What I learned as a product Illustrator in 3 years — Part 2

The last time I wrote about my learnings (Which I’d encourage you to read first) as a product illustrator, was 3 years back. Writing that was one of the most fruitful activity because of the positive Impact It created. I also have been reading quite a lot of articles, and books, and have grown in my role to Lead product illustration recently with additional responsibilities being added to the expectation in this role.

Since the role is still not very defined (being interpreted differently by a lot of aspiring product illustrators) and the learning never stops, I felt 3 years is quite some time to have a lot of learning. I wanted to write about it again. Also, this would be a good start to finish my many unfinished writing in my drafts gathering dust over many months.

Here are many and very practically applicable learnings I’ve jotted down for myself based on my experiences and learnings from the last 3 years. I’ve tried to very precisely write and condense it down but I assure you it’s worth reading. Let’s dive in!

Career and Growth

1. Leverage your manager

Having a great manager is crucial in your career and that can make or break your entire journey ahead especially if any career.

Also please note Manager and mentor can be different as well. I only once had my manager who was a mentor as well. The importance of a great manager is to ensure you get great opportunities to flex your skills within the company. Your manager may not understand the craft of visual design and illustrations but if they unlock great opportunities for you, get you the resources, time and guidance you need, you’re in good hands. Don’t always think great mentors can be great managers. Those are your different skills

Now that we know managers and mentors can be different, how do I leverage them? Remember, it’s a 2-way conversation. Well here are some crisp pointers I have used to have the conversation.

1. Ask them hard questions. Ask what’s the road map and growth path for you.
2. What are the potential projects for you they have in mind?
3. If you have an interest in learning let’s say animation or branding, ask their help to identify potential opportunities within the org.

In general, have an honest conversation with your manager. Sometimes it’s a tough call but you’ll have the clarity for what’s the action plan for you and them. Write these down and make it more fruitful.

2. Don’t condition your career

Listen, we all have said to ourselves that If I go to that company, It’d be so much better. Or I’m just waiting for the promotion and that’s what we take as a goal and do extra and push ourselves just for that promotion. Or I want to learn a particular skill so I want to work with my favourite designer or a favourite company. I have been in this position and we all are/were at one point. Putting conditions to our own learning and careers. This does nothing but make us lose sight of bigger goal and learning.

As my wise friend Shashank once told, Promotions are side rewards and you get them when you have grown out to the next level already. Not the other way round where you want it and then you start to prepare yourself for the role.

Your skills in design in particular are not tied to your title at all, you may get to senior designer at a company and be a celebrated designer, but when you make the switch, you may get a Junior designer or a lead designer at another company. Your skills will be the true dipstick. Period. Don’t hang on to the titles, particularly in visual design is what has worked well for me.

Have a global career plan that involves learning true skills like illustration, motion design, icon design, etc and not just hard skills but soft skills like art direction, presentation, design walkthrough, and collaboration through well-established competencies.

3. Ask for advice only from the people who are doing great in your field and who you think can give you well-informed good advice

Who doesn’t love to hear compliments and appreciation about their work. The visual nature of our work makes it even more open to consumption by general audience. But don’t settle for compliments, ask for feedback and that too only from the pros in your field you to be like one day.

In Flipkart, I was the only Product illustrator and specifically in the early days at Flipkart, I was unsure of how am I doing since there was no benchmark or competition in the org, and all others were product designers and managers. There was a vast variety of feedback and appreciation. I was on constant lookout for validation and feedback from everyone to just ensure that I’m on the right track. Designers had enough designers in the same role to understand their drawbacks, strengths and weaknesses to benchmark themselves. Here I was as a product illustrator asking for feedback on skills and careers from the people in the role that’s different. How do I solve it and ensure I’m doing ok?

Firstly thanks to my Friend Radhika who told me years later that I’m just asking the wrong people for feedback and should ask and take action on the right feedback from right people who I want to be like. After that I reached out to many product illustrators globally with my work and asked multiple questions that gave me a good perspective on what am I good at and what I need to improve on. This has given me good insights and a great roadmap ahead for me to work on.

Please reach out to not many but the right people for the right advice. Just ask a few questions in your head.

