talking to yourself, you can get similar benefits by writing your problem down.

2- Go Outside

With everything so computer-oriented these days, it’s easy to go for long stretches without going outside except to run errands or commute. Even a short walk can help boost your mood and take your mind off things. Plus, you might run into neighbors or friends and that social interaction is also very helpful.

The CDC recommends adults get 150 minutes of brisk activity each week. That could be a half-hour walk five times a week, for example. It helps to give your body calming stimuli completely unrelated to the stressors at work.

3- Meet Friends & Family

Socializing is a great way to distance ourselves from stressful situations in our professional lives. Friends and family might also be our biggest supporters and confidantes, making them ideal candidates for a gripe session.

Jobs stress us out because they’re how we make a living. It’s important to see friends and family so we can remember what kind of living we’re working to make.

4- Avoid Caffeine

The image of the creative burning the midnight oil with a pot of coffee on the desk beside them may have an allure for some, but all that caffeine only increases the jitters and quickened heartbeat that our natural stress response provokes anyway.

It’s quite common for the jittery symptoms from too much caffeine to make you feel stressed on their own, even when you’re not in a particularly stressful situation.

5- Try New Things

If your creative output is what has you stressed, you might need a new perspective or new stimuli. Try something you haven’t done or don’t do often so your mind can chew on some novel information. You might try a new activity like yoga or hobbies such as cooking, photography, or music.

Museums are also great places for seeing unique things. If it’s feasible, traveling to a new city can help, even if it’s only for a day or two.

6- Occupy Yourself With Small Tasks

Stress reduction at work doesn’t have to be a momentous or long-lasting problem. If you find yourself stressed out one day, try concentrating on the more routine aspects of the job. As long as you can still feel productive, the stress response shouldn’t have too big an impact.

7- Take Advantage of Constraints

This is one of the most vital stress relief tips. There’s a limit to the creativity and enthusiasm of every creative, so rather than getting depressed about that, why not look at it as a tool? After all, necessity is the mother of invention.

If you know you only have so much dedication to work with – say, you can work in earnest for 2 hours before you’re tired of it – then build your schedule to suit. Your inspired moments may not come at the same time every day, but you can build a schedule that allows you to hop into action when you do get inspired.

Coming up with creative solutions is a central part of the job description for most creatives, but too often that problem-solving is reserved for clients and stakeholders and not for stress reduction at work.

Conclusion:

Stress reduction at work is a tricky subject. Since we can be stressed out to varying degrees by any number of factors, getting rid of that stress is often complicated. However, if you know yourself well enough and have the right tools to properly identify the main stressor, solving the issue becomes much easier.

Hopefully, some of the stress relief tips in this article will help next time you find yourself overwhelmed or in a creative funk. The most important things to remember is that everyone experiences work-related stress and life will never be completely stress-free. Our enthusiasm has limits, even for things we really enjoy. Realistic expectations are a good place to start for creatives who want to reduce their work-related stress.

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Designers have long been preoccupied with the way psychology impacts their trade. A general summary of some of the most important aspects of design psychology, the Gestalt principles are several rules that summarize how our minds process visual information.

Building with these design fundamentals allows for a more intuitive design and lessens the cognitive load on the user, meeting their needs in an easier way and enticing them to use the product again in the future.

Many designers have come across Gestalt principles before but many have a narrow view on how they can be applied. Read on for a full rundown of the Gestalt principles and how they’re used to build beautiful, effective designs.

Where Did Gestalt Principles Come From?

No, there wasn’t some design genius named Gestalt who first identified all these design principles. These rules are based on the work of three psychologists named Max Wertheimer, Wolfgang Köhler, and Kurt Koffka. Beginning around 1912, these psychologists strove to identify how the different parts of an idea are linked together by the human mind into a single whole.

The school of psychology that predated these men, called Constructivism, held that human thought and ideas are built up of small pieces just the way that elements are built up of atoms and molecules. As such, constructivists were trying to break down thinking into its smallest pieces.

Gestalt thinking sought to do the opposite. After observing that people naturally made order out of elements and created a whole new idea as a result, Gestaltists sought to lay out the mechanisms used to do so.

As an example, think of a film or a piece of music. While there are thousands of individual frames and countless notes used, we naturally perceive a whole – the film or the song – from the disparate parts. Aristotle’s maxim that “the whole is greater than the sum of its parts” indicates that extra something that is added when we humans create a story out of disparate pieces.

The 4 Essential Gestalt Psychological Principles

These rules are based on the structure of stimuli. Our minds group individual stimuli and then make associations about the resulting whole objects based on their relationship to other whole objects.

For instance, 12 lines on a sheet of paper might not mean anything at all, but if they’re grouped the right way we’ll recognize them automatically as a transparent three-dimensional cube. From a young age, we learn that this cube has a fundamental relationship with the square, a smaller group of its parts that has different possible uses than other shapes such as a sphere.

Broadly speaking, the most important design fundamentals you can derive from Gestalt psychology are as follows:

1- Reification

To reify something abstract is to make it into something more real or physical. In the context of Gestalt psychology, it has to do with the negative space around the stimuli. If you have four 90° angles facing one another on a white background, the negative space in between them will be perceived as a square.

This principle operates based on our brains’ natural tendency to look for the contour of objects to determine what they are. Cover three of the angles and you’ll see just the remaining L, but it will be hard not to see the square when everything is uncovered.

For a more physical example, think of the thousands of pictures that have been posted all over social media with two hands in the shape of a kind of compressed C shape. Each hand means nothing on its own, but together they make the shape of a heart.

2- Emergence

Similar to the reification principle, emergence is the creation of a complicated scene from smaller pieces. To clarify the difference: reification is the construction of a shape from negative space while the smaller pieces or negative space can cause emergence.

There are two kinds of emergence. Weak emergence occurs when there is a larger shape or image created but the individual parts retain their characteristics while in strong emergence the combination of the parts is so thorough that they no longer appear to exist.

Compare traffic flow on a highway and a running river. You can still see the cars as individual parts on the highway but you cannot see the individual molecules in the river.

3- Multistability

Returning to the 12 lines that make a transparent cube, we can also see multistability at work. While the 12 lines make the cube, each of the 4 lines forms a square. It’s also possible to see the whole cube from separate angles.

This ability to kind of toggle from one perception to another is called multistability. An interesting aspect of this multistability is that our brains can perceive these different shapes and angles without losing the cohesiveness of any one of them. Lots of optical illusions rely on this fact, but copying this kind of object design will likely confuse users.

4- Invariance

Even when we can’t actually rotate or resize them, we can recognize objects shown from different angles. Our brains can readily discern that two objects are the same even if they’re distorted by different lighting, stretching, or resizing. We can also tell when objects are physically different from one another even when they’re similar and presented with different distortions.

Repeating patterns feature the same object exactly the same, but we can see invariance illustrated by rotating patterns, which alternate between an image and a rotated or flipped variant. While we do understand the difference, we also don’t have any trouble accepting that both of the shapes represent the same object.

The 7 Prägnanz Design Principles

The psychological principles just discussed are applied to design through something called Prägnanz, which describes how humans organize our perceptions into a simple, symmetrical, and regular order. This application results in Gestalt Laws that are applicable to all sorts of design work.

• Law of Closure
  

Our brains will see an entire object even if parts of its shape or outline are missing. We also tend to complete shapes that have pieces missing. This tendency is called closure.

Gestaltists believe the human mind completes gaps in objects this way to promote more regularity. Without closure, the slightest aberration or missing piece would render a given object completely meaningless and unreadable for our brains.

• Law of Proximity
  

Objects that appear to be near to one another form into groups automatically in our minds. This is handy for counting things quickly and also for sorting groups of different objects without having to reorder them. The objects that are grouped together can also form shapes that are immediately recognizable to us such as rectangles or squares.

Representing numerical information and organizing lots of options into a digestible format are both made easier thanks to the law of proximity.

• Law of Symmetry
  

Our minds love symmetry. Groups containing an even number of similar objects allow us to make groups of two, which in turn gives us a sense of order. Though they might not be connected in any way, two objects facing each other are likely to be grouped in our minds to form a pair.

