Connecting the Dots in Design, Tech, and Career Growth.

As the new year drew closer, the need for something new grew stronger; not necessarily because 2022 had been a quiet one, but rather the opposite. I was enjoying the ups, downs, and side turns that the ending year brought and felt ready to challenge it by doubling the bet.

Among many things, in 2022 I

• Started a new role at work.
• Began mentoring .
• Saw some of my long-time colleagues leave and embrace new adventures, and naturally missed them, but also saw great designers step up, embrace new challenges and bring their best selves to work .
• Got the chance to write and share some ideas, be a speaker , and join as a jury member in a design competition.
• Had the wonderful opportunity of having great conversations with a number of well-known designers and authors with whom I would have never dreamt that I would be chatting.
• Decided to officially leave my role as a Local Leader to one of the associations that I am related to, but won't ever resign from my role as a member. I really look forward to seeing the results of the efforts of a new team of leaders.
• Wrote a few pieces both in English and Spanish.

Out of the whole list, one of the things that I found most difficult, was pressing that "Publish" button when writing some of the first pieces, so on one of the first attempts of challenging myself further, I started this newsletter, and here we are.

Chapter 1

The first edition taught me lots and propitiated truly deep, exciting, and enriching conversations where maybe the hardest one was on a Saturday morning when I asked a well-known designer and writer for feedback on "The Matrix Syndrome " . It partially reminded me of my first years as a student at Facultad de Arquitectura, Dise?o y Urbanismo, Udelar where not all of the feedback was easy to digest but it was all valuable. Mauro Canziani - always a better student than I - during one of our recurring meetings for coffee and sharing showed me a different angle. He brought back the work of Gordon Training International in the 70s in "Four Stages of Competence" where if translated to this scenario it would be something like: "When it comes to writing you're now in the second phase of learning. You've gone from being Unconsciously Incompetent to being Consciously Incompetent". And that resonated well. The subsequent phases of learning should be to become Consciously Competent and finally Unconsciously Competent and that takes time and practice as with anything else. Fun, interesting, and engaging conversations happened with many other people and one of those I enjoyed a lot took place at the end of the day, at the office with Javier Gómez - who always asks great questions, shares extraordinary stories, and is extremely creative - where he invited me to think that probably the gap was too big, the expectation was too high, and for a non-academic maybe the feedback gotten from an academic is not where you want to land first. Maybe it's more helpful to understand and see oneself as a popular writer. One that writes maybe lighter or less academic content, not worthless.

Chapter 2

Through that quest of doubling down, I decided to bet on learning more from the community that I love and try to nurture and contribute to it. I realized that the last time I ran a survey through the community had been four years ago. It seemed the right time to take a new snapshot and try to understand the current topology of the XD landscape in Uruguay. This led to many other things that you'll discover in the following lines.

The State of XD in Uruguay 2022

The survey went out again and this time it more than doubled the number of participants. It went from 77 respondents in 2018 to 159 at the end of 2022 and it will let us understand the community way better. Demographics, Educational Background, Salaries, Learning Sources, and Expectations were all part of the areas on which questions were asked.

The survey was closed on December 31st and the report on the results is still in the making. Please be patient. I′ll be sharing as soon as I can.

Uruguayans Who WordPress

As the survey was ongoing, another side project took place. Last November, the LinkedIn group WordPress en Espa?ol turned 13 years old, just as old as my son, and it grew to over 9000 members. It was recently recognized as one of the most engaging groups.

A different story is the fact that in many of my conversations with colleagues and LinkedIn contacts the question "Do you know which Uruguay-based companies provide WordPress website and theme/plugin development services?" usually arises. I′ve answered this same question countless times, always appealing to my memory and never having a list at hand.

The combination of the previous two was the spark. It then occurred to me that it was time to bring it to life as it happened a few years ago with "Uruguayans Who Design ", a live repository of designers working on different fronts and roles, and an initiative from which many have seen the benefit.

Now it was the turn for others to benefit from being listed in a repository of agencies that provide these services as well as those that are related to those like in the case of SEO, Video Production, Ad Campaigns, etc.

Almost 60 companies were listed and it is now live on a Notion Website. Maybe the next step for it could be to have its own domain, who knows?

2023 and Synthesis

As anticipated the reporting on the survey is not completed yet but there are a few pieces of data that can be shared early.

