How To Design Better Than Anyone Else

Here's my advice to design better than 99% of people. There are 3 steps to it: taste, speed, and depth. And if you don't know who I am, my name is Charles Postiaux. I'm the founder and designer at Baboon Note Studio, where we've worked with companies worth over $160 billion. And I'm doing these videos because I want you to design amazing products, and then you can work with me to make them even better. Taste is basically your design standards. It's how good your designs are just by default when you're just warming up. And in my opinion, you're only as good as the designs that you consume. And so we want to change our design environment to change our standards. And so I'm going to give you a couple of platforms and resources that you can use to surround yourself with those quality designs, those real designs that comes from real products, not just concept, not just aesthetic designs. And the first one is mobit.com. If you follow my channel, you know that I'm using it all the time for design critiques, design reviews, redesign concepts. And in my opinion, this is one of the best websites and platforms. I'm not sponsored by it. Although, you know, Mobbin, if you're watching, but it's a really good platform. I'm using it for projects and I'm also using it just to make content. In my opinion, it's really good if you're a web app designer, if you're like a mobile app designer, it gives you so much depth and so much understanding in terms of how the products are being thought out and designed. It's also really good to go through flows and understand why design teams are doing what they're doing, how to make cool, unique designs and aesthetics. It's perfect for your projects or just as yourself. If you want to study, improve your design skills, you can just pick a screen and try to break it down, analyze why they're doing what they're doing and how you would improve it. Then if you're more into landing pages and websites, I have 2 references for that. The first one is Landbook. I think it's a really strong and solid website and resource if you're trying to learn or improve your web design skills. It's visual and that's just a really good strong resource to have. Another one is curtsy.design. It's another website landing page resource. And I feel like this is more towards like design-centered pages. And again, if you're in need of that fresh, good-looking design and clean landing pages, I think these are 2 great resources to have. And the last one is startups.gallery. It's more about the startup world and the products that they have, not so much about inspiration, but I think it has a lot of benefits for you if you're a designer right now. The first one is just to understand that products don't have to be perfect to make money. You can see here a lot of those startups and companies are raising millions and millions of dollars. Obviously it's raising, it's not making and earning, but it's just to show that there's still interest, there's still money to be made. And so even you as a designer, maybe your service is not perfect. Maybe your portfolio and your skills are not excellent, but it doesn't mean you cannot make money. It doesn't mean you cannot already find customers that are willing to work with you. Another thing that's great about this platform is that As a designer, no matter what you do, it could be graphic design, landing page design, brand designer, like all of those, no matter what you do, you can look at those startups and figure out if there are some of them that first of all, you're interested in as a designer. And second of all, if there is potential for you to like improve on what they have, because maybe you go through, I don't know, ceramic.ai and you look at their landing page and you're like, this is not a super good landing page. There's just text. There is no visual, there's no story. Maybe they could benefit from me redesigning their landing page. And so what you can do is just take what they have. Have, create a landing page, and then you can reach out to the team and say, hey, I've done this landing page for you. You can take it if you want. If you do not want it, no problem at all. And that's it. And that's how you start creating conversation. That's how you start having customer relationships. And that's an amazing way to do it and to learn more about business because, and I'm going to talk about it a bit later, you need to be great at so many different things in order to succeed in design that you having the opportunity to start learning those new skills today is an amazing way to grow as a designer and to stay relevant in the future. Surround yourself with great designs, with high quality design from real products, because your design taste is one of your biggest strengths as a designer. Having a high taste in design means that you have higher standards as a designer. Also, I think all of them offer like a free version. So, you know, even if you don't have the money to pay for them, try to find ways like you can just start with the free versions of it. Even if it's not much, it's still better than nothing. And you're going to find those designs, those features, those elements that resonate with you and that improve your standards. as a designer and you're going to store them somewhere. I don't know where. It can be a Figma project, Figma page. It can be on Cosmos. It can be on Pinterest, anywhere that's relevant and useful for you. And you're just going to store them there. And by the way, if you need help redesigning your products, getting feedback, understanding how to improve your flows and your designs, I've already worked with multimillion dollar companies and you can get a product review from me. We're going to break down the design that you've done. I can also on other tiers record a walkthrough video. I can also design some screens or redesign, offer some concept, but I just want to give you as much value as possible so that you can make the best possible designs for your product. And the link is in the description. Then the number 2 is speed. Speed is the time it takes for you to go from an idea to reality. And by reality, I mean having the design done. And the reason why speed is so important is because you can go fast only once you are good. Once you've done it so many times that the process is streamlined, once you've removed what's not needed. What are the principles of your design process? We always think about principles for product, for features, but What about you? What about your principles as a designer? What needs to be true for you to make the best designs and how to remove everything else that does not matter? And you can see here, for example, that's a project I worked on and I did all of this in about 3 days, which