IDIAMM

So the design industry is stressful, which ever way you look at it. As your career grows, so does the roles and responsibilities and therefore so does the stress…

Going from university to your first company will be stressful regardless and depending on what your university taught you, will prepare you in some way, shape or form…

But the reality is how you cope with the learning curve, take on the responsibility and manage your time… After all there is a direct link between time management and workload and there is nothing like your first major project and your first big deadline under pressure.

The secret is to have a series of processes and procedures to manage both your design and your time. Design management is an important set of skills that allow you to plan your design approach to a set timetable and with a level of production to suit the brief.

You cannot just go into a project all guns blazing. You need a plan to a series of deadlines and monitor these against a gant chart to monitor your progress over a period of time online with your deadlines. This allows you to speed up, pivot your approach to suit and more importantly ask for help early if need be to get back on track.

You want to have a set drawing issue list to work against, have a cross reference approach, build a design guide to set standards so you don’t need to keep redesigning from scratch and instead work on a solid foundation that has flexibility but you know will align to other areas already.

You want to do weekly DTMs even just yourself to monitor your progress and more importantly manage your time and design accordingly. Allow more time where you are slower in production i.e. visuals and less where you know you can save time i.e. CAD if you are good at breaking down a design, tiering, detailing and more.

Treat your project live a live project with weekly monthly deadlines to add your own stress and pressure because you will have this in the real world (rather than just have pressure in the final week!) and you get used to it early on…

If you do this at university in your projects and carry it into your first design role / job, your learning curve will be smaller as you already have an industry foundation and it all comes as second nature, it’s how you work anyway so what’s new?

Then the only stress is the reality of a live project (!!!!), new work colleagues and learning new skills to grow as a designer and more responsible…!