Daily Life of a Designer

You may like the sound of “designer” in a career description, or people, having taken note of your artistic talent, have urged you in that direction as a possible career path. It may sound like a chance to revel in your creative energies for eight hours a day, but the reality is quite a bit more mundane than that. There aren’t jobs available such as being the head of Leonardo’s workshop and getting the whole day to work on whatever creative project strikes your fancy, be it the parachute, the revolving bridge, or the Madonna of the Rocks. (Even Leonardo had to take commissions and put up with clients, not that the evidence suggests that he was especially good at it.)

What, then, does a designer do all day? You should have an idea of a designer's daily existence before committing to design as a career. Indeed, other jobs are more mundane and offer less play for one’s creative talents, and working as a designer can be both exciting and fulfilling. But work is also work. What follows should give you an idea of how both ideas work to create a hypothetical designer’s quotidian existence.

What is a Designer?

A designer is a person who comes up with designs—plans, drawings, schematics, renderings, and prototypes—of just about anything you may encounter in today’s world. Everything from a shampoo bottle to the outsides of airplanes had to be designed before they could become tangible realities. The designer is often the person who comes up with the idea for something and then comes up with the plans for it. Designers are idea people and creative types who possess the ability to see things that don’t exist (yet).

Designers come in as many shapes and sizes as the objects they design. You’ll thus encounter everything from Floral Designers to Mechanical Designers and Graphic Designers to UX/UI Designers. Each field requires specialized knowledge, but the threads connecting all of them are a creative spirit and artistic ability. Much designing today is done on the computer, using CAD (computer-assisted design) software, but the good old-fashioned ability to draw is still an essential tool in most designers’ toolkits.

Read more about what a designer does.

Designer Specializations

Designers come in all shapes and sizes. Graphic Designer is the first job title that comes to mind since their design is closest to drawing, but it is far from the only career path that involves design. There are as many kinds of designers as there are objects in need of design, and, in today’s digitally-oriented world, very often, those “objects” are virtual. Thus there are UX/UI designers who design apps, game designers who cook up video games, and web designers who make websites. Real-world objects come with their own breeds of designers: mechanical designers (formerly known as drafters) come up with the drawings that become everything from toasters to aerospace rockets, while industrial designers bring together a whole range of disciplines (art, business, and engineering) to create manufactured objects.

That’s hardly an exhaustive list of categories of designers. In addition to the above, you’ll encounter Design Engineers, who are engineers who dabble in some aspects of product design. Then there are Architects who design buildings (that Civil Engineers make sure will stand up) and Interior Designers who use furniture and textiles to decorate their insides. There are also simpler types of designers who work directly with the materials of their trade: this is the province of floral designers (who have the enviable task of working with flowers all day), landscape designers (who usually end up getting their hands dirty) and, perhaps the most enviable job title of all, Lego designers, who get to spend their days assembling Lego bricks into everything from typewriters to London omnibuses to Van Gogh’s Starry Night.

Read more about other job titles related to designer.

Starting Your Day

Like all human beings, designers start their days by waking up, something that can be done well before the time they need to show up for work or at the last minute for people who don’t function well in the morning. Many designers, however, like to make sure that their brains are well-prepared for the creative labors of the day and, therefore, like to leave themselves time in the morning for everything from journaling a bit about the day to a few minutes of meditation. Going to the gym can also be beneficial to get the neurotransmitters flowing. Then it’s time to report to the office.

Designers are creative people and a little mysterious due to the general population. By tradition, creative people get some leeway when dressing for work. Thus “business casual” offices that tend towards the business side of the expression will let their creative teams show up casually dressed. It’s not a buttoned-up suit-and-tie career, although you may be expected to dress up if you meet with clients. That’s not a promise that you can come in jeans and a T-shirt to work every day, but it probably does mean that you won’t have to worry about having a knife crease in your khakis.

Designers’ workstations can vary considerably, as some designers’ jobs require that they have room to draw. Thus, they’ll sometimes get a suitable surface for working with traditional artists’ media in addition to a desk with a computer and probably more than one monitor. Whether they work in a cubicle or an open-plan office depends on the company. Firms whose only business is to design will likely have cool-designed office spaces, maybe even with a great deal of natural light. Other firms show less interest in creating an atmosphere conducive to creative thought and corral their designers in cubicles.

Freelance designers and those who can work remotely obviously need home offices. Those can be whole rooms or, in smaller domiciles, a desk up against a wall. Some freelance designers like to keep their home offices as spare as possible, while others work amidst a healthy amount of décor and clutter. That depends on their personal style. They’re almost sure to have multiple computer monitors, headphones, and a microphone to communicate with clients. They also need computers loaded with and capable of running the requisite design software. In busy households, a lock on the home office door is also probably a good investment.

9 AM:

A designer’s workday will likely begin the way, so many people’s workdays begin today, answering the emails that have built up since the previous afternoon. They also have to respond to messages on Slack, Basecamp, Trello, or whichever software your company uses to keep team members in touch with each other.

Following the routine emails, some firms will have “standup” meetings (don’t worry, you usually can sit at these; the term is borrowed from agile project management) to make sure all team members are on the same page as they embark on their work days. Usually, these are brief affairs, and, as such, probably not the only meeting you’ll attend during your day.

The other important task for the first part of the morning is organizing the day’s labor. Many designers come up with a to-do list at this point, separating meetings and phone calls from actual work needing attention. There are many ways of creating such a list, from a personal kanban board to a sheet of graph paper and a mechanical pencil. It should come as no surprise that designers often gravitate to the latter.