On the demographics, we can see that our XD market is balanced in terms of gender representation. 50.3% of the participants identified themselves as women and 49.1% as men. In terms of age, 50.3% belong to the segment of people that are between 26 and 35 years old. No surprises in the geographical distribution, we live in a centralized country where 86.8% of the participants live in the capital city of Montevideo, followed by 8.2% living in Canelones and 1.9% living in Maldonado. The remaining percentage is spread over a handful of departments out of the 16 remaining.

In terms of education, 83.7% of the participants have reached the University level, 47.2% have finished their degree, 6.3% have Postgraduate studies and 6.3% have a Master's degree. 52.8% come from a Graphic/Visual Design background and 16.4% are trained Product/Industrial Designers. Over 50% have less than 3 years of experience in the XD field and 19.5% have less than a year of experience. 47.8% of the participants work for Uruguayan companies and 66% work as full-time employees.

In terms of income, there's a full range of income bands going from barely 1K USD/mo to well over 5K USD/mo in hand / after taxes.

No news, the pandemic has changed everything, less than 8% of the participants go to the office every day and the rest splits evenly between remote and hybrid modes.

When we look at roles, 62.2% are individual contributors while 12.8% are managers, the rest say they′re somewhere in between.

And in the world of communities, 40.3% say they′re not part of any design community, 30.8% are members of +Mujeres en UX Uruguay and 28.9% are members of IxDA Montevideo .

88.6% of the participants say they learn about design-related activities o events over LinkedIn, 61.1% over Instagram, 24.8% are subscribed to newsletters and 20.8% say they feel they hardly ever get to know about any design-related event.

The final numbers need to be verified but this first round gives us a rough idea.

Books

As a part of the survey, participants were asked to suggest books that were worth reading. Following very similar steps to those that gave birth to Uruguayans Who WordPress, I mapped those books and categorized them. They all have links to Amazon in case you would want to buy any of them. Take a look, there are almost 40 books awaiting you.

Podcasts

Something similar happened for the podcasts where 20 shows are waiting for you to give them a try.

Designers & Thinkers

Podcasts can bridge your access to thought leaders, authors, and respected representatives in different disciplines. And through them, you can also learn and choose what to read next, but most times what you would want is to have that news displayed directly on your feed, that's why we asked participants who should their colleagues follow and they collectively built a list of 27 sources for you to weigh in relation to your interests and nurture your feed.

Conferences

Some of these designers, thinkers and overall referents can have a very busy conference/speaker schedule. You can find over 250 design-related conferences that are organized by date. Having them mapped allows you to choose and plan your attendance as much as it allows you to think if you're ready and prepared to present a talk to any of those.

Design Teams

Who is who in the local/regional/global context? Browse the list and find out which companies have either established design teams in Uruguay or have hired Uruguayan designers that work remotely. For each of them, you'll find their website, LinkedIn page, and Instagram presence.

Where to study

A question that arrives frequently. There are some local options, for in-person, hybrid, and remote training on interaction design. Most offers are boot camps. There's also a constantly growing number of places where to study online. The list covers some of these possible combinations.

Design Systems

Before ChatGPT became the trending topic, Design Systems seemed to be that, and before them the Style Guides. We see a bit less of that in our feeds but by no means are they less relevant. In fact, it is a more than interesting exercise to go through several of those. By understanding the needs they serve and mapping their differences, you can think of your own approach to building and maintaining the one you need or use. A varied list of Design spaces , systems, style guides, and company/discipline-related medium feeds awaits.

You can also read the most recent newsletter published by Vitaly Friedman exactly on this topic:

→?Design System Case Studies and?Design System Canvas

Job Board

Finding the right job on LinkedIn is not always easy. Yes, you can go to the Jobs listings but more often than not you'll get a scrambled list of jobs that have little to do with what you're expecting. For that reason, there's a weekly, carefully curated Job Board awaiting your visit to Dotted Paper.

?? Thank you

I appreciate you for reading this far. If you haven’t already, subscribe to Dottted Paper to receive more articles like this one here on LinkedIn and directly on your email.

Andrés Richero has over 20 years of experience at the crossroads of Design and Software. He heads a global team of Design and Research professionals for an enterprise software platform. For the past decade, Andrés has focused on Design Leadership, Community Building, and Practice Development. Proudly, he's Uruguay’s top mentor on ADPList .