As children we were all artists. Nobody could tell us that our pictures weren't right or good, and everything we did came from the belief that we could draw anything. And we could draw anything because there was nothing holding us back. We weren't hung up on technique, shadows, realism or scale. If we thought about a pony, we drew a pony and it was the best pony we'd ever seen. Some never lose that ability but for the rest, somewhere along the path of life, we forget that creativity once poured out of us.
I didn't set out to be a designer, it just sort of happened. Right as the newspaper industry was moving online I was in school to become a photojournalist. As we focused on the web experience I found myself putting photos together with audio to create slideshows. We did so many that we started stringing these slideshows together under a shared interface. And a strange thing happened, all of a sudden I had to start thinking about interfaces, what it would look like and how the content would be organized into something that made sense. Overnight I became a designer.
I was dropped into a world of information architecture, interaction flow charts and wireframes. I would create those initial designs then hand them off to a "designer" to be made pretty and I would get to work building the interface.
I did all sorts of design and didn't hold back because I could always rely on the person with design in their title to complete things. My awkwardly sketched designs were focused on the interaction and I was able to flourish because nobody expected me to give them something gorgeous, just functional. I was like a child because I didn't have any pressure to make something perfect.
The most interesting thing about all of this is that I considered myself to be a developer because I wrote the code. It wasn't until years later that I admitted to myself that I am indeed a designer and have been all along. And here's the pony to prove it.
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