Five ways your hobbies can help you to become a better designer

I’ve always had a lot of projects going on on the side of my main job. These projects aren’t related to design mainly, and I sometimes felt a bit guilty. Instead of these projects and hobbies, I could dedicate more time to developing my design skills. And also, there is an opinion out there that if you’re not focused enough on some particular theme, you won’t master it on a deep level and will be flying from field to field like a butterfly. Not respectable.

Due to corona, I dived into a new job searching process. As you might know, a Linkedin profile is a must for this kind of thing. And in a Linkedin profile, you should list your experiences and achievements obviously. What wasn’t obvious for me — should I add all these projects of mine that aren’t related to design at all if I’m in search of a UX/UI position? What kind of recruiter would be interested in it? Isn’t it a waste of their time? But as I thought some more I realized that these hobbies are very useful in terms of becoming a better designer. Here are the benefits I’ve discovered.

Ability to structure and plan.

This is the most obvious point: when you run side-projects, you’ll learn how to plan and organize workflow. And for the design process, it’s crucial to be able to see a distinct path and every step on it. I don’t think that there is a need to say more on this topic, so let’s dive a little bit deeper.

You get to know people in different areas and expertise.

For every human, it’s natural to suggest that his point of you is the most logical and right. In reality, there are so many different visions of each particular matter that you’ll be surprised. They often say that empathy is the key to successful design (although lately there is a lot of discussion on this topic, it still sounds really reasonable to me). When you meet people of different professions and social status, you can get different perspectives and discover issues that otherwise are sitting in a parallel universe for you. And when you’re doing a lot of projects on a range spectrum of themes, you – guess what – meet a lot of people and get to know them and their unique processes.

Broad perspective

A good designer always does his research before getting to the creative side. You have to know particularities and technicalities of the field for which you’re designing site or app or whatever. Because without this in-depth knowledge, your product can inefficient and flat (and not in a stylish hipstery way). So you have to spend some time doing your homework. But imagine you get to design something for the field you’ve already got aquatinted with because you fancy that field on the side. So maybe you’ll still need to learn more, but you’ll know where to look and from where to start, and the amount of time spent on this pre-production part will be sufficiently decreased.

New skills in design

Ok, maybe these points above were too vague and impractical. Let’s turn to something more practical: your design skills. When you’re doing personal side projects, it’s often a one-man orchestra (at least in my experience). But for most of them, you need to do a design of some kind. So you can eventually stumble upon a design task that’s not in your range of skills yet, but as you really need this to this passion project, you will learn how to do it. And voila, a new skill is in your toolbox.

New methods and frameworks from other fields

This is less obvious, and it doesn’t happen with all projects, but sometimes it can be truly eye-opening. You know that sprints that can be transferred from coding to design practice. But you can find something in many fields: psychological approaches for brand development, implementation of the art in corporate website design. Do you think that factories and design are entirely unrelated? Maybe. Or maybe not. In fact, it could be a good design exercise – finding something useful for your practice from the irrelevant-from-the-first-sight area.

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