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Focusing


I consider myself a Jack of all trades designer, probably because when I started designing things were not as complicated and a web designer just needed to know photoshop and some HTML. So that lead into what I am today: 30 % Interaction 50% Visual 20% Front-end. (Sorry about the percentages, I hate them too but it’s just to illustrate this).

So now in 2014, I want to keep the pace of our industry, and this is more or less the list of things I would like to learn in the near future:

- Sketch 3 - Grunt - Node.js - Framer - Quartz Composer - jeckyll - Github / Git - After effects - CSS animation - Improