Grace Hong

This week my buddy Corey Lee shared this post about designer levels, and it resonated SO HARD with me. ❤️‍🔥 Junior level designers are the level of doing the work, being fed the strategy, executing on the orders. This is where we all start, and where your focus should be just about getting good at "doing the thing" - wireframing, visual design, prototyping, generating ideas, using typography, all of it. Your goals should be to acquire skills, and get good fast. Mid / Lead - this is a time in which you're leading the work. You're getting put at bat, and getting given an opportunity to start leading and taking much more responsibility. Your goal shifts here from just "doing the thing" to facilitating the thing. Your goal should be to align, solicit, and communicate decisions. You should be towing the line, and getting the project across the finish line, and not letting anyone stop you. Senior and higher, your goal should be to "absorb problems" and define how you would approach the work. This means the strategy, the the research plan, the artifacts, the timeline. You should be operating as a subject matter expert, giving recommendations, not asking for permission. If you're not doing that, the harsh truth might be that you're overtitled, and you don't realize it. The sad truth is I think many designers are operating under the Senior title without the trust and respect or credibility from having defined and led the strategic work. It's one of the big things I talk about, the trust / respect gap. It's why designers never - "get invited into the room" - "don't have a seat at teh table" - "get told what do to do." - "don't get trusted with what to prioritize, or the impact they drive." This is the reason why I created Dark UX Academy, to help designers overcome this exact hurdle. I was there too, so I get it. Design is power, you can change peoples lives with it. However, without influence, business acumen, trust and respect, you won't realize the full potential of that power. What's been the most challenging part of being a designer for you?

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wtf is a prototype now?? we've made incremental progress for a decade+ and then everything changed overnight 😳 So I chatted with Nikolas Klein and Holly Li to unpack what it all means for designers (including some tactics I'd never considered) We go deep into: ✧ Rethinking what "high fidelity" means ✧ How Figma Make fits into your workflow ✧ The use cases they're most fascinated by + a LOT more... It's high energy, insightful, and should spark a ton of ideas 👇 https://lnkd.in/gvqWQUjq

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Most designers never scale because they won’t let go. They keep doing the client work. They keep running ops. They keep being the bottleneck. The real lever is this: Get out of fulfillment. Delegate the work → scale the company.

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