1. Would I want to be a professional when I grow professionally?
2. Does this person provide value and insight to me that I can leverage in my professional life?
3. Does this person have skills and values that I can learn from him that I may be missing right now?

The list can go on but the idea is to find the right person who can help you grow. Send them a mail, reach out for help and follow their advice. To put it with a bit of humour, it does not make sense to see singers judge a dance competition which is quite common these days.

4. Know what you seek

Try this out. Take a piece of paper and write down the goals you wish to achieve in the next 5 years of your career. The moment you think about it, and you try to write it, it’s going to be so tough.

If you have a plan and you’re working towards it, that’s great. You’ve the clarity one needs so you can skip this one, but maybe not.

Having clarity on what you want and being decisive towards that is a skill many of us need and aspire to have. In a sea full of possibilities, it’s important what you’re searching after and what you’re working towards. It could be skills or even money and roles you have an eye on. The lack of clarity comes from many places. Initially, even I wasn’t sure what’s next and early years like all creatives are spent mostly on learning hard skills so it never occurs to plan out what I really wish to learn and leave. Meanwhile how to grow in my career, and what strategic choices to make is also something I figured out later.

The overall challenge is that the role is not defined so you wouldn’t find the blueprint of what you could be doing. However, the base if you hard skills like illustrations, colour theory, techniques etc. Once you

If you also sometimes feel like you don’t know what’s next, One thing I learned was to search Try to find the job description of a bigger role than you are currently at. Write down all the key requirements, skills, qualifications etc needed for that role. Don’t pick up just one but 4–5 such descriptions. Try to check what you already know and what you don’t know. Then you can decide what you should be doing next and try to learn those skills and apply those. It’s going to give you so many challenges to work on. Not only will you grow, but you’ll also understand if you enjoy a particular

5. After a point hard skills saturate.

The initial years of our careers are spent working on our hard skills. These are the ability to draw, developing a strong design intuition, and design skills which are our basic competencies. It doesn’t come quickly and takes years to create a strong understanding and ability to do so. However, as a product illustrator, after a point, these skills don’t matter in achieving your goals or getting visibility in org or outside.

My friend Samriddhi told me once that craftsmen are incredibly competent at their skills but sometimes lack the ability to market or showcase their work which leads to them not getting the right money and recognition. After a point, your growth won’t come not just from how great your hard skills are but also from how well you can present your work, and how active you’re in the network and tap the right opportunity at the right time.

Another aspect of hard skills is that you’d need to be done with learning the tool soon. If you start learning the tool and you don’t know it well, you’ll be spending a lot of time not knowing the full capability of the tool or spending an avoidable number of steps but just using a shortcut. Just learn the tool quickly so you can then actually focus on illustrating. Many times students or illustrators ask how I did the clipping masking or used blend tool. That’s probably a not-so-great question. In short, just be done with tools quickly so creating an illustration is not operating the tool.

One other very important thing is to know your weaknesses. The very first step is to address and accept that you don’t possess this skill, yet. The second step is to understand and know if you want and should have these skills also or not. Not everything that one doesn’t know should be learnt. As a product illustrator, you can choose to specialise in something like motion, or 3d, or iconography. While the base skills are a must for all, you can still become an expert in motion design and choose to stay away from 3d. For example, since I never went to a formal design school, I had to draw human figures at Flipkart. It was a nightmare. I did it but it was awful. I did realise my weakness and worked on it. Over the last 5 years, now my character has improved. So one should work on those gaps early in your career. Don’t shy away!

I learnt to incorporate cultural diversity into my human illustrations.

Process and communication

6. Be crisp and precise in your communication.

With most of the communication taking a formal medium such as emails and chats along with meetings, it’s quite important to have a clear structure in your mind about what you want to communicate. As a creative, I did have many moments where feedback was as vague as “hmm, I don’t know, but can it be better?” It doesn’t help to be honest. We need something actionable and something tangible to work with.

