 Hi everybody, I'm Brittany from AJ & Smart. In this video today, we're going to go through some of the essential skills that most designers actually ignore, especially early in their careers. I'm going to go around the office and ask some of our own designers what skills they think are often overlooked, especially in junior designers. It's going to get pretty interesting. Before we get into it though, I'd love to know what you think are some essential skills that designers need to have, especially early on in their career. I think this is a really, really interesting topic. So definitely let us know in the comments. Let's chat about it. Also, if you have any questions about anything that we mentioned in the video, please ask in the comments. We answer every single comment. All right, thanks. What? Hi, I'm Omar and I'm product designer at AJ & Smart. So one skill that I feel junior designers often neglect is knowing how to present your work and communicate it to the client. And that's super important. That's a core skill for a designer to have because it means that you can speak the client's language. You can tell them why design is good for their business. And that means that eventually you'll be able to sit at the strategy table and talk to your clients at a much higher level than just someone who makes things pretty. Now, the way that you can present your design better is you don't talk in jargon, meaning you don't use design terms that your clients aren't familiar with. You just use simple language that they will understand and clearly show them why your design is good for them. If your client doesn't understand the value of your design, you can't blame the client and say, my client doesn't understand design. It's your job to speak in their language and phrase things in a way that they will understand. And one resource that I highly recommend for designers to check out is a book called Design is a Job by Mike Montero. And specifically, well, it's a very small book. So it won't take much of your time. It's great. It has a great size because large books are hard to get through. This is a very well-written book. It's short. It's nice to read. And if you still don't like reading books, just check out Chapter 7. It's called Presenting Your Work. And it has a ton of tips for you on how to do that well. Is it recording? Hey, I'm Jonathan. I'm the CEO of AJ & Smart. And I'm also a product designer. A skill that a lot of designers overlook. But even senior designers, even a lot of mid-level or senior designers that I know also kind of have this blind spot is the understanding of typography. So I think having an understanding of typography and really how it works and the rules behind typography was one of the most useful things that I learned when starting out as a designer. And typography is often, if you look at most products that you're using, many products or even most products, the entire screen is taken up by different typography and different forms of typography. Ignoring typography means you're ignoring something that's taking up often 80% of what's on the screen or 80% of how the structure of a web page or an app is actually presented. And it's really easy to make something just look really messy and incoherent when you don't understand typography. And I think it is actually a fundamental skill that every UI designer really should know, not just pure aesthetics, not just how to add a nice shadow or not just like how to find good color palettes. But for me, I think typography sort of trumps all of those things. So I think the best book I read about typography was something that I think I had to read in college and it was called The Elements. Wait, you can even show them. It's called The Elements of Typographic Style by Robert Brinhurst, a super boring book, but a really, really great overview of the typographic landscape and a really great overview of all the rules of typography. So that's a really boring book, but honestly, if you search web typography, if you search things like that on the internet, you're sure to find tons of articles about it, but The Elements of Typographic Style is a great book if you wanna just get into the topic and deep dive immediately. So that would be my tip for something that designers often overlook, it's typography. My name is Dee, I'm a product designer and a design sprint educator at H&M Smart. Yes, I think a really big skill that a lot really most designers overlook is facilitation and it's not just that you should be a good facilitator if you wanna be a designer, but that the point of it is that being a designer isn't done in isolation. You alone won't come up with the best ideas and the best understanding of the challenge, but bringing people together with the different knowledge and different opinions into a room and your ability to facilitate them to share their knowledge and then come up and share and build on each other's ideas is a great skill that will lead you to actually making successful things and really coming up with great designs for things. Something that people can and should do is just find a simple workshop that you wanna start with. You could start with a design sprint, that's quite a long thing to do first thing. A shorter exercise like the Lightning Decision Jam is great and just do it, just facilitate something and see how that goes and even get one of your colleagues to be thinking about it and giving you bits of feedback afterwards and just do another one and then just do another one and keep going because you won't be perfect at first, but you'll get 10 times better if you just start running and facilitating workshops. Hi, my name's Tim. I'm a product design director at H&M Smart. So one skill that a