🚨 Get your design portfolios right, please 🚨

It aches my heart every time we hire, seeing the amount of thinking designers put, in building their portfolios.

Commonplace repeated errors time and again, making it such a tough case to consider them.

✨ Very important tips ↓ Most designers struggle to have any impact with their portfolios not because they’re bad designers, but because their portfolio actually gets in the way of someone trying to understand their work and their skills.

✨🇰🇪✨

We’ve spent the last few days in Kenya and its gorgeous wilderness.

Initially we were only doing the Mara, but later expanded the trip to more parks and that decision was spot on!

If you’re planning a trip, here are a few of our findings (with photos) ↓ 🐆 Wildlife — We’ve done safaris in most parts of India, only to be disappointed with sparse animal sightings.

Kenya is nirvana though — Zebras, lions, cheetahs, giraffes, rhinos, leopards, hyenas, wildebeest, warthogs and a ton more.

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Sharing the learnings I've gathered over the years working in Design, as one-liners.

Starting here ↓ If a state is important to be communicated on a screen, use multiple avenues to reinforce it. Don't mention it once and assumer users will read it where you've put it.

Users glance around and catch loose cues. Multiple avenues increase the odds of successful conveyance.

✨💰 Thread on Salary Negotiations

Over the years I’ve gathered some pointers on negotiating compensation better after struggling myself early on in the career and then seeing so many others struggle.

Here are some thougts — Salaries are bucketed into ranges for junior → mid-level → senior → principal designers and often even beyond.

Companies don’t like making exceptions in setting comp and would put you in the range.

Your job is to find this range and get close to the upper maxima.

[🌻 trigger thread alert]

Noticing so many folks being massively distracted by chasing twitter fame, conference & talks 'clout', internet stardom, visibility fluff and virtue signaling lately.

Grab a coffee, this'd be intentionally uncomfortable for many & informative for most. Let’s dive into some hard realities of building a design career, from a time when these distractions largely didn’t exist (thankfully).

Hoping this helps you ignore the noise these days & align your priorities. Not asking you follow this, but this is what got me what I wanted.

Thoughts on Design Documentation:

Many of us work in very large product teams where there are more than single-handedly manageable number of efforts ongoing. Not only that, products are always in a continuous flux.

If everything is always changing, why document at all? I've seen 3 clear benefits of design documentation in my career:

Documentation...

- forces a rationale and a structure to your work

- scales your ideas/thinking incredibly well across the organization

- is collaborative

- showcases your work with a story