11 AM:

Designers need time to design, which involves both the highly creative concept work and the detailed work by which those concepts are made into reality. For most designers, the morning is the time to work on client projects. The concept phase is often taken care of by a brainstorming session with the rest of the creative team, or you may be asked to come up with something on your own and pitch it to the group. That’s the part closest to fun and games in the design business. However, it engenders a lot more grunt-type work. This can include fixing reflections in a photograph of a dog’s eyes with Photoshop, which isn’t as much fun as saying, “let’s do a layout with cute labrador retrievers,” but the Photoshop work is as much a part of the job as the brainstorming.

Since people are freshest in the morning (when coffee is most effective), it is the best time to work on client projects since client work matters the most. Other work (and there usually is plenty of it) frequently gets put off until later in the day.

More and more offices are instituting agile project management methods for breaking work down into bite-sized chunks, making team members’ tasks unambiguous and manageable. In such places, you can expect to have a specific and focused assignment that you’ll be expected to complete in a compact (but doable) time frame. Or you may be working on bigger-picture ideas in companies that haven’t subscribed to the agile way of doing things. In any event, the morning hours are often the most productive for designers as for anyone working on a 9 to 5 schedule.

2 PM:

A designer’s afternoon can mean more of the same, especially if client work needs to be completed. It can also mean a chance to shift to another project if you’re working on more than one assignment at a time. Many designers find themselves in that situation, with work staggered so that one project is in its early stages while another is nearing completion. Thus the early afternoon can be an excellent time to tackle something different if your workflow allows it.

Afternoons can also be devoted to internal work (design projects for the company itself, for example) or longer meetings (which, in some companies, can account for nearly a third of your workday activity.) Those meetings can involve people from different teams than just the one on which you work, or sometimes even clients themselves. Afternoons can also be a good time to catch up on mechanical work like answering emails, returning phone calls, and handling correspondence.

Freelancers may have a different take on spending these hours, as they always have to bear in mind the care and feeding of their businesses and the work for their clients. Thus the afternoon can be an excellent chance to work on portfolio or showcase projects, catch up with boosting the company on social media, or put together promotional YouTube videos. Afternoons are also a good time to go out and meet clients, if necessary, reserving the productive morning hours for more creative work. Some freelancers also go in for a change of scene and pack up their laptops to head out to a coffee shop for a few hours of work in a different setting.

5 PM:

Although there probably will be crazy deadlines needing attention at some point in your career, designers get to leave the office on time more often than not. Quitting time will likely involve answering a final barrage of emails (one recent study showed that the average office worker has to confront 80 emails daily.) Hopefully, any fires that broke out in the afternoon have been put out, most of the to-do list has been completed (only in novels do you regularly finish up a day’s to-do list), and superiors have been pleased with your day’s work and don’t want urgent changes made by nine o’clock the next morning.

You’ll also want to make sure that you’ve broken off work on creative projects at a suitable juncture, at the end of a metaphoric paragraph, in other words. That will make it easier to pick up work in the morning and spare you having to sort through loose ends at the start of your workday.

Freelancers, especially those who work at home, must make strict time boundaries, as they can easily be lured into working non-stop, which can be fatal in a creative field like design in all its many plumages. It helps if there’s a family life to intrude upon your professional one: you’ll stop work at five o’clock if there are kids to be fed. You can still have shop hours even if you’re working at home and for yourself. Indeed, it’s ideal for your creative abilities and sanity.

What does a designer need to do to wrap up the workday? How will they ensure that they’re ready to go the following day?

After Work

As with anyone who works a nine-to-five job, evenings should allow for a designer’s downtime, including a civilized dinner, in or out (out can even be healthier, bringing as it does a change of scene from just the home and the office.) Feet need to be put up, and batteries need to be recharged, although that can be done more creatively than just ordering food and eating it while you watch Netflix and simultaneously fiddle with your phone.

Occasionally, a designer might attend an evening class to brush up on a skill or add a new one to the toolkit. And there will no doubt be occasions when you have to bring work home with you, although design work is more likely to involve overtime in the office where the necessary computers are located. The evening hours can also be spent creatively: if you’re a graphic designer with an art background, now would be a good time to pull out those pencils and paints and make some art, unfettered by professional constraints. 

Now can also be a good time for working on vanity projects and tending further to your website’s health. (This is especially important for freelancers.) It can be a creative time, especially for people who do their best work in the later hours of the day, and be effectively used to help your creative (and, by extension, mental) health. Of great importance here is finding time to do something you enjoy doing that has nothing to do with what you do when you’re working. As, of course, is getting enough rest so you can face the next day and its labors adequately refreshed.

Learn the Skills to Become a Designer at Noble Desktop

If you wish to become a designer, Noble Desktop, a tech and design school based in New York that teaches worldwide thanks to the wonders of the internet, is available to give you the education you need to get started in this exciting field. Noble teaches certificate programs in numerous aspects of design and the technology that makes design possible in the contemporary world. These certificate programs offer comprehensive instruction in their topics and will arm you for the job market in whichever aspect of design interests you.

Noble has certificate programs in graphic design (the Adobe trio of Photoshop, InDesign, and Illustrator), digital design (the main troika of Adobe programs plus Figma for UI design), UX & UI design, and motion graphics. All these programs feature small class sizes in order to make sure that each student receives ample attention from the instructor, and can be taken either in-person in New York or online from anywhere over the 85% of the Earth’s surface that is reached by the internet (plus the International Space Station.) Classes at Noble Desktop include a free retake option, which can be useful as a refresher course or as a means of maximizing what you learn from fast-paced classes. Noble’s instructors are all experts in their fields and often working professionals whose experience is invaluable when they mentor students in the school’s certificate programs 1-to-1.

Noble offers further design courses that are briefer than the certificate programs. You may also wish to consult Noble’s Learning Hub for a wealth of information on how to learn to be a designer.