The law of symmetry applies even when the two objects are a significant distance apart. While this can also help count slightly faster, you can also use this design principle to highlight information that is in between the two objects that have perceived symmetry.

• Law of Similarity
  

Whenever similar objects appear on the same plane, we tend to group them together. For example, a scattering of multicolored dots can make a shape if all the red dots form a square because our brains automatically see all the red dots as connected.

Although they frequently work simultaneously depending on the design, the laws of proximity and similarity will also form a hierarchy when they exist at the same time. Either one can override the other – meaning the proximity of objects or their similarities can be more readily apparent.

• Law of Common Fate
  

The most dramatically-named of the Gestalt principles by far, the law of common fate describes the way we group together objects that seem to be traveling along the same path and toward the same destination.

In the real world, you can think again of traffic flow on the highway. Northbound cars and southbound cars are viewed as two distinct groups. Flocks of birds are also seen as a collective unit because of this principle.

• Law of Continuity
  

We can perceive an entire object even when another object overlaps it because of the law of continuity. Just like our brains can fill in gaps, it can also fill in parts of objects that are hidden from view. This law also states that we are less likely to view parts of an object as a whole if there is a sudden or sharp change in direction.

Interruption in continuity is one of the most common ways to frustrate a user. Frequently, not being able to see part of an object will look like the design has broken down and not like a purposeful choice.

• Law of Past Experience
  

Humans are learning animals, which means we base our knowledge on what has happened to us in the past. In abstract terms, this means we start to build an opinion of an object as soon as we see it and expect it to have a set of unchanging characteristics.

In terms of design fundamentals, we can think about web design. In the early days of the internet, there weren’t very many rules and webpages looked fairly cluttered in a way that looks insane to us today. But past experience also helps us build stereotypes that make new designs easier to use.

For instance, we all look for the home button in the upper left and most people have become accustomed to pinching and swiping on their touchscreens because they have used that technology enough before.

Design Fundamentals & Gestalt Principles

While they are incorporated in various ways across web design and product design, these Gestalt principles aren’t a step-by-step guide to producing a design. Rather, they’re guidelines for the way our mind works to collect information. Since designers are always aiming to create products that users can understand immediately and use without issue, understanding how to apply these principles is key.

One bit of good news is that these guidelines are broadly applicable, meaning the designers and the users should have a common understanding of them. Many designers can just spot when something doesn’t work or just looks a bit off because the design is violating one of the Gestalt principles.

It’s always best to stay innovative and work to find new ways to manipulate these laws to make an even better product. As designers work through user research on specific products, they tend to invent new ways to apply design thinking to graphic layouts. Here are a few of the ways design principles and Gestalt laws work together:

1- Logo Design

From the detailed logos of the 19th century to the slimmed-down minimalist ones that are so popular today, logos are one of the most apparent ways Gestalt principles are applied. Consider the IBM logo, which has horizontal sections removed. What better way could you illustrate the law of closure?

2- App Development

UX/UI designers who work on apps often have tons of information to display. The law of past experience allows them to rely on things like the hamburger menu which many people have already seen before.

Popular apps that feature photographs and user posts usually take advantage of the law of proximity by displaying a photo overlaid on the background. The user perceives the image floating on top of the original feed because they can still perceive the whole feed.

3- eCommerce

All designers want to guide the user to some kind of focal point, usually an important piece of information or a call to action. If you want people to find the button that allows them to purchase or subscribe to a product, then you have to build a design that intuitively brings them there.

A bad example of this is pop-ups or hanging banners that pester the user and actively interfere with their use of the page. Past experience teaches us to minimize or close these windows immediately. But product or service comparison tools that separate information using color-coded boxes use the law of similarity to reduce the mental load on the user.

4- GIFs & Infinite Animation

The law of common fate is constantly at play in the infinite animations that have been such a huge graphic design trend lately. These animations are frequently quite playful, leading the viewer to separate the content into multiple groups based on their probable destination, only to have the perspective change to reveal that all the pieces come together to form a single item, usually a logo.

5- The Infinite Scroll

Social media sights seeking to increase the time users were spending on their sites turned to the infinite scroll, which is when the news feed never seems to end. The law of continuation is at play in this design feature because the news feed, however far down you manage to get, is still perceived as one flowing object even though it’s constantly disappearing at the top of the page and reappearing at the bottom again.

6- New Product Design

Companies that were once eager young startups are now aged, in some cases by as much as two decades. This calls for a redesign of their products. But as users have built up brand loyalty and expectations based on the original, changing things too much can be a disaster.

Using the law of past experience, it’s possible to recreate the feeling of the original product while still innovating. Certain standout features can be left how they were or updated but left in the same place, depending on what the product is.

Conclusion:

Gestalt principles are need-to-know information for any kind of visual designer. They are the bedrock for tons of design fundamentals and essential for understanding how the human brain takes in new stimuli and converts them into useful information.

There are many more design principles in addition to the ones discussed in this guide, but the Gestalt principles are some of the most basic ones. Hopefully, this guide has illustrated what they are and how they can be used to build more intuitive designs.

What exactly do art departments and creative teams do for businesses? This question is often on the mind of stakeholders and other employees who lack a comprehensive understanding of the design thinking that underlies creative work.

Design thinking is a non-linear process used to approach problems from a new perspective based on market research and user input. It creates more diverse brainstorming and unique solutions and makes the product and its delivery more appealing and useful.

Once you have a grasp on the principles of design thinking, communicating with creatives and understanding their solutions will be much simpler, as will thinking of better solutions that are tailored to your business and its target market.

Read on for a full rundown of design thinking and how it’s used to innovate and vitalize products by businesses all over the world.

What is Design Thinking?

A concise definition of design thinking that avoids catchy buzzwords and jargon should provide a solid foundation for understanding its principles.

Design thinking is a multi-stage methodology to collect scattered information into an appealing product that satisfies user needs and desires. Identifying what the users want and the problems they experience – called “pain points” – is an essential part of design thinking. Business goals and design go hand in hand because users engage more with products that are tailored to them.

In case you have an image in your mind of creatives in colorful sweaters sitting around silently pondering, it’s important to note that design thinking is not a mental process but actually a series of action-based stages, which is great for managers and other stakeholders who want to monitor how a project is progressing.

However, there’s much more to this process than its concrete deliverables, which might include prototypes, wireframes, or personas. It also serves as an unparalleled communication and brainstorming tool.

Stages of Designing for Business

Creatives use design thinking for a great number of design products in addition to using it for apps, software, and physical products for companies. The process is similar in all cases but the following description is explained in business-related terms for additional clarity.

1- Empathize

To better meet users’ needs, you have to approach their problems from a place of understanding. Identifying their problems is one thing, but to know how the problems arise and in what ways they affect the lives of your users is another.

Most designers are driven by a general sense of empathy for people and a desire to help them and make their lives more convenient. Even if you don’t personally experience or identify with a given pain point, empathy is vital for viewing the user as a whole, independent person whose problems are valid and worthy of correction.

That might sound like so much false positivity, but consider a caricature of some sort of snake oil salesman – their goal might be to dupe people into purchasing a product instead of building a product that people genuinely want. Empathy is the first step to creating such a product.

2- Define

This second step is in large part a clarification of what was discovered in the first step. User research might be conducted as you define the user’s problems but it can also be done earlier, and designers may draw conclusions from the research in this second stage.

All of the problems identified in the research are collected into problem statements. Designers also build personas to summarize the real users of a product and highlight their most urgent pain points.

Regarding personas: many stakeholders disagree with personas when they first see them because the stakeholder has an idealized version of the people they want to buy the product. The point of personas is not to build an ideal user but rather to illustrate who the real users are.

3- Ideate

Once the problem statements and personas are there, it’s time to get to work brainstorming possible solutions. Brainstorming is nothing new for business professionals, but designers aim to ideate while simultaneously challenging any preconceived notions and prejudices that might produce inadequate solutions.

Too many potential solutions can overwhelm the process and damage its effectiveness, which is why designers frequently prefer to go through the beginning of their brainstorming process without too many people present.

All aspects of the problem statement should be addressed by any solution shortlisted during this third phase. Both business goals and design principles should be taken into account by each possible solution as well.