Similarly, when you’re presenting your work, or putting your thoughts and points across, you need to have a clear structure around what you’re presenting, what expectations you have in terms of feedback you want from everyone and decisions you took around your design process. 1 way you can practise is to describe/communicate in points. This makes sure that you break down your thoughts into smaller easy-to-consume points for everyone to understand and get structured feedback in response.

7. You’re an expert! Not a pencil!

Not everyone wants to hire a pencil. What’s a pencil you ask? Well a lot of times, Illustrators, by a product manager, Ux designers or other collaboraters are asked to create something something very specific they have in mind. Your role is reduced to just being a pencil. They ask you, and you just do what they say. For e.g. They may say “I don’t like red colour here, can you pick this green colour,” or “This isn’t standing out on this page, make it pop. You can pick from what our competitors have made.” Personal preferences, biases, copying and many other methods are very few or many ways in which you can become a pencil. You’ll just be doing exceptional work without questioning, debating or collaborating using 1 sided communication.

So don’t be a pencil. You’re part of a team and within the org, there’s no client and servicing company model wherein you’ll cater to all unnecessary or foolish requests for illustrations. As a freelancer, you’d definitely say yes because you’ll get more money but as a product illustrator, you may say no because it’s not needed in the overall experience. You’re creating the visuals that will be used in the overall experience and not to the individual requirements. So when you present, you should feel comfortable modifying requirements as you’re an expert. You should know how visuals for a larger usage.

Largely, this comes with a lot of experience and writing down some actionable won’t do much, but a few pointers that may help to get there”

1. Don’t design in isolation and always work on the broader context. For e.g., if you’re making navigation icons, don’t just make them, put them in screens where they’d be used, and see how they feel in active state, do they need to be bolder and louder? Do they pair well with the fonts and colours? Isolated designs are a no.
2. Be very careful of other feedback. Look for subjective feedback. “I like red, it’s my fav,” or “This doesn’t look nice.” Don’t accept such feedback. A simple trick is to ask why. Why do you not like this? Why does this need to be red? Ask for subjective questions that allow stakeholder to express their thoughts well. Dismiss 1 liner statements immediately.

8. Spend more on qualitative tasks than Quantitative tasks

Well, this is a very recent learning but I kept it at last so you remember this one well enough. Simply put you can easily categorise your tasks into 2 types. Qualitative tasks and quantitative tasks. It’s easy to understand that way.

Since product illustrators work with designers, product managers, and many other stakeholders for product illustrators, a considerable chunk of our time is spent on scheduling and attending meetings, submitting work to the team, sending updates, prioritisation of work and many more tasks. On a broader term specifically referring to illustrators, your time may go into raising invoices, signing contracts, submitting your docs to the client, following up with them, etc. These tasks are just quantitative task. Their completeness is definitive and can be easily measured. When a mail is sent, it’s sent. It’s a yes or no. When invoice is uploaded and shared, it’s done.

The second ones are qualitative tasks. These are like the sketch you drew for the illustration. The solution you proposed. The illustrations you drew and showed to the team. These are all subjective tasks, Their completeness isn’t definitive. You can never say when they’re over as the better parameter for this is quality. The more you spend time, the better your output will be. They can never be said complete. You spent 10 minutes on them and you can call it done, though it will be a horrible one, but at the same time you spend 3 hours, you’ll create amazing quality work which may still have tiny room for improvement. The more time spent, the more quality work you produce.

Since I was catering to 30+ product designers at Flipkart or at Swiggy recently where I was helping most of the product designers on new initiatives charter (Instamart, minis, genie, handpicked), by the number of stakeholders, my qualitative tasks would increase and I’d find it hard to navigate. My day would be clouded with meetings, calls, updates, giving feedback and catchups and eventually, I’d get very little time to illustrate and work on solutions. This will lead to a lower quality of work that I’d not enjoy.

You should be collecting all quantitative tasks together and doing them quickly so you get more work on qualitative tasks so you can keep spending more time on iterating them and get better quality every time. Otherwise, you’ll try to reduce everything to a quick task and submit a low quality word. Here’s how you can do. Write down your all actionable. Just dump them all on a paper and then highlight the ones that are quality tasks. Batch the rest quantitative tasks together in batches. Finish a batch and then focus on the qualitative task. Repeat.

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