Focus Early

Let’s stop lying to young people and pretending that everything in design is easy and glamorous. Just because you know how to match two outfits or have an eccentric personal style doesn’t mean you’re suddenly capable of building a solid marketing campaign or leading a product design team.

No — it’s not that simple. No one guarantees you a Red Dot Design Award just because you made something “exceptional.” Talent helps, but it’s never enough on its own.

Knowing color theory, having a curated Instagram feed, or looking visually interesting doesn’t make you a designer. Design isn’t about appearance. It’s about decisions, context, and a lot of invisible work.

What being a good designer actually means

A good designer is, first and foremost, a well-specialized designer.

When I started working in design — around 2007, and more seriously by 2009 — things were very different. You couldn’t really say you only did print or only web. You were just a “designer.”

If a client came to you for a business card, they almost certainly wanted a brochure as well. Or a website. And even websites were a bit of a gray area back then. Flash and Dreamweaver were the standard. If you knew how to use both, you could make good money.

At that time, the idea of a designer who also coded didn’t really exist. Teams were clearly split. Designers designed, developers developed. That’s where the classic love–hate relationship between the two roles was born. Over time, things settled. Each side learned a bit from the other, and today those boundaries aren’t as rigid anymore.

How to build a niche without boxing yourself in

Before this turns into a “back in my day” speech from an old designer who wants to explain how hard life is, let’s get back to the point: how to choose a niche.

Today, design is massive. There are countless branches, sub-branches, tools, methodologies, and specializations. My advice is simple: Learn a bit of everything, but don’t try to master everything.

Absorb information. Experiment. Pay attention to what naturally pulls you in. Don’t panic if for a few months you want to do illustration, and then suddenly UI design starts to feel more appealing. That’s normal. You’ll always be drawn to things other people do better than you.

The key is to double down on what you’re best at, without completely ignoring the other creative disciplines. Steal a little from each of them.

Why design never works in isolation

Let’s say you choose UI Design. One of the most important foundations for UI, in my opinion, is print design.

That’s where you learn:

• typographic hierarchy,

• visual weight,

• spacing,

• and how to give importance to content.

You’ll apply these exact same principles every day in web and mobile applications. You’ll constantly work with text sizes, colors, spacing, and rhythm.

As you go deeper into UI, you’ll also rely on illustrations and icons. A good illustration isn’t just decorative. It guides attention. It helps focus users on a specific area or call to action.

Illustration always has a focal point — sometimes more than one. A simple movement, like a foot kicking a ball, creates a clear connection between a button and an action. None of this is accidental.

Maybe the examples aren’t perfect, but the idea is clear: no design discipline exists on its own.

Conclusion

Design has become extremely segmented. So segmented that it’s impossible to keep up with everything the way the early 2000s generation once did.

What you can do is pick a direction and commit to it. Yes, it’s a gamble. Just like print slowly faded, UI/UX may eventually lose its essence as everything becomes increasingly standardized.

In the end, design isn’t always about what you choose. Very often, design chooses you. Your job is simply to persist long enough in one direction to find out if it’s truly yours.