How To Design Faster Than Anyone Else

This simple habit changed my design career and it takes less than 30 minutes to do. As designers, we have very limited time to actually design. It's very rare to get a solid 4 hours of unblocked design work time. So we need to jump back into the project and design high quality work as fast as we can because we have very scattered moments of design work between meetings, between interruptions, between life. So here's how I warm up to design a lot in a very limited amount of time. And this is a process that I apply to 6 and 7 figure projects. And that I keep refining. And if you don't know who I am, my name is Charles Postiaux. I'm the founder and designer at baboon.studio. I've worked with companies worth over $160 billion. And let's go. First, I review my notes and my designs. So I start by looking back at what I discussed with the clients or with the team in the past day or 2 days. Big tip for any designer out there is to, whenever you have a meeting or you have feedback from the team, the designers that you work with, or the clients, make sure to take notes. Because nowadays it's very trending to have tools take notes for you and that summarize it with AI. And so I feel like it's a lot easier now to just don't do anything, just go on the call, talk with people, and that's it. But actually taking notes kind of like adds layer of understanding to what has been said. Because on a call, if you just listen and you don't take notes, it's very one for one kind of where they say something, you listen to it, and that's it. But when you take notes, you have to first of all listen to them, then realize that that's something that is worth noting. And then you have to play it back into your head and summarize it yourself. And so you understand a lot more of what happened than what has been said. You're also gonna add some critical thinking to it of like, okay, so why did it say that? What do I need to do to fix that? Or, you know, to manage what has been said or to work on it next time. And so you add so much more understanding to, to the conversation than just listening to it and reviewing the transcript or the summary. So make sure to write notes for meetings, for feedback. You can also write questions or ideas that you have or thoughts that you have when you design. Or you end the day, you have some extra thoughts, you can also add it there to make sure that I first understand, okay, what are we doing? What has been done in the past few days? What have been some of the challenges and the problems or the goals that we're trying to achieve with the project? And then just review my designs on Figma. So the designs can be low fidelity, can be wireframes, it can be high-level flows or just, you know, just design work that I've done for the project. But it can also just be inspiration and references that I have. It doesn't always have to be pixel-perfect designs. It can— or not even design, it can just be visuals, it can be ideas, it can be anything. Like when I'm on meetings, for example, and we think about a new feature to make, sometimes I'm thinking about, oh, this feature makes me think of this product or that product that also do it very well, so I should think about looking at it next time I work on it. Because I usually have meetings at the end of my day, so I cannot really do it in the moment. I usually have to do it the next day. And actually doing meetings at the end of the day, like, I feel like meetings at the end of the day is a lot better in my opinion than in the— in the— at the beginning of the day. Because at the beginning, you're like, you don't have that warm-up. You're just, you're just starting out. Or maybe you have an hour or 2, and that's where you get that interruption of being in the flow, being in your creative mode. I feel like that's really not— that's not super productive. But when you do it at the end of the day, first of all, you have to work, right? Like you have to have designs that are ready to showcase during the call. So that's already a good motivation as a designer. And also you don't have to do anything like— it's the end of the day, so you're not as creative as in the beginning. And so you're more aware of, you know, what people are saying. You care more about what they say and you're trying to speak as much as you can. And I feel like that's really, really beneficial. Number 2, to warm up, what I do is I Ask ChatGPT basically what we worked on and what we thought about last time, because I work a lot with ChatGPT. I think it's a really amazing tool to think about the copy, understand how features might work, what could be some flow ideas, just to understand also industries, what the users might want, simply just to ping pong ideas. Because sometimes you don't have designers to work with you, or again, like if you work remotely or have different like designers from different countries, it's sometimes hard to jam together. And so obviously you need to, you know, always take it with a grain of salt when ChatGPT says something. Overall, I think it's a really great tool and I just ask like, what ideas or what flows, what feature, what did we talk about last time? What goals are we trying to achieve? And so usually it gives me back like a checklist with several sections, bullet points, and even sometimes questions of like things we're still trying to think through on the project. And that helps me to connect the dots between what I took with the notes, with the design that I've been working on, or the references and ideas that I have. And also just the kind of like product design thinking and strategy behind all of that. If I'm not sure about some things, I'm going to usually ask follow-up questions to clarify some points and just to make sure that I'm on top of my game, ready to design. And you can see that right now I have not even used Figma yet, right? I've just used Figma to look at my designs, but I've not designed anything yet because in my opinion, the warmup as designers starts First of all, in our mind, not really about the design that we make. Like, we can only be as good as what we think about as designers. And so if we don't think at all, then the designs are not going to be that good. And then the third and final step of that warm-up is just to look at quality designs, because in my opinion, your design taste is one of your greatest strengths as a designer, and it goes down very quickly if you do not keep it in shape. I think my, my biggest motivation or lesson in the reason behind me always— I'm always trying to push designers to look at more high-quality designs, better products, because I don't want people to tolerate mediocrity. As designers, we have to set the standards to be extremely high, to have that excellence-only attitude. And so to do that, I need to look at design from real projects, real products, and real companies. I'm not an influencer on Twitter who makes money getting paid to design cool concepts. I'm a designer who gets paid to bring real results to real businesses. I'm getting paid because I'm helping businesses make more money. And so I must always be grounded in reality and know what's doable for my clients. And at the same time, always push my standards and my designs to always be a step higher every time I design something. Like, how do I push myself and my skills and my understanding of the product and the experience and the users and the business to be better. Because at the end of the day, my understanding of the product and my design taste, these are what makes me unique as a designer. That's what makes me irreplaceable. That's what makes me stand out. And if I do not invest more time, more effort, more resources into becoming better at it and surrounding myself again with a lot of great products and just great design in general— it doesn't have to be products, it doesn't have to be even design, but just shaping that creative mind and keeping it sharp is usually like an amazing investment to make. And that's going to heavily impact the project that I work on, which is going to heavily impact again how much money my clients are going to make. The better I become as a strategy designer, the more money they're going to make. And so right now, if you do not know what to do as a designer to get better, just find those quality designs, You can go on mobbin.com, you can go to curated.design, startups.gallery, on Landbook. You can go on those platforms and look at what real products, real websites, real companies do and just find those cool designs that you want to learn from. Just learn from them, because if nobody wants to work with you right now, if nobody wants to pay you, it just means you're not good enough. You're not market standard. People don't care about you doing your best, you're trying your hardest. You need to be better. And so to be better, you need to put in the work. You need to find what makes you unique as a designer and just push for that. Do as much as you can, as much volume as you can, because it only depends on you right now. There's no— it's not about the market, it's not about the industry you're in, it's not about other designers being cheaper than you. It's just you're not good enough. And that's something I remind myself all the time. Like, if I'm not as successful as I want to be, if I'm not making as much as I want, it's just because I'm not good enough. And so that's also a reminder for me to like keep pushing for that, keep being better. And hopefully this video helps you do that. Thank you so much for watching. Make sure to leave a like and subscribe. Also, YouTube thinks you will like this next video, so if you have not watched it, have a look. Bye!