Looking Back on 2021 as GiFT's First New Graduate Designer

What you'll learn from this article

• What it's like for a new graduate designer at GiFT (4 employees at the time I joined) to go through their first year
• What happens after someone becomes a designer coming from a general university background

About me before joining

• I interned at GiFT one to two days a week starting in May 2020
• I picked up a bit of design and markup at a vocational school

It's a bit clumsy, but I'll write about it in three parts: the first half, the middle, and the second half of the year.

The first stretch, where every day flew by too fast (April–June)

At first, I was still working from home just like during my university days, thinking "hmm, my life hasn't really changed that much..." That's how I started. Since the release of a service I'd been working on since my internship was approaching, I dove right into design work. The first thing I struggled with was designing the top page of that service. The top page has the role of introducing the service itself. Because of that, the tone was different from designing the service itself, which threw me off, but with a lot of help I managed to get through it. There were tough moments, but since it was a service I'd been involved with from the start, when it launched I was so happy that I bragged about it to all my friends. Ha.

Around this time, I also designed a flyer for the first time. Looking at the version before revisions now, I cringe a bit — mismatched fonts, whitespace that wasn't well controlled, oversized frames added out of fear of the layout looking too empty... ugh. I got feedback, revised it over and over, gradually organized the information, and by the end it turned into a before-and-after I barely recognized myself. It was a really educational experience.

Looking back, during this period every day flew by so fast that I kept feeling anxious that I wasn't taking in enough input. But now I realize that input is something you build up little by little every day — reading Twitter and note, browsing gallery sites, reading a book when the mood strikes — so there was no point stressing about it so early on. Going forward, I want to keep valuing the habit of staying tuned in to things.

The middle stretch of working out loud (July–September)

During this period, I had several projects where I explained the sites I'd designed to clients and even did the markup myself.

Markup was its own challenge — IE support was tougher than expected, jQuery was a mystery to me — and design had its own struggles too, like putting things into words. Every day was full of things I didn't understand. In the middle of all that, there were several times when something I'd agonized over enough to feel feverish got solved instantly just by throwing it into Slack. From then on, I learned to just post in Slack once I'd been struggling for a while. I want to use my time well instead of stubbornly telling myself "I feel like I'm almost there..." Working from home means there's no one sitting next to you, so this middle stretch made me realize how much more important it is to work out loud.

Working out loud is part of GiFT's culture. ↓ What is Working Out Loud? Working Out Loud, Building a Culture of Training Among Team Members - Studysapuri Product Team Blog

This was also the first time I took part in user research. It was fascinating! Even though I'm normally on the user side of a service myself, user behavior turned out to be surprising in ways I didn't expect, and there were improvement points in places I hadn't considered — understanding users runs deeper than I thought. At first, my hands were full just taking notes and observing users. But after getting advice on how to take notes, I started making notes I could understand later, preparing templates in advance, and gradually made the work more efficient through these little improvements. Once I had more room to spare, I could pay closer attention to user behavior, and sometimes I'd ask about something that caught my interest and get a surprising insight that made me go "oh!" — it's quite fun. That's a kind of enjoyment I probably wouldn't have understood if I hadn't become a designer myself.

The second half, where I felt communication was a challenge (October–December)

As I had more direct interactions with clients and asked engineers to implement designs I'd made, I ran into many situations where I felt communication was harder than ever before. To make design data easier to understand, I tried leaving comments in the design files at spots where questions were likely to come up, and marking which parts had been revised. There's still plenty of room for improvement here, I think. It's hard to convey everything through text alone, and unless you're psychic, it's hard to notice the gap between how the other person understands something and how you understand it. So I think working out loud regularly, letting my thinking flow out as I go, and creating an atmosphere where communication happens naturally, is something that working from home can actually help me train, ironically enough. Talking about recent stuff tends to turn into nothing but self-reflection, so I'll leave it here.

Looking back on the year

I was worried I might be living on autopilot, but looking back, I was relieved to find that I'd actually been thinking a lot while working. Ha. Looking back, I found two things I want to work hard on. First, I tend to be a half-hearted kind of serious person who gets anxious about whatever's right in front of me, so I don't want to neglect pursuing clarity, usability, and expressing the "essence" of a service or website. Second, I want to become better at communication — so that everyone at GiFT, who's always helping me out, can move more smoothly, and so that I myself can absorb even more learning. Starting in January, I'll try to do what I can, little by little — continuing to gather information daily, working out loud, and making design data easier to understand. The days since becoming a working adult flew by in an instant, but along the way I got to work on all kinds of projects, and once I started coming into the office once a week, I got to think about company matters together with others, hold study sessions, and even teach interns sometimes — it was a really rich and fulfilling 2021. I'll keep at it with renewed spirit next year too, so thank you for your continued support. Have a great year-end!