was a big stretch for me because that will usually take a week or 2 weeks. And so a lot of it comes from doing market scan, knowing what products to look for. It also comes from just analyzing a ton of different products, resources, visuals, and then trying to combine, okay, what do I have? What do I need to do? And then just designing a ton, iterating, iterating. Every idea is a new iteration. Yeah. Iteration is a new screen, and then you just combine everything together. You start making flows, you start making features. You try to understand how they all interact together, how to have a feature that exists throughout the whole product, not just on one specific screen, and how it's going to impact the other features and the product as a whole. And so it takes a ton of work. It takes a ton of efforts to actually get there and to actually be fast and match your new standards. And people would disagree with that. People would say, oh, you can achieve it in 90 days, in 30 days. Like they're usually trying to sell you something. It's a lot harder. And difficult than what you think it is. And if people are trying to tell you that it's not, then you need to be careful about them because all of this, for example, is like the representation of what I've spent for my whole career doing and designing thousands and thousands of screens and designs and iterations and looking at thousands of products and different flows and screens. It's not just 100. It's not just me in 2 hours being able to come up with all of that. And so the key for you, the test that you can do right now is to understand, okay, what do the top designers do? What is their process like? And you just do 10 times more than them because there is no way you're going to close the gap between where you are and where they are. If they keep doing the same quality of work and the same speed and depth in their work, which I'm going to talk about right after that, you do not work more than them. Like there's always gonna be the same gap. So you need to do a lot more work than they are just to catch up to them. If you are a designer trying to have your own design studio, having your own clients, it's the same thing you need to apply for other areas of that business. Like you need to also spend hundreds of hours and doing it thousands of times to be good at your landing page, your offer, talking with clients, making a pitch, everything. And so you need to be super patient with the results, with the outcome that you want to achieve, because it takes time. It compounds, but it takes time. When you see the chart, you know, like there's always the chart of compounding. It only goes super high at the very end of it, not in the beginning. So you need to spend all that time extremely low on that curve to then get that compounding effect that just multiplies everything by 100. To do that, to get there faster, you need to just be impatient with actions. You need to do it more often, more frequently. That's what I'm doing now with videos. I could do one video a month, one video every 2 weeks, but I'm impatient with that. I want to succeed. I want to get more leads, more clients, more projects. And so I'm just trying to make more videos. Okay. And the last one is depth. Depth is how far ahead you are thinking about the impact of a design, of a feature. And I think again, like looking at flows from other products is a great way to realize that and to understand that you need to be intentional with the designs that you make, with the design decisions that you make. When you look at a lot of products and screens, you realize that a lot of companies, they are not that intentional with some things. Like some onboarding flows are absolutely terrible. Some signup screens are also not that good. And it's probably because they need to ship more things and they don't really care so much right now about it. But you can realize that being intentional with design decisions is not that common. And it's an amazing habit to start building up as a designer. Because it's going to impact everything that you do. And every time you design something, if you are in a team that's not bad, they're going to ask you why, why that design decision, what's the rationale behind it, right? And you need to know why, even if you just thought about it, even if you just came up with that idea, you need to have some rationale behind it, some logic behind it. It also comes up faster when you've done so much work, so much product designs that it's almost second nature sometimes, but there's still that depth relevant to the product that you're designing that You need to spend time working on. Like again, looking at this design project, if I design this feature here, how would it impact the product? What other feature could be impacted by it? What's the flow like? How do we introduce that feature to new users? What's the most optimized way to show it? How to show only what's required or what's necessary for the user to get value out of it? How do we onboard users with this new feature? Why do we need this feature to begin with? What's the benefit of it for the product? That's how you're able to become a strategic designer, not just someone who takes orders and follows them. You bring strategy to the product, you bring intentionality to the product, and that has a ton of value because now you're disconnecting the amount of time you work to the value you bring to a client. And I think that's an amazing skill to have. And so that's why, like this feature here, I try reusing it for other features of the product throughout the whole flow, throughout the whole experience. Like how do we bring that same feature everywhere so that it becomes part of the identity of the product, becomes part of the brand. Just to conclude the video, in my opinion, it's easy to have one or two of those skills. Some people love design. And love good quality design, but they cannot make it themselves. Other designers, they might be extremely fast at what they do, but the quality is not that good. They don't have that high of design standards. Some designers are really good into thinking about the whole product and how each feature's going to impact it, but they're not that fast to design or they don't know how to design and they probably don't have very good design taste. And so you can see that each skill can live on its own and they can be very impactful for the team, for the product. It's really hard to get all of them together. And that's how you become a better designer. That's how you stand out. That's how you're part of the one person is by being amazing at each of them together. Thank you so much for watching. I really hope you like this video. Make sure to leave a like and subscribe, and I see you for the next one. Bye.