4- Prototype

Once possible solutions are identified it’s time to test them out. Not all prototypes will be complete products or inclusive of all aspects of the imagined final product. In fact, it’s best to have just enough in the prototype to identify possible failures and rule out the least effective possibilities.

For many stakeholders, prototypes are the single most important deliverable because they are physical results of the work of the designer(s). Don’t focus completely on getting prototypes from designers, though, because they aren’t always warranter. You don’t want your designers spending all their time building prototypes when they could be testing and working toward the final product in other more abstract ways.

5- Test

Of course, the designers and stakeholders shouldn’t be the only ones who determine the success or failure of a product. The users have to see the product or elements of it and give feedback on whether it addresses their problems effectively. The testing stage is where designers have users try out products or certain design elements to see if they work.

A great example of testing is the A/B test, where UX designers will give users two versions of a design to try out. There might only be a single difference, such as the presence or color of a button on a webpage. Users then report which of the options they prefer.

There’s not one stage of testing. Frequently designers will have to go back to the drawing board for tweaks and fixes many times in this process, but that’s a good thing. It means they’re identifying new aspects of the problem and inventing better solutions.

Is Design Thinking a Fixed Sequence?

Design is iterative, which means it’s performed through individual attempts at a design which is then altered based on new information. Because new information comes in so regularly throughout the design process, you can revisit any one of the stages at any point.

For example, you may discover a new aspect of the problem and return to the define stage to write out a more inclusive problem statement. Building a new prototype might require additional brainstorming. It’s entirely possible to discover a deeper empathy for the problem you’re addressing several times in the course of creating a design.

This flexibility is what makes this process so effective at designing for business. Although you might take a meandering route, the general path always leads from identifying users’ problems toward a final product that solves them.

Bias and Design Thinking

Building a product or service for an imagined problem or consumer can go wrong. That’s because someone who imagines a problem based on their own view of things is relying on a limited individual experience that is not likely to be illustrative of other people’s lives.

While there are trends, there is no individual experience that speaks for most people. We think differently, have different personal philosophies, and thus have different priorities. Rather than trying to design one thing that will be received the same way by all people, it’s best to build a flexible product that users can put to a variety of purposes depending on what they need.

For example, if we were building a hypothetical online shopping website, it wouldn’t be necessary to build only one pathway for users to get from the homepage to the shopping cart. Users will rightfully find this brief experience unfulfilling; it will seem as if there is no desire from the company to do anything for the user except sell them something.

Building a website with a wealth of information and tools for comparison, calculations, and user reviews, though, will give the user a much more involved experience. More importantly, it puts the user in control of their own experience. That empowerment is a critical key to make products more appealing.

This isn’t an argument that particular stakeholders or professionals are always tainted with bias, but rather that one of the explicit purposes of design thinking is to identify bias and eliminate it by going straight to the users and getting their opinion. Designers might approach a problem with their own biases but research and testing eliminate the worst of these, provided the testing and research are done correctly.

Design Thinking As a Communication Tool

Managers and other stakeholders may not see how business goals and design work together, but since design thinking is grounded in human experience, it’s a great framework for discussion. Creatives discuss ideas and organize their own thoughts within this context so using it to explain things to non-creatives just makes sense.

Beyond simply explaining ideas to others, design thinking can also be used to solicit solutions from stakeholders who might have ideas about a product or design that they have trouble articulating in a way that’s useful and constructive for designers or a creative team.

Outside specific design projects, the same methodology can be used to identify organizational solutions and build internal business processes that address the problems of employees and management. The way iteration and ideation combine in the process makes it ideal for groups to collaborate on a wide variety of projects.

Benefits of Designing for Business

Not only does design thinking foster healthy communication and reduce the impact of biased thinking, but it also provides an excellent structure that will make projects feel more interrelated. If your company builds up its own brand of design thinking that’s specifically tailored to the company’s brand and products, it can be even more effective at helping to build an office culture.

Here are a few other benefits of merging business goals and design:

• Innovation
  

The more you address problems through a design thinking framework, the more intuitive the process becomes. Soon, it will be a go-to structure that makes people more comfortable when they’re considering ideas that are new or completely different from previous solutions.

Riskier ideas tend to get tossed out more quickly in the ideation phase, but taking care to label them as potentially risky and keep them around on a kind of backburner if they have significant enough appeal is a great way to use design thinking to innovate.

• Customer Discovery
  

Identifying users’ problems involves outreach to new potential customers. Centering the user from the very beginning of a project frequently reveals new sections of the market that your business can target. Laying out a customer journey based on research findings can also reveal new ways to cater to the needs and wants of your existing customer base.

It might seem like wishful thinking, but the discovery of new customers and new avenues for reaching existing customers is an inherent result of more interaction with real users. Limited personal perspectives are widened and broadened by design thinking. Users are given the opportunity to express needs and desires that may otherwise not be apparent.

• Social Impact
  

Collaborating with users when designing new products and services also gives innovators new perspectives on how their target audience lives. That means opportunities for social outreach and more inclusive brand messaging will increase.

The relationship between businesses and society is frequently discussed in business ethics. While opinions as to the degree and nature of corporate responsibility vary, there’s just no denying that concretely improving the lives of customers will make them like your brand and company more. Designing for businesses can be summed up in a few words: Outreach builds better products.

• Unity
  

Because it goes to such great lengths to gather information on users and their pain points, the design thinking process also helps everyone involved with a project get on the same page. When everyone is starting on even footing, there’s less opportunity for disagreements and a better understanding of the project’s goals will be shared by all.

That’s not to say that people won’t have different or opposing views, but design thinking also provides a great avenue for settling disputes because the information is clearly laid out and universally shared.

• Streamlined Process
  

Once you start to think like a designer you’ll wonder how you ever got by any other way. The design thinking process is described in stages even though it’s not necessarily linear because it is a standard for organizing the long road from problem identification to product release in a way that saves time and money.

Business products that were invented to look good and impress people simply aren’t on the same level as those that took their users into account from the very beginning. Every product needs a design to be created, but there’s a stark difference between designs that were created for the designers and those that were created for the user.

• Better Products
  

All the testing and prototyping of design thinking eliminates bugs and product shortcomings that might have been missed otherwise. The first iteration of your product would likely have worse reviews from the people who used it, but the iterations constructed when designing for business eliminate worse products.

This is all done according to the desires and needs of the user. Even if they think they want something, design testing allows you to see how they truly use a product so you can give them what’s actually needed. That might look different than their idea of the product, but if you show them something they didn’t even know they wanted, you’ll have a much more satisfied customer who is more likely to return in the future.

Conclusion:

Business goals and design go hand in hand but far too many executives and shareholders have a hard time seeing how. Basically, if you’re trying to sell something to someone it makes so much more sense to get them involved. This truth is borne out by the success of the most successful companies that have clearly implemented design thinking in their product and branding designs.

Hopefully, this guide has helped clarify exactly what people mean when they talk about design thinking and illustrated some general ways you can use design thinking to make your products more effective and your business more successful.

Onboarding properly is the best way to build a lasting positive relationship with employees and make sure they’re happy in their role at the company. Most businesses already have a general onboarding procedure in place but these traditional plans need some adjusting to remain effective in the current business world where remote work is increasingly common.

Tactics like shadowing, ramping up, and buddy systems all require regular monitoring that might not be feasible in a remote working environment. Fortunately, the same new technology that has made the recent uptick in remote work possible also offers unique solutions to these onboarding problems.

Whether you’re new to remote working or trying to revamp an existing plan to make onboarding remotely easier, try out some of the tips in this guide for a smooth process.

What is Onboarding?

Onboarding is the process by which new hires are introduced to the company, their coworkers, their responsibilities, and workplace culture. Incidental paperwork and introductory material that can be covered in a day or two is generally a part of an orientation session that may or may not form a significant part of the onboarding process.

Some corporations, for example, have their new designers and other creative new hires go through intensive training sessions that extend for weeks. This is because there is a ton of brand history and design guidelines that have to be maintained by everyone.

Taking the most limited view of onboarding, we might conclude that it’s a non-specific term for the first couple of weeks when a new hire is still getting the hang of things. However, it’s a bit more complicated than that.

