Having a Side Project Makes You a Better Designer

Photo by Faizur Rehman on Unsplash

Many people these days have some sort of side project outside of their 9–5 job and it makes sense for designers to do so. When you have a side project, you get to explore other areas of design that you might not usually get to work on. This can help you become a better designer overall, as you gain new skills and insights.

What side projects should you be working on?

Just like I’m sure you’ve learned from any English class you’ve taken in school when it comes to writing English essays you need to know the who, what, when, where, and why of the project. What kinds of things are you passionate about. Perhaps you’re interested in projects that allow you to work towards saving the environment. Wonderful! Captain Planet would be so proud of you! Who else can you involve in a project like this? Figure out where these people can be found. Why do things alone when you can do them with other people? When will you guys meet up? It’s important to meet up at a time when all of the people in your group can be available. Finding where to work is easy as with zoom you can meet with pretty much anybody anywhere anytime. Last, but definitely not least, the why is important because it can dictate the entire course of the project. Why do you think there is a book called Start With Why?

Also, keep in mind that you want to make work based on what you would want to get hired for. If you want to be a UX/UI designer for a company that specializes in eCommerce focus on making work that is centered around eCommerce. If you want to work with a company that focuses on real estate, do work that is centered on real estate. Just because you are UX/UI designer for one company does not mean that everything you do applies to another company.

Being a UX/UI designer means not just solving problems that already exist, but also working to solve problems that could exist in the future. This is why it’s important to stay connected to the community around you. What problems are going on in your neighborhood, city, suburb, or whatever? What can you do to help? Keep in mind as a UX/UI designer, you have a certain set of skills, but you can’t do everything. That’s why it’s good to have other people around you that have other skills than you do. That’s why having copywriters, developers, digital marketers, and people with other skills around you can be good thing. They can provide perspectives on the project that you may not be thinking about because they have different skill sets than you.

How long should it take to complete side projects?

That really depends on the project. If it’s something small, it can take a day or two. But if it’s something more complicated, it could take weeks. The important thing is to start small and then build on that. Don’t try to do too much at once. Start with something simple and then add to it as you go. That way, you’ll be able to get the most out of your side project and you won’t feel overwhelmed.

For example, go look at a site like Daily UI. When you sign up for this website you will receive a different UI challenge to complete each day. You can see what kinds of ways people tackled these challenges on Collect UI. On this site, you’ll notice that solutions on the website tend to not be super extensive. If you click on any given challenge you’ll notice that people only did one page per challenge. Another site you could look into is Designercize. Designercize gives you random whiteboard challenges. The challenges are timed in intervals of 5 minutes up to 60 minutes. They also have different challenges for different difficulties-easy, medium, and hard. An easy challenge might look like this: Design a single detail view for a professional networking site to help early adopters. A medium challenge might look like this: Design a full checkout process for a geocaching app to help backend software engineers. A hard challenge might say: Design an onboarding process for a dating app that matches based on compatible allergies to help disaster relief coordinators. You can also reload challenges for any difficulty if you don’t like the challenge presented. If you’re saying to yourself “All those challenges look nuttier than a pecan pie”, well that’s the point. Challenges like these force you to push yourself when it comes to designing solutions for problems.

There are many different side projects to take and different ways to do them. Figure out what works best for you.