Responses to @dustin’s Five Design questions…

1. Tell us who you are in one sentence.

Inveterate doodler, occasional painter (oil paints, mostly), daily pixel pusher who works to make the world a slightly better place while keeping the dogs rolling in the kibble.

2. If you weren’t a designer, what would you do?

Not sure, I have a wild and storied background in retail and food service, so that’s always an option. As long as I don’t have to clean the fryolator, I’m good.

Other than design, I really like project management and anything that has to do with defining the problems/solutions for the arc of a project.

If I could get paid for it, I’d make think-/drink- tanks that met in bars to brainstorm redesigns/designs for products to improve the world in some way (see next answer).

If I could go back to school, I’d be interested in either marine biology (random, I know, but I love biology and feel like the ocean is one of the next big frontiers we need to care for) and/or product design (yeah, I’d still be a designer, but a completely different kind of designer).

If I didn’t need to work for moolah, I’d do the think/drinktanks and paint more.

3. What is something you wished you designed, either because you love it, or because you feel you could have done it better?

The Q Drum — it sums up all that I love and believe in about design. It’s beautiful, simple, elegant, and provides a vital solution that improves the lives of people on a day-to-day basis. There are other products like this (the Mine Kafon is one), but if I had to pick only one, it would be the Q Drum.

4. What was your biggest design mistake?

You mean other than my misspent youth and my love affair with Photoshop filters, gif/flash animations (CLICK HERE NOW! TO BUY! THIS SWILL!), and HTML table-based layouts?

Not testing enough—in all its forms. An email sent out and not vetted carefully enough, a website tested in IE8 via the IE9 developer tools (a whole page was missing! ack!), and so on. Slow down. Test everything. Don’t trust virtual machines/tools.

Other than that, not realizing my niche and trying to do it all. I play really well in the front-end of a project (planning, UX, HTML, CSS), but anything deeper (backend, real programming, databases, servers) puts me right to sleep. Now I have people for that.

5. What advice would you give someone entering the design field?

Get a job.

No, really. Get out of school or wherever you are and get a job, even if it’s just related or gives you exposure.

Best case scenario, get a job in a design shop or as part of an in-house design team where you can learn a lot from people much much smarter than you. Second-best case, get a job where you can become the defacto in-house design person, and improve the crap out of everything. Third-best case, get a job at Kinko’s and play with all the toys. Depending on the creativity of your co-workers, you will learn better production techniques on the graveyard shift than anywhere else (swing shift ain’t bad either…).

There’s nothing like real work that’s tied to real-world problems and business constraints to make you a better designer.

If you’re interested in web design, learn the nuts and bolts online. Start reading and building stuff. HTML/CSS ain’t rocket science. Sure, it’s boring if you’re not really into it (and that’s ok, you don’t have to be a web designer! Plenty of other work out there to go around!), but if you’re motivated, you can pick up the basics in a weekend or two.

From there, start really immersing yourself in becoming a better designer. Follow people on teh twitters. Find free/cheap conferences or meetups to attend (here’s a few, and another, and this for my queergirls!). Talk shop, meet folks, you’d be surprised the things you learn and the connections you can make.

Other than that, once you’re working, work hard, play nice, and remember it’s the long game that counts. Good luck!