My first job was in a small company of four people. The owner planned to develop web design in the city where I live. It was a small outsourcing team.
For the business, he hired a copywriter, a manager, a developer, and a designer. As you can guess, I was the designer and my first task was to create a website design for this company.
It was 2012, and the trend was bright, 3D, almost cartoon-like or fairy-tale-style designs. Below you can see the style was popular at 2012
These designs are taken from 1stwebdesigner.com
Things went well
I didn’t have strong 3D modeling skills, and my boss knew that. So the obvious option was to create collages from ready-made assets, but I came up with a different idea. I can draw by hand, so I suggested creating handmade illustrations for the website — drawing them, photographing them, and using as artwork for the header and throughout the site.
It was quite an original idea, and my boss liked it because no one had a similar design. I remember painting watercolor illustrations of our team members and creating drawings for other sections as well.
Just “make it more serious”…
As often happens — and now I know this is normal — my boss started showing the already implemented design to his friends and acquaintances. Most of them were men from metallurgy and construction industries, and they naturally leaned toward more serious, industrial aesthetics. To them, the design felt childish.
That’s when I received my first unexpected and confusing feedback: “make the design more mature.”
From that moment, it turned into a difficult cycle for me — a mix of my inability to understand my boss and his inability to clearly explain what he wanted.
I kept drawing new illustrations, reworking the old ones, was on the verge of being fired several times, and was constantly getting sick. In reality, all I needed to understand was that he might have liked the design himself, but it didn’t match the expectations of his circle — people whose businesses had nothing to do with design.
When you get negative feedback, don’t rush to fix everything
All my effort to redo everything only made things worse. The design started to feel like it was created by someone uncertain and exhausted — which, to be honest, I was at that time.
Now I understand that if I had been able to explain my decisions and stand by them, a redesign might still have happened — but my boss would have respected both me and the design much more.
Design teched me not only estetically, but mentally about how to be not only a good designer, but also a confident person. You might also like to read about one of my challenging projects – Logo and stationary design for an interior design company