lot of younger and junior designers are lacking in my opinion is something as basic as having a professional attitude to your job and your career, working with colleagues. The reason why that is is because nobody teaches you that in like whether you're attending a design school or maybe you're self taught or maybe you're learning design from an online course, but when you're working with other people in a team, it's actually really, really important that for example, when somebody asks you to do something and you say, yes, okay, I can do that. You're super motivated. You want to show them that you're, you know, like that you love your job and that you can take a lot of responsibility, but then the responsibility is actually on your shoulders to fulfill what you promise. So this is something that you have to learn with experience, but one way you can kind of like make that process a bit easier and faster and also one way of really impressing the people you work with is by being proactive and always making clear that you know what's expected of you. So one basic thing that I see a lot of junior designers not doing is for example, taking notes. So when I see somebody's not taking a note, I already feel like maybe I should not be talking to that person because I don't know what you will actually remember. I know for sure that in the beginning, I also thought I would be able to remember everything. This is actually not true at all. You'll have to take notes. You will have to know when something's due and when it's due, it has to be done. And in, you know, when you're attending design school, it's usually fine to tell your instructor, you know, sorry, I didn't get to do that, whatever, I was sick. You're still a junior, so it's expected of you that some stuff will maybe go wrong or maybe you will forget something. All of that stuff is fine, but the sooner you can deliver at a really high level of professionalism and dependability, which is also really, really important, the better it will be for your career because more people will give you stuff to do. They will really appreciate that. They can give you a task. You will fulfill that task. And that's also a really great way to rack up more experience. If you're a designer who is maybe extremely talented, super creative, but you are actually always going over the deadline, everything you have to do needs to be double-checked, then it's going to be less likely that you will get these interesting things and they will actually land on the desk of another designer who might be less talented than you, but they might be more dependable and professional. And that's honestly one of the most important things in an agency environment where you just have to get done on time and within budget. So that's my advice for you. So my name is Bruna. I am a visual and product designer here at Agentsmart. So one essential skill, which is overlooked by young designers, especially, is something that is actually very important here at Agentsmart. At Agentsmart, we care a lot about soft skills. And one skill that I think is really important is improvisation. And that's something that most of the facilitators here have, because it's really important when you are with a client and sometimes they ask you a question that you don't even know or it's very hard to answer. So instead of being like, uh, I don't know, it's very important to improvise. Just use the skills, the informations that you already have in your mind and just connect them in a positive way. So maybe you don't know the answer, but the client is going to feel that he is getting his answer, you know what I mean? So we just have to improvise. I would say that that's a good thing. So to learn that, you can actually do some theater classes, improv classes, I did myself improv classes. So that's going to help you improvising, not only in the work, in your work field, but also in your daily life. It's very good for you to even communicate with other people, other designers, if you are a freelancer, you know, kind of to build your network base. So I just think it's really good, just knowing how to improvise and communicating better with people. Thank you so much for watching you guys. I hope you found that video insightful and interesting. If you have any questions at all, please pop them in the comments. Also, if you have any skills that you think we didn't mention, that you think a lot of junior designers or even just general designers are lacking, please put them down there, we want to talk about it. Also, of course, please like this video if you enjoyed it and definitely subscribe if you haven't subscribed already. We have videos coming out every single week about product design, UX, innovation, all kinds of stuff. So it's definitely a channel you'll want to be a part of. Also, we have an Instagram that you should be following if you're not. It is a daily vlog of what's going on in our agency. We have really cool, valuable content coming out all the time there. So definitely follow us there. And you should be listening to our podcast, which is Product Breakfast Club. It comes out every week on Mondays. It features Jonathan Courtney, our CEO, and of course the author and inventor of the design sprint, Jake Knapp. It's an excellent, excellent podcast you should definitely listen in. Otherwise, those are all the things you can do immediately. Other than that, I just want you to have a great day. So you can just go do that. All right, great, bye. Hi, I'm Jonathan and... Okay, before we get... I don't know if this is going to work if we edit it together, to be honest. It'll be very tricky. Okay, bye, bye, bye. By a garbage truck. By just, that's definitely for YouTube. Just keep that bit in.