How Long Should Onboarding Last?

The length of time onboarding new talent takes will vary with the sort of job they’re starting. Senior talent and executive-level new hires could well be going through the onboarding process for the better part of a year or more because there is so much for them to learn. Usually, you can assume that the longer you expect a new employee to stay with the company, the longer the onboarding should probably be.

That’s because onboarding is a vital employee retention strategy. Clear communication about goals and responsibilities helps workers understand what’s expected of them, which means they’ll be better equipped to deliver on those expectations to mutual benefit for themselves and the company.

Rather than concentrating on a fixed end date for onboarding new talent, it might be more helpful to think about when onboarding new talent should start. Begin onboarding as soon as possible, even before the candidate is officially hired, to make sure that everything is clear and they’re properly introduced to the company and its goals.

The 4 Stages of Onboarding for Remote Jobs

This is only a rough map of a generic onboarding process that will change depending on company structure, the specific job, and the size of the team. However, onboarding new talent typically has the following stages:

• Pre-Hire
  

Before you actually select a candidate, you should have a definite onboarding process organized and in place. In fact, this procedure should be designed and tailored to the goals of the company before new roles are even created.

The sooner you start thinking about your onboarding process as an integral part of every employee’s relationship with the company and build a fixed procedure that allows every new hire to join the team and have clear communication channels within the organization, the more successful your onboarding will become.

• Week One
  

Communication and responsibility standards established in the first week of employment are likely to stand throughout an individual’s career with a company. That first week sets the tone and it’s critical to be as informative as possible and give new hires everything they need to fulfill their role.

This is also when you establish expectations and set milestones, including for the remainder of the onboarding process. People who know what to expect and what’s expected of them are in a much better position to succeed. They might not be experts by the end of the first week, but the initial onboarding process should demonstrate the company’s history, culture, and values in an authentic and approachable way.

• 90 Days
  

Building up to the first 90 days should function as a continuation of the successful practices used in the first week of onboarding a new employee. In addition to getting the new hire better acquainted with the company, this period should also integrate them with the rest of the team. For creatives, that means stakeholders as well as coworkers.

Ramping up also typically occurs in the first ninety days. It’s common to establish benchmarks at 30, 60, and 90 days, although that by no means guarantees that onboarding will be finished in the first 3 months.

• 6 Months – 1 Year
  

Onboarding is likely to transform into retention and future planning by the end of the first year, but before you reach that stage, you should see the full scope of an employee’s dedication, motivation, and productivity. If the rest of the onboarding process has been effective up to that point, the individual’s future with the company should be clear.

Most people decide if they’ll stay with a company within the first 6 months of working there. While some are a natural fit, it’s just as common for people and organizations not to mix. That first 6 months is a great time to get new perspective on the company, it’s functions, and current problems through fresh eyes, so make sure to get new hires involved as soon as possible and use surveys to take advantage of this opportunity.

Onboarding for Remote Jobs Vs Traditional Onboarding

The four stages we just discussed are equally important when you’re onboarding remotely. There are some new challenges presented by the virtual workspace but there are also plenty of new convenient tools that can help you rise to meet these challenges.

An office tour on the first day is a hallmark of traditional onboarding and a great example of how onboarding remotely changes the game a bit. Obviously you can’t physically meet new hires if you’re in a remote workspace, but that workspace can still be introduced as part of a digital tour. Show new hires the most important tools they’ll need to do their job and, most importantly, what they’ll need to know to get through the first stages of the onboarding process.

Communication is more important for onboarding remotely. Since remote workers are more or less isolated, they’ll need to hear from managers and coworkers to build up the sense that they have actually become part of a team. Otherwise, they could wind up feeling like they’re on their own.

If new hires start to second guess themselves or aren’t sure exactly what they should be doing, they’ll look for someone to ask. Ensuring that there is such a person available is the key to success – failing to identify that person and supporting the new hire throughout the onboarding process could leave them stranded and frustrated.

Tools Used for Remote Onboarding

Bringing someone new onto the team without ever having met them is challenging. Too often, managers are the go-to person performing all the onboarding, and for remote workers, that will prevent them from integrating with the rest of the team.

Here are some of the best tools to use to make onboarding for remote jobs easy and effective:

• Video Conferencing Platforms
  

Different companies prefer certain platforms for video conferencing, but whichever one you choose, it will be the backbone of the onboarding process. Remote workers need to see who they’re talking to and everyone on the team should see each other as soon and as often as possible to understand that they are still working with human beings.

• Document Signing Software
  

Paperwork can be a huge speed bump when it come to the first week of orientation. Remote work and document signing software help solve this problem because they allow new hires to read through orientation and HR materials on their own time and then sign where they need to and send everything back.

As long as you make sure new hires know who to go to with questions, software has made paperwork one of the easiest parts of onboarding remotely.

• Collaboration Programs

To keep the team working together, there are some programs that are absolutely essential. Not only will chat software allow everyone to communicate and create channels for particular subjects, but live documents and digital workspaces allow teams of people to collaborate and provide feedback to one another.

These programs are essential to the work of any creative and that means they should also be a cornerstone of the onboarding process.

7 Tips for Onboarding New Talent Remotely

Although it’s a bit different from traditional onboarding, onboarding for remote jobs can be just as effective and much less of a timesuck for existing talent if you use some of these tips:

1- Change the Timeline

Even if you can accomplish the same goals in a virtual workspace as you can ina traditional office, the standard goals you set for 30, 60, and 90 days out will need to change if you’re onboarding new talent remotely. More than altering the goals themselves, changing the timeline should focus on giving enough time for the new hire to get acclimated and make sure they can accomplish what’s needed.

For example, you might make more frequent benchmarks at 45, 75, and 120 days while pushing some goals to later dates. That way, the onboarding can be more focused and less stressful for everyone.

2- Introduce the Team ASAP

Knowing the tools of the trade is important, but for remote workers meeting the people they’ll be working with is frequently the clearest signal that they are beginning a new job. It’s the part of remote onboarding that’s most similar to traditional onboarding methods.

Some managers are hesitant to introduce new talent to existing staff because they worry about the impression it will leave if the new hire leaves shortly after. All the more reason to have the whole team involved earlier in the onboarding process and even before the official hiring decision is made. If existing staff weighs in, the likelihood for surprises is greatly reduced.

3- Establish an Oboarding Plan – Then Personalize It

There’s no need to reinvent the wheel everytime a new person is brought onto the team. Establishing a clear and universal onboarding plan will make everything more streamlined and it also has the benfit of making the entire process seem more official to new remote hires.

However, you should leave a little room to personalize this plan slightly. One great idea is to have separate onboarding processes for freelancers and contractors and a separate one for more permanent members of the regular full-time staff. Since they’ll have different levels of involvement with the company, it just makes sense for their onboarding process to reflect that.

4- Prevent Employee Ghosting

The lack of direct, physical oversight is one of the largest factors preventing employers from offering remote positions. While you’ll never be able to guarantee an employee won’t simply disappear from the job, there are a few tricks you can use to make it less likely. For instance, responding to messages, phone calls, and emails quickly will keep them working and make them less likely to give up on the company.

Starting the onboarding process early and keeping everything clear will give the new hire a good first impression and make them more likley to stay. Staying in touch throughout the hiring process will help as well. If the new hire was left in the dark for long stretches before they were hired, they could well feel like they were already ghosted and be more likely to do the same in the future.

5- Foster Healthy Company Culture

It’s easy enough to hold fun social events in a traditional office so people can relax and be friendly with one another. When all or part of a team is remote, holding such events is a bit more difficult. Many companies have built coffee breaks, virtual happy hours, and remote networking events into their weekly and monthly schedules so even remote workers can get into the company culture.

A feeling of openness and trustworthiness is integral to a healthy company culture. If you want to build that sort of atmosphere, complaints and other issues have to be handles the right way. HR services are too commonly ignored when a team is remote because there’s less informal interaction, but giving employees somewhere to go and giving them opportunities to show who they are as people are still important in remote work.

6- Provide Networking Opportunities

Although you might not want to sponsor events with competing businesses, if your company is large enough you can hold events for everyone to speak together on professional topics and brainstorm about ways to use this new knowledge to problem-solve during working hours.

