I wrote ‘A different letter to a junior designer’

Last week, Cennydd Bowles wrote his Letter to a Junior Designer. It was widely shared and commented on, but while I enjoyed Cennydd sharing his experience—he is, after-all, an experienced product designer—I felt that his message and tone were profoundly negative.

This paragraph in particular rankled me:

Perhaps your teachers exalted The Idea as the gem of creative work; taught you The Idea is the hard part. I disagree. Ideas aren’t to be trusted. They need to be wrung dry, ripped apart.

I want to inspire young/junior designers, not demoralise them, so I wrote my own, different, letter to a junior designer that’s based on my experience and published it alongside Cennydd’s original on A List Apart.

(This is my first article on A List Apart for eight years, eight years since Invasion of the Body Switchers. I won’t leave it so long next time.)