Andrew Fox

A digital designer needs to be skilled in many areas. They need to be creative and solve problems visually whilst also ensuring the experience is optimised for the user. They also need to be technically savvy in order to develop or empathise with developers to ensure their creations work. But there is one other skill that I think is equally as essential for a designer and all too often disregarded – management.

How a designer can benefit from management of their design projects:

• More involvement in projects means more depth of understanding and therefore maximising opportunity for better design solutions.
• Having direct client communication is important to gain first hand information that may otherwise get lost in translation through project managers or other people involved.
• A deeper project understanding means it’s easier to debate issues and advise justified design solutions that are clearly a business benefit to the clients work.
• Being involved in management of a project to the end means more control of design issues should they arise during the development process. This ensures that the project is deployed as the designer intended.
• Too many cooks spoil the broth. Too many people involved in a project means communication becomes over complicated, opinions in design become diluted, no one really gets what they want and no one takes leadership of the project.  Managing this from the design side means a good consistent end result as you intended.
• Greater satisfaction when the job is done and you can be sure you made a solid effort, knowing everything about the design of the project.