New hires who see such events early in their career with a company are likely to be impressed and view the business as a place of open communication and friendliness. It can’t all be parties and relaxation, but provide space for it to happen once in a while.

7- Continuing Education Resources

Whether it’s a deeper look at creative practices with the company or providing a way to get more information on their profession in general, giving new hires resources for further research will keep them more motivated and involved. Plus, this skill-building will obviously benefit the company in the form of better creative work.

Some companies have started virtual book clubs for their employees to talk about the latest trends and cutting-edge techniques in their field. Of course, it can also be based around reading in general and employees can take part in the book club during off hours if they choose.

Conclusion:

Onboarding for remote jobs is a new challenge that will likely require some adjustments to your existing plan for bringing new hires onto the team. Luckily, there are many digital tools that make the whole process easier.

The same principles still apply in the digital workplace. Clear communication, agreed-upon milestones, and a healthy company culture are essentials for making new talent happy and enticing them to stay with the company longer.

Healthy office culture forms the bedrock for design teams to excel in their endeavors. Engaging in graphic design exercises such as brainstorming, idea-sharing, and work critiques becomes more impactful within a setting where individuals are familiar and at ease with one another. This familiarity fosters an environment where team members are more inclined to express candid opinions without fear of causing offense.

Crafting an effective team of designers requires a nuanced approach compared to team-building in other professional contexts. Creativity is deeply intertwined with individual personalities, necessitating a more personalized approach to team-building. Graphic design exercises, tailored to the unique traits of team members, become instrumental in establishing a cohesive and innovative design team.

Both managers and designers can leverage the insights provided in this guide to institute and maintain an open, friendly, and productive community of creatives. The incorporation of graphic design exercises into team-building efforts enhances not only collaboration but also the overall creative output of the design team.

What is Teambuilding?

Teambuilding exercises are too frequently confused with any kind of social interaction between coworkers outside of the workplace. More than being just an opportunity for people to get to know each other (which is also important), teambuilding for designers generally includes four different kinds of activities:

• Goal-Setting
  

Laying out a plan of action is essential for any team and doubly so for designers. Brainstorming and defining what success and failure might look like will help everyone stay on the same page and make for much more effective design work.

In some sense, the central goal is always to translate business goals into a product that will drive users toward a call to action. If you can learn how to determine concrete goals and benchmark stages as a team, that entire process will be more intuitive and streamlined.

• Interpersonal Relations
  

Universal respect and trust should be a common practice when working with designers. Even if there are ideological, personal, or political disagreements on the team, everyone should have enough respect for the work and their coworkers to continue problem-solving in a rational, professional manner.

Learning how to share with one another and support teammates to resolve conflicts and disputes will keep everyone happy and the office dynamic as drama-free as possible. Teambuilding facilitates all these factors as well as demonstrating how the team can use a common mediator to address problems.

• Problem-Solving
  

Just like they have to do to solve design problems as effectively as possible, members of an art department or design team should also learn how to work together to address the problems they’ve identified. This might include leadership training and identifying personal strengths and weaknesses, or it could be more task-oriented.

This is one of the biggest parts of design work and therefore also one of the key aspects of teambuilding for designers. At the end of any exercise, participants should feel empowered to tackle any problem as a team.

• Role Clarification
  

Clarity regarding each team member’s responsibilities and duties will help foster a more forgiving and understanding attitude in the workplace. Beyond simply identifying their roles, participants might also act out the roles of others so that everyone can understand the entire structure of the team.

Role clarification can also help everyone understand the office hierarchy. Make sure everyone knows who they should go to to resolve disputes and get permission for risk-taking actions before they pull the trigger.

Common Goals of Teambuilding

These stages have several goals whether you’re working with designers at a corporation or a small agency. The team should define itself and its purposes to make sure it can stay on task and complete its objectives easily. Leadership should be clearly defined and agreed upon as well.

A general code of conduct and consequences should be described and agreed upon, although many companies have a specific section of their onboarding process that accomplishes this task well before teambuilding begins.

As far as the work itself goes, ensuring everyone is contributing to a project and taking ownership of their actions is very important. Communication methods should be outlined and illustrated so everyone understands them.

One aspect of team building that is frequently overlooked is how and who to ask for help if you need it. Construct your team strategically so that everyone has at least one other person they can go to if they get in over their head or simply cannot think of a solution to a problem.

Does Team Building Work?

Don’t expect team members who have issues with communication or a lack of respect for others to magically turn into superstar employees after a few teambuilding exercises. However, the majority of employees do benefit from teambuilding because they receive explicit information that they can continue to use for a long time to come.

If your goal is to get everyone on the same page and speaking frankly about goals, problems, and solutions, then teambuilding is a good idea. Some companies try to make a big splash by spending tons of money on fancy company outings, but a simpler exercise will very likely have a similar effect.

8 Common Teambuilding Exercises

If you want your teambuilding exercises to work you have to choose something everyone will legitimately enjoy and not view as an unwelcome interruption of their busy work schedule. Here are a few common teambuilding exercises you can try:

1- Honest Penny

This game is quick enough to break the ice before a meeting but you can also use it as part of a longer team-building session. All you need is a pile of pennies with years between 5 and 30 years old, depending on the average age of the group you’re working with.

Each person takes a penny at random and tells a story about something that happened to them during that year. It’s a great way to learn things from your coworkers that generally don’t come up in meetings. If you want to make it more design-centric, you can ask for design-related stories and use younger pennies.

2- Picture Book

For a game that requires a bit more creative thinking, you can assemble a series of photos and dole one out to each participant. Instruct them to hide their photos so no one can see what they look like, then ask everyone to make a story with their pictures by describing their own.

This is a fun game for designers because they likely already have a good sense of storytelling. You can make the photos as absurd and comedic as you like to get everyone laughing.

3- Human Tangle

Have all the participants stand around in a circle shoulder-to-shoulder. Make sure everyone is comfortable with physical contact before you begin. The goal is for everyone to hold the hands of two other people besides the ones immediately next to them without breaking the circle.

The solution to this challenge isn’t immediately apparent, but once people start to understand the pattern they should be able to build a continuous knot in no time.

4- Escape Rooms

One of the biggest teambuilding trends in the past few years is escape rooms, which are frequently set up to resemble apartments or laboratories that participants have to escape with the use of hints and clues. These rooms are great for problem-solving and learning to communicate and strategize with one another.

The only drawback to escape rooms is that they’ll probably require a longer commitment. Everyone will have to travel to one, which means time off work. But if you’re building a longer teambuilding session, escape rooms could be a great idea.

5- Categories

Designers will love this game because it challenges them to look at everyday objects in a new way. All that’s needed is a random assortment of things, different enough to make the teams think. You can use objects from around the office or you can use completely unrelated things.

The excuses people find to group certain objects together often lead to hilarious results. If you want to add another dimension of discussion to this game, you can include a mechanism for debating other teams’ categories or the inclusion of certain objects in a given category.

6- New and Improved

You can get a second game out of the random assortment of objects you used in the categories game. Instruct teams to select one object and make them design a complete ad campaign for the object, including slogans, logo designs, and branding package.

Designers can let their talents shine through in this game. Those with some copywriting experience will have catchier slogans and product designers will likely have a more inventive design. Best of all, since it’s so low-stakes, designers can use this game to lampoon certain aspects of the industry or make jokes about design.

7- Egg/Water Balloon Toss

A simple game a few people might remember from summer camp, a tossing game can also be tailored to be more applicable to designers. For example, rather than simply tossing the egg or water balloon back and forth, participants can be instructed to build something for catching the object without it breaking.

All you need to do to play the original game is one egg or balloon per person. Pairs face each other and toss the object, taking one step back each round. If you have limited resources, you can also have everyone stand around in a circle and toss one object to a random person across the circle.

8- Helium Stick

This is a great group activity for everybody and it doesn’t necessarily require the use of words. A helium stick for this particular task will have to be purchased, however. A helium stick is a long, thin rod that is filled with helium so that it floats slightly.

