Creative Operations 101: Individual Contributor vs Manager

One area of creative operations where I get many questions is from young Designers who are looking to move up in their careers. For creative people in the visual design fields the natural career path is from Designer to Art Director to Creative Director. Typically the most challenging career step is the first big leap - from Designer to Art Director.

Many young Designers I work with have the idea that after having proved themselves by creating great designs that they should naturally be promoted to an Art Director. This belief is based historical precedent. The educational experience of these young designers has been that year after year they enjoyed moving up the system: freshman to sophomore, junior, etc. This was a predictable and paced system of inexorable progress; with time and effort one always moved to the next level.  

Excluding the public sector where time in the game means money, the creative fields operate on a different model - a model of corporate health and individual utility. Therefore the challenge for the young designer is twofold: to determine if the company is doing well enough to support their career ambitions and to master their own personal workflow and help others with theirs. Focusing on these two areas will allow the Designer to more convincingly bring an argument for a promotion. 

The first and most important step is to assess the general health of the company. The Designer should ask these questions:

Is the company growing?  

Is it taking on new clients? 

Are you personally being asked to participate in new business initiatives?  

Are your peers being promoted?

Does the company provide its employees breakfast and perhaps even lunch?  

If the answer to most of these questions is “yes”, then the company is growing at a strong enough rate to support your promotion. A company in this position is managing its finances well and will be a good place for you to invest your time and talents. If however the answer to many of these questions is “no”, then it is best for you to look for a job at another company. A company in a poor financial position, in a sector in decline, or with limited growth will not have the resources to support your career ambitions. 

The other piece of the Designer’s path for growth is to understand the differences between Individual Contributor and Manager. The role of Graphic Designer is that of a individual contributor - meaning you and you alone are responsible for your output. Raw materials come to you: text docs, images, etc., you create a design file, and pass it off for approval. Once approved you prepare the files for output and post on an FTP site. Your creative work is part of a large conveyor belt of activities that involves other teams and people; you are largely responsible for the work that passes by your narrow area.  

As a sole contributor your range of influence is limited and mostly involves perfecting your own workflow. There are steps you can take to alacrify your workflow and the most efficient and immediate step is to use technological solutions. For example you can ask yourself the question: “Is there a better way to use a design software like InDesign?”  InDesign offers many tools for speeding through work. Continuing with this example, at your present job there is likely an InDesign subject matter whom you can seek advice; use them as a resource. Describe your workflow to the InDesign SME and they may have a technological solution to help you streamline your process. By using technology better you can create process efficiencies and free up time for you to help others.

Second, have a conversation with the person or department feeding you work - the upstream workflow. The goal is to see if there is something they can change to make your workflow easier. Ask the following questions:

How do they send your files?

Are the file formats the easiest to work with?  

Do they email files to you? Or can they populate a work folder on the sever?

In general must you do much prep work to the files, copy, or images they provide for your designs?  

The idea is to see how they prepare or send you their files and identify areas where, if they change something, will result in less work for you. Additionally, and more importantly any change should make their workflow easier. Otherwise it will be very challenging to get buy-in from them. Having said that, there have been times when although changing an upstream workflow did make more effort for one person a whole downstream department was very positively impacted. They saw the value of the added effort and as a result willingly made the change.

For example while on one longterm project I noticed the Copy Department would send us Word docs with text that contained two spaces after each period. We would have to do a find and replace command for the two spaces, and sometimes manually clean up the rivers that would wind through the text block. Also there were times when two spaces were needed and so we would have to manually reinsert those two spaces. If we simply were to receive Word files without double spaces after periods, we would not have to do these extra steps. This was an easy change for the Copy Department and was happy to oblige.

Looking at the downstream workflow presents a slightly easier sell because you are looking for ways to make their work easier. You can ask the following questions:

How can you change your workflow so that people receiving your files have to less work?

Are you performing steps to the files you send downstream that seem unnecessary?

For example on one job it was the responsibility of the Designers to do rough silos and color moves to their Photoshop images. The adjustments were done on the base image layer and were therefore permanent. Once approved the Designer would pass off these files to the downstream retouching department. The retouching department would have to recreate what the Designer had done on a new, duplicate file. We sped up the workflow by batch processing Photoshop files to add default adjustment layers. The Designer would make their non-destructive color moves and silos on these layers. As a result the retouching department would not have to do the extra work of finding the Camera Raw file and creating a fresh tif file to work with; they could simply work with the file provided. Also all the adjustment layers had been built into the file so the retouchers could simply make changes to these layers.

This change was a very easy sell to the downstream department because it eliminated a significant segment of their workflow and allowed the team could do more hi-res retouching to more images.

Focusing on these steps will make the career challenges of the Designer more achievable. Investing your time, talents, and energy at financially healthy companies is of paramount importance. Moreover augmenting your own technological skill set and refining your own work flow and the workflows upstream and downstream will give you the edge to champion your upward career ambitions.