What makes a good designer? Hear the answers from over 17 designers at Config2024.

Hey, y', all, my name is Miggy. I'm a designer advocate at figma. And so the question was, what makes a good designer? I would say somebody who is intentional, thoughtful, actually thinks deeply about the problems, understands it, you know, so if you're not necessarily like an expert in the field, you know, those who actually work tirelessly to truly understand it, who falls in love with those problems in designing? You know, those who have a respect for craft and really, you know, digs in deep. They're not surface level. So, like, good design is thoughtfulness and intentionality. What makes a good designer to me is curiosity. I think the best designers are curious. They investigate things, and they are not satisfied with just knowing what's on the surface. Okay. Hi, I'm Pablo. Pablo Stanley. And okay, the question is, what makes a good designer? I think curiosity. I mean, if you want to be a little bit philosophical about it, it is about trying to find things, you know, like going into rabbit holes and seeing what if this and what if that, you know, and that can be on answering problems, on bringing other people and just like always, not just conforming to one idea and seeing what else is out there. So I think that that is one superpower that we can all just as designers or curiosity, and not be afraid of. Just, like, be weird with our curiosity too. So, yeah. Hi, I am Lily. I am instructor at Memorizing, but I'm also the founder of Sol Dools, and I think a good design. Wait, what was the question again? Okay. What makes a good designer? I think a good designer is a person who has a lot of empathy, is a person that always ask for, for the why. And I actually have a tattoo that says why. And it's a person who really thinks in the future and ahead. Also, as a person who loves to collaborate, I think those are, like, the best skills to have. Yeah. My name is Jesse Showalter. I'm a designer, content creator. I think what makes a good designer is somebody who's curious and flexible. I think when you put those two things together, you get a little bit of magic there. You have to be curious, you have to ask why. You have to kind of, like, dig deeper. But at the same time, I think that you have to be willing to accept that maybe your assumptions and thoughts aren't right, and that's where you can kind of be flexible. And again, I think that's that magic moment where you go, like, I'm just having fun now because I'm curious and flexible. So to me, that's what makes a Good designer. Hi, I'm Sharon, I'm a full time UX designer and I'm also a content creator. I think a good designer is someone who really understands both design aspect but also how it fits into the context of the business. So I definitely would recommend always being in alignment with your PMs, knowing the business constraints and really to what greater purpose is this trying to solve. So that's what I would say. So yeah. My name is Chris Beltran, I'm a VP Product Designer over at jpmc. I work with the fine gentleman behind the camera, John. Let me see. So what makes a good designer? I actually posted this on LinkedIn the other day. You gotta have empathy. Empathy. So that's step one and then step two. You gotta have common sense. So if you don't have any of those, you probably gotta brush up on one of the two. That's what I have for you. Howdy, I'm Grace, I run a buddy community, Design Buddies, the largest design community in the world. I'm also a content creator and startup founder and I think what makes a good designer is someone who's willing to take feedback and share feedback as well. What's up folks? My name is Jay. I host Sneak Peek which gives you an inside look in the Figma files of top designers. I think that what makes a top designer is a lot of things, but specifically because I work in enterprise, for someone to be really good in enterprise setting for that designer, they have to have really good facilitation skills, align a lot of different stakeholders on the same mission, a lot of empathy skills for our users in the enterprise space. Don't just assume that they want the latest and greatest interaction design patterns have empathy, understand that they're used to a certain kind of pattern. Don't try to innovate if they're not asking you for it. So I think those things make someone a really good designer in the enterprise space. Thank you for watching. Hi, I'm Anna, I'm a designer advocate at Figma and I think what makes a good designer is someone who is creative and looking and good at problem solving. So not just going with the status quo, challenging what are some of the existing patterns and expectations and trying to figure out if there's a way to make things better. Yeah, I'm Ryan Hudson Peralta, also known as look mom, no Hands. And what makes a good designer is loving what you do, loving your output and just pushing it, pushing it forward and you know, test it, test it with yourself, test it with family and have others Try it. And if you love it, that's all that matters. When you're designing for accessibility, don't think about yourself. Always think about others. Gotcha. I love that. Thank you so much. Okay. All right, let's do it. Hi, I'm Elaine Anzaldo, AKA Elaine in the Bay. I work at Meta as a conversation designer. Let's see, what was the question? What makes a good. What makes a good designer? For me, it's all about being a devil's advocate and being able to view a solution from many different perspectives and really being able to even challenge your own assumptions about, you know, something that you might feel very personally connected to. For example, a lot of people are writing the AI boom. And I think it's always very healthy to have a certain level of skepticism and everything that might be shown to you is exciting and new. That's really the main thing, is making sure that we're designing products that are ethical and trustworthy. Hi, I'm Mattia Caramel. I'm from Italy. And what makes me, like, a good designer to produce that that device is mainly, like, the finding something that it will be useful for myself and know that other people out there can find it comfortable for their needs. So I think that making the product comfort and useful for even, like, the community is going to be like, the. The most like, like, interesting part of the. Of the designing behind it. It's a good designer. I think somebody that just kind of follows their intuition and leans into what makes them. Them. And that's exactly what Mattia did. So that was the prompt. Yeah. Hi, I'm Mattia Caramel. I'm from Italy. And what makes me, like, a good designer to produce that that device is mainly, like, the finding something that it will be useful for myself and know that other people out there can find it comfortable for their needs. So I think that making the product comfort and useful for even, like, the community is gonna be like, the most, like, interesting part of the designing behind it. The ability to get scrappy, can get emotional and think outside, think outside of the box, even traditional methods and mediums. I think that's what makes a good designer. Thank you. I think, like, you gotta have a really focus on, like, the product vision. You know, for me, I'm a startup designer, so I've, like, always worked in startups, but I think, like, there's a point where you have, like, a good enough gut instinct, right, where, like, you could. You could spend another three or four hours on it. But is it good enough to ship? And yes, fucking ship it. So I think that that's the thing you got to really learn, like build and you'll also be much more effective when you do that. Awesome. Thank you so much. Hello, I'm Gemma, I'm a senior UX designer and I think the. What was the question? What makes a good designer? What makes a good designer? I think empathy for people, that's really, really important. You have to understand other people's emotions and things like that so you can design better for each other. I'm Tommy Giocco and one of the most important things that designers can do to improve, improve their craft is to understand the bets your company are placing. Oftentimes people say, hey, why are you making this decision? And if you don't understand the macro level bet your company is placing to win the market, it's much harder to justify why you're spending so much time on a small decisions. There are four types of macro bets your company might make. Velocity, how quickly you're getting some market efficiency. How well you're dealing with waste. You can think of things like design systems, accuracy, how accurate is your company in the bets they're making, Are they right more than they're wrong, and innovation. What are the things your company are doing that really differentiate themselves as a product? You should be able to identify one or two of those buckets of your company and if you're not sure, then you need to start talking to stakeholders and product managers and you can start to identify that answer. Good luck.