Have the team stand in two lines facing one another. They should put out both index fingers so that the stick can rest on them. The stick must stay in contact with everyone’s fingers the whole time as they attempt to lower it to the ground.

8 Teambuilding for Designers Who Work Remotely

Perhaps half of the activities we just named won’t translate to design teams that are completely or partly remote. Games that remote teams can play have to operate on imaginative games and talking with one another. Here are a few different options for teams working with designers in remote locations:

1- Two Truths & A Lie

The concept of this game is simple enough but it might not work for teams of people who haven’t known each other for very long. Each participant shares three statements, two of which should be true while the remaining one is not. Few games offer the opportunity to share personal stories like this one does and since it doesn’t require any materials at all you can easily adapt it for digital teams.

2- Desert Island

In this game, individuals or teams are instructed to take a list of things they might need if they were trapped on a desert island and place them in order of priority. Discussion is an important part of this game, so if you don’t have enough people to make teams then you should build in a discussion session afterward for people to discuss why they made their decisions.

3- Just One Question

Participants should be given a list of different situations as individuals or teams depending on the number of people you have. For each person’s scenario, the others can ask just one question to determine if they’re qualified and prepared to face the hypothetical event to come. At the end, everyone votes on who asked the best question for each situation.

4- Bucket List

Allow everyone a few minutes to come up with several things that are on their bucket list – things they want to do before they die. Go around the team and have people share what they put on their list. This is a great way to get to know people’s values and personalities.

5- Elimination

For this discussion-based game, small teams or individuals work fine. Start with a random comparison of two things that are fairly similar like bagels and doughnuts. Everyone must decide which one the world can keep and which will disappear forever. Continue as many rounds as you like with the winner of each round opposing a new object until it is eliminated.

6- Judgment Day

This game can go on for a while, especially if the topics chosen are interesting. Before the teambuilding session, instruct designers to choose a favorite website that features a design that they love. Go around and have people share links and explain why they like it and let other people make comments. The best part about this game is that it’s happy-hour-friendly if that fits into the office culture.

You can also use current office projects if the team is comfortable and interested in critiquing each other’s ideas and providing constructive criticism.

7- Arm’s Reach

Give each participant one minute to find an object within arm’s reach and invent a story about it. It could be a real story or a completely absurd piece of fiction, just so long as it’s relatively cohesive. If people are slow to talk, give them some pre-defined questions that their story has to answer to keep things moving along.

8- Guess Who?

For this game to work on a digital platform, the facilitator has to coordinate a fair bit. Ask each participant to send you the name of a famous person or character who is well-known enough for people to recognize the name. Then, dole them out to each person, making sure no one gets their own.

Go around one by one asking yes or no questions to learn who each person is. Each person can continue asking questions until they get “no” as a response. The funniest results come when people fail to recognize their own submissions.

Teambuilding Mistakes

Some managers hear about teambuilding and try to fit it in immediately at their next meeting. That can be fine, but if the team is already busy or know each other well enough, a teambuilding session can be boring or frustrating.

Working with designers means there could well be a few introverts on the team and every effort should be made to include them in the activity. Don’t force them, but make sure to ask them enough questions that they can contribute as well.

Teambuilding for designers is always more effective when the participants can demonstrate their creativity in a way that feels authentic and not forced. The most important thing to consider before holding teambuilding for designers is the office culture. Make sure everything is in keeping with the vibes at the workplace (real or digital) and everyone is happy to participate.

Many people who try teambuilding jump right to the flashier exercises that center on booze or sports. That might be perfect for your office, but make sure you’re tapping into a common interest so no one is left out.

For example, drinks can be included but they shouldn’t be required or the central goal. Similarly, don’t expect the whole office to be interested in team sports if their ages skew older or nerdier.

Conclusion:

Design team members have to be familiar and comfortable with one another to produce their best work. Teambuilding can help create more honest brainstorming and critiques as well as prompt the whole team to come up with more imaginative solutions.

Even if you’re on a remote design team, there are plenty of ways to get people learning about themselves, each other, and design thinking. The advice and activities in this guide to teambuilding for designers should help bring the whole design team together in meaningful ways.

A common misconception held by managers and other business leaders is that productivity tends to slump for employees working remotely. With remote work continuing to grow in popularity, any misgivings about letting employees work from home could be harmful to the entire company.

The good news is that productivity doesn’t plummet when workers go remote, but creatives may be hard-pressed to keep their imaginations running when they move out of the traditional office.

Whether you’ve been remote a while or just made the switch recently, you’ve likely faced writer’s block at some point. Follow the designer tips in this guide to stay on the cutting edge and produce your best design work from a remote position.

Creatives and Remote Work

Like many industries, creative work has seen a huge rise in remote work positions recently. Advances in technology like video conferencing and digital production software have kept up a steady pace since the early 2000s and allowed for more and more remote work.

For creatives, adjusting to remote work can be difficult. Most creative jobs are done through iteration and collaboration, so if you’re far away from the rest of your team and the people with a stake in your project, you have to find a new way to maintain communication and file sharing.

The main difference for many creatives who move to remote work is that they don’t have the incidental interactions with coworkers that so often take their ideas in new directions. Brainstorming and talking through current problems with team members is a huge part of creating the best solution to design problems.

With a little ingenuity, creative teams can establish best practices for staying productive when all or part of the team works remotely. New web-based software is designed to share information and communicate. Setting up regular meetings and channels for brainstorming and critiquing is the best way for creatives to get the most out of these new tools.

Remote Work Projections for 2021

It’s not only creatives who have seen a considerable increase in remote work positions. According to one study from the Harvard Business School, half of all participating firms had more than one-fifth of their employees working remotely. By one estimate, as much as 16% of jobs that were made remote in the last year will continue to be remote more or less permanently.

While some managers and business leaders have understandable apprehensions about remote work, they’re also warming up to the idea as they see it being used effectively by competitors or on a small scale within their own companies. All this points to one likelihood: remote work is here to stay and more of us will be working outside of traditional office spaces, probably in the very near future.

That’s why it’s so important to get a handle on remote work as soon as possible. Even if your job isn’t remote, the odds that you’ll be working on a team with remote members are quite high.

Does Remote Work Make You Less Productive?

The short answer is no, simply working remotely doesn’t automatically make workers less productive. For many managers, the idea of having workers physically absent would seem to make it harder to monitor them and keep them on task. However, evidence shows that there is no significant drop in productivity when workers are remote.

Creative positions appear to reach higher levels of productivity when workers go remote. Perhaps because the tools of the trade are already web-based and maybe also due to the reduced hovering of stakeholders hungry for deliverables, creative workers seem to get more done when they work remotely.

While the ability to concentrate on work is easier when you’re working remotely, staying motivated and inspired so that you can produce your best creative work is more difficult.

8 Designer Tips to Stay Creative When Working Remotely

Inspiration is an abstract thing. It can come from the most insignificant thing or it can just hit you apparently out of nowhere. When you leave the office, you’re likely to lose some of the sources of inspiration that you’re used to relying on to stay sharp and outshine the competition.

Follow these designer tips to keep your mind flexible and active when you’re working a remote creative job:

1- Study, Study, Study

New books on design thinking are coming out all the time. Since business goals are constantly changing, the design solutions that respond to them also have to change. If you want to stay on top of the newest design thinking, you have to stay informed.

For other creative positions that aren’t strictly limited to design, there are still many places to look for the latest work. Monitoring ad trends can help. So can trade blogs, publications, and targeted online forums and conferences.

2- Network

Such forums and conferences are a great way to make contact with people in similar creative roles at other organizations. Trade knowledge is incredibly important for staying on top of the latest ideas and even getting feedback on your latest work.

When you work remotely, you miss out on the community feeling that traditional offices have. Networking online through platforms like LinkedIn can help you find people who like getting into the nitty-gritty of creative work.

3- Log Off

If you’re working remotely, you might be working, talking to family, and getting your entertainment on the same device. Not only is that possibly bad for your eyesight, but it’s also a surefire way to burn out. Make sure you get away from the computer once in a while and take in some non-digital information.

Music is a great way to switch gears after a long day of remote working. Podcasts are also a nice informative way to learn that doesn’t involve having to look at anything. The best thing you can do is go outside for a walk so you can let your brain rest and get some fresh air.

4- Collaborate

Remote workers usually have some kind of chat platform that’s shared by the creative team or the entire company. One great strategy for team collaboration is to divide these chats into channels that are dedicated to specific topics.

Establishing a chat for critique and sharing favorite creative work will give everyone something fun to talk about and create a deposit of new ideas for people to use as inspiration.

5- Change Locations

Leaving your workspace for a cafe or another location can help you see things from a new perspective. Some remote workers take this designer tip to the extreme and move to entirely new countries, but a simple move to a coworking space or a coffee shop can be enough to give your brain a boost.

Going outside to work is also a great way to get some authentic background noise. Ambient noise helps us think more creatively, especially when it’s unrelated to us and won’t drag us away from our work.

6- Understand Your Process

The biggest disadvantage of working in a traditional office structure is that, to varying degrees, your schedule is decided by someone else who may or may not fully understand the way you get your work done. When you work remotely, you can structure things according to your style.

Give yourself time to process things, come up with new ideas, and test them out so that you can make sure you’re producing creative work that makes you proud. Nothing destroys the will to create faster than repeatedly producing work that you’re not completely satisfied with.

7- Get Our of Your Comfort Zone

Physically changing places can help you stay creative and so can building your skillset in new directions where you’re currently lacking. If you identify your weaknesses and take the time to improve them, you’ll be a more well-rounded worker and have more applicable strategies in your toolkit.

Online webinars and unpaid work that serves primarily as a personal experiment are two of the best ways to make yourself uncomfortable and thus build new skills. You don’t have to show it to anyone, but if you’re happy with the results you can always use it as part of your portfolio.

8- Stay Active

You should make sure to get some sort of physical exercise as well as giving your brain a workout with new information and design thinking. You don’t have to have hours and hours of spare time to get enough exercise. Federal recommendations for adults are only half an hour of brisk exercise five days per week.

Walking on your lunch break, for example, will help your mind relax and also help curb the possible negative health effects of sitting down at a desk all day. The key to a working and curious mind is a variation of stimuli and exercise is great for that. Even if you don’t go outside, you can invest in a standing desk and an under-desk treadmill to get your heart rate up for a short time each day.

Professionalism and Remote Work

A central concern of managers is that people will get too relaxed when they start working remotely. Designer remote work often makes you want to spend the whole day in your sweatpants since you’re not in the office anymore. Avoiding this habit will not only make things feel more business-oriented, but it will also help you divide your working life from your free time once the day has finished.

That being said, there’s probably no reason for you to dress up in a suit and tie every day. You should make sure you’re not appearing on the video conference screen in a half-open bathrobe, but a nice button-up shirt is probably enough.

Some people who haven’t used video conferencing tools fall victim to faux-pas related to leaving their camera or microphone on while they go about their business. Be mindful of how your platform works and make sure you keep things muted unless you’re currently on the microphone speaking to everyone.

Professionalism isn’t just for management. Creatives can also benefit from keeping things at least a little professional because it saves time and makes assignments feel more important.

7 Designer Tips for Productive Remote Work

Maintaining your creative energy is a significant part of staying productive, but there are a few other things you should do to keep producing quality creative work. Use these designer tips to stay organized and meet your deadlines with meaningful products.

1- Define Your Hours

Separating your workday from the rest of your life is essential for a good work-life balance. If you don’t want to get stuck answering emails at midnight, make sure everyone knows when you’re available and on the clock. This becomes even more important when you’re in a different time zone from all or part of your team.

2- Have a Dedicated Workspace

Designer remote work and work-from-home positions might make you want to work from bed, especially on cold winter days. But if you’re working on a laptop on the couch or in the bed, you won’t be able to fully unplug when you finish work. On the other hand, if you have a workplace set up, you can happily turn off the computer and move elsewhere in your house or apartment and truly feel that you’re not working.

3- Make a Personalized Schedule

We all have different body clocks. Some people do their best work early in the morning before they have fatigue and others take longer to wake up and are more effective in the afternoon. Once you understand which type you are, you can schedule things like meetings and research during the hours when you work best and do things like answer emails when you’re most likely to be tired.

4- Set Reasonable Deadlines

Not everyone is lucky enough to have control over their deadlines, but to whatever extent possible you should give yourself enough time to brainstorm, test things out, make new iterations, and have some time to let your unconscious mind work. If you don’t set your deadlines, work with your managers to make sure you don’t have a breakneck schedule that will burn you out or prevent you from producing your best work.

5- Communicate More

It might be coworkers or other professionals with similar jobs to yours, but you should talk to people who will lend a kind ear so the remote work doesn’t feel so isolating. For designer remote work, reaching out to others is a good way to get around writer’s block and brainstorm with other people. Talking more by phone, video, or chat will also help management get over any remaining doubts they had about letting you go remote in the first place.

6- Don’t Focus On Deliverables

Management might be hyper-concerned with deliverables like prototypes and completed designs, but creatives should already understand that most of the work of designing happens in between iterations. Don’t fixate on finishing all the aspects of a deliverable or you may end up wasting valuable time. Research and original ideas are every bit as important as the personas and wireframes you might produce in designer remote work, for example.

7- Establish Success Benchmarks

Non-creative stakeholders might be relying on those deliverables to measure how productive you’re being, but how do you know if you’re working effectively? Make sure you have both short-term and long-term goals established so you know if you’re on track to finish by your deadline or if you need to speed things up a little bit.

More qualitative goals like implementing specific design techniques or making a product that stands out should also be a part of the way you measure your output. Much of the self-doubt we feel about creative products can be dealt with by forming a picture of what success will look like as best you can before you start work on a project.

Conclusion:

Moving to remote work is a big change for creatives. Maintaining the same levels of inspiration, creativity, and productivity can be hard when the traditional office and in-person coworkers are no longer around. However, modern technology and design thinking have both made designer remote work and other creative distance working much easier.

The remote work trend is picking up steam and it doesn’t show any signs of slowing anytime soon. Whether your creative job is going to be made remote or you’re just working on a partially or fully remote team, knowing how to accommodate remote work is fast becoming an essential skill. Use one of the 15 designer tips in this guide to help make creative remote work as effective and productive as possible.

You might already have some conception of a corporate work environment in your mind: grey concrete, endless cubicles, masses of people with briefcases and ties bustling back and forth in large atriums, and an opaque internal bureaucracy. Small agencies, on the other hand, are all colorful and filled with a handful of youthful disruptors with limitless ideas and energy.

Of course, neither of these depictions tells the whole story. Successful small agencies turn into corporations and big companies frequently mimic the small agency model to keep their talent happy.

So, what is it like working as a designer at a corporation and a small agency? Is one better than the other, or is it basically the same? Read on if you’re considering job options at either or curious to see what design work is like in a different environment.

What Is It Like Working as a Designer?

Broadly speaking, designers are brought on to either think of a way to present a product to users in a way that entices them to respond to a call to action, usually to buy a product or subscribe to a service. Companies’ business goals have to be translated to prospective customers and they hire designers to do just that.

Specific types of designers like graphic designers, UX/UI designers, and product designers complete this task in different ways. They may also form an art department or a small team that works together to build appealing designs.

Design work is typically overseen by managers, supervisors, or department heads. People in these positions who can influence the outcome of a project are called stakeholders. Designers often have to present prototypes and other concrete deliverables to stakeholders in an effort to demonstrate the design thinking behind a certain project.

The process from brainstorming to research to prototypes is done in iterations, or unique versions, that are changed to accommodate new information from users until the product does what the company needs it to do. Although this same general approach is used by both corporations and small agencies, working as a designer isn’t exactly the same in both environments.

Large-Scale Design Projects at Corporations

The main thing about design work at corporations is that you’re much more likely to share it with other designers. Some corporate design teams are small, made up of only a few people. In others, there might be over 20 designers.

One definite trend is higher design literacy across businesses. Fewer of the biggest companies still need to be convinced that design can help them reach their business goals because they’ve seen it in action. That also could mean designers at corporations are much busier with multiple projects.

Major corporations typically can’t survive if their people are completely in the weeds all the time, though. You might have more work as a designer at a big corporation but there will also be more resources to help you get through your projects and more money in the hiring budget to bring on some help when it’s needed.

Small-Scale Agency Projects

When we say small-scale, that’s only compared to the massive scale of corporate design projects. Agencies still frequently make designs that are seen by millions of people.

The limitations imposed on designers who work at a small agency are usually related to scarcity. Small teams and sometimes even talented individuals will handle entire projects by themselves and are much more likely to report directly to the CEO of the company.

Many designers who like working at a small agency prefer a smaller number of coworkers. It could be possible to meet and know everyone in the company by name and build long-term connections with them, which is a great way to keep talent happy.

Sometimes, though, individual designers have an urge to grow professionally and many small agencies aren’t interested in scaling up. It can be part of the appeal to people who like more personal workspaces and larger responsibility at the same time that it is a drawback for people who want their design work to reach millions and millions of people.

Design Thinking at Large Corporations

The biggest companies have been incorporating design into their business practices for decades and are more likely to have a set and structured explanation of the design theory used by the company. This can make onboarding really informative for designers but that onboarding process will also take more time to complete.

There’s certainly no unified design thinking across large businesses simply because of their size. So while it is nice that these larger companies might have a more step-by-step introduction to their design thinking, it’s also possible that you’ll have to reorient yourself to different ways of doing things if you ever take a job at a different company.

Design Thinking at Small Agencies

Smaller agencies, especially those that are happy with their size and not looking to scale up or grow very much, are more likely to have unique ways of looking at things. Designers might be onboarded very quickly and more or less taught about the company’s design thinking on the job.

However, you should also be aware that for many of these companies, these design projects are defining the company in real-time. For small boutique design firms, the design is the purpose of the business rather than a secondary necessity like it is at many corporations.

Because the design thinking of a small agency has such outsized importance, you’re also more likely to find yourself surrounded by people with some design sense, if not outright design skill. That’s great for people who have a passion for design and will discuss it at length, but you might also but heads with people more if they have their own idea about how they would build a certain design.

Advantages of Working as a Designer at a Corporation

Every big corporation is not the same and the market can create a necessity for new business practices at practically any time. However, here are some things you can more than likely look forward to if you work as a designer for a large corporation:

• Tons of Resources
  

It’s not only that these corporations usually have bigger budgets. They also have huge databases of past work and people who have worked on spectacularly specific projects. Unless you’re moving in unchartered design territory, there’s probably someone around who can walk you through what you’re working on.

• Massive Exposure
  

Designers who want their work to be seen by as many people as possible try to make it happen by working with huge companies. Since they already have some kind of product or service built-up, their audience is huge. You could be designing advertisements or products that are meant to be mass-produced and shown to millions of people around the world.

• Specialization
  

Larger teams mean more people are sharing the responsibility for projects, so individual designers can concentrate on building the types of skills that appeal to them the most. While smaller agencies might expect their designers to be generally skilled, corporations usually have point people for every step of a design project.

• Detailed Branding
  

The products that make big companies successful are held with a kind of reverence within the company. Huge teams of people have been establishing the brand for generally longer periods than what you’ll find at small agencies. That means designers who join the team already have conventions to play with, a history to draw on, and a much more nuanced product overall.

• More Likely Career Growth
  

There are many ways for people to be promoted in large companies. Since there is a larger hierarchy and more applications are being received, it’s common for people to move up over the course of their career with a given corporation. In addition to an increased likelihood, the large size of these companies means there are positions with them that simply don’t exist at smaller firms and agencies.

Cons of Corporations

Designers are going to be noticed much less frequently and have their name on their work much less at big corporations. You’re going to be a small fish in a very big pond, depending on the size of the company and how much importance it gives to its design teams.

Although it is nice to have a rich brand history to work within, you might also find it challenging to stay motivated when the projects are always so similar. Unless the brand resonates with you on a personal level, some amount of boredom is to be expected eventually.

Corporations may also have long-winded processes in place for their designers that are all but impossible to affect from your position as a designer. That means you might get stuck doing things in a way that doesn’t suit you. Worst of all, you might get used to doing things in a way that feels unnatural so that when you do leave you have to work to correct that behavior.

Advantages of Working as a Designer at Small Agencies

From boutique firms to more moderately-sized businesses, design work at a smaller agency is a great way for designers to put their skills to the test. Some of these advantages are less likely as you get to larger firms, but you can still expect them to some degree at smaller companies.

• More Creative Control
  

The smaller the organization, the more likely it is that you’ll have the final say in what your design looks like and how it’s implemented. We’ve already mentioned how the company itself will care more about the design than a corporation probably will, but that usually translates to greater personal investment in the designer.

• Transferable Skills
  

As a team player and a catch-all designer, you’ll be gaining a more comprehensive skill set that will translate more readily to other jobs if you design to change companies later on. Working as a designer at a small agency is also a great way to find out what aspects of design you enjoy the most, making it an ideal starting place for beginners fresh from school.

• Know Your Boss (Clients, Too!)
  

The smaller scale of things makes it more likely that you’ll have plenty of face-to-face time with management and with the clients. That means you’ll be taking more direct personal responsibility for your design by the people who commission it. You can also express concerns more clearly and all the employees will have a louder voice within the company.

• Outside-the-Box Thinking
  

Small agencies are more flexible and more willing to try out new things when it’s justified. Designers who want to experiment and take their design thinking to a new level are more likely to find a venue for that expression at a small agency than they are at a huge corporation that has years of branding and products to consider with every design decision.

• Less Office Politics
  

At huge corporations, decisions are often being made by teams and individuals that you never see. Sometimes people are just following orders but not sure where they came from, which can generate disagreements that are essentially unsolvable. Smaller agencies make it much easier to resolve such disputes and misunderstandings because the people who work there are more likely to know each other and know who to go to to solve problems.

Cons of Small Agencies

At a small agency, you’re probably going to have way more deadlines and far less consistency between projects. That’s great for building a diverse skill set, but it can also make you feel on the move constantly. Designers at small agencies might not be able to take as much vacation time if they have lots of responsibility so the long-term fatigue can be quite high at small- and mid-sized companies.

You’re also going to get some annoying clients from time to time since you’ll have so many more at a small agency than you will at a corporation, where the client is more or less always the same. The strategy for working as a designer effectively at a small agency is to work fast on your projects and don’t let occasional bad apples ruin your mood.

The increased responsibility is enough to drive some people away from smaller agencies where they have to answer for entire projects rather than a singular aspect of a design project like they would at a corporation. That being said, some designers discover that they love the additional control when they move from huge companies to smaller agencies.

Corporations vs. Small Agencies: Where Do Designers Make the Most?

All of the creative and workplace benefits we just mentioned are enough to make some people make their decision. But, naturally, the salary must be taken into account when considering any job.

At first thought, it might seem obvious that huge companies would pay higher salaries because they have more money. But that’s not always the case because the overhead at a huge company is also staggeringly high. For all the profits reaped by the design work produced at big businesses, some must be used to pay for the larger team, more tech, licensing, and saved to use for future growth.

Small agencies frequently aren’t interested in growth at all. Since they’re sustaining and don’t have nearly the overhead you would find at a big company, smaller agencies might also have a higher budget for paying their designers, especially when the design is making such an outsized impact on the final product.

For other things like health benefits, corporations might offer a better deal because there are way more people in the insurance pool. Then again, since the owner of the small agency knows all the employees and may even be close with them, there may be more care taken in choosing a health plan that everybody likes.

Conclusion

In the dynamic world of design, acknowledging and embracing the diverse needs of corporations and small agencies is key. By incorporating insights from the iCreatives blog, designers can stay informed about the latest trends and strategies, enhancing their ability to navigate the intricate challenges posed by these distinct design environments.

Making a choice between working at a large corporation and a small agency isn’t easy. On the one hand, you can have more stability and work with an extensively established brand at a big company, but on the other hand, small agencies give you more room for personal responsibility for your work and additional freedom to take risks.

In the end, it will depend on the personality of the specific designer. Some are built to shine in small firms while others are better off specializing on a design team at a corporation. You might even try both throughout your career. Regardless of what size company you work for, it’s important to keep things fresh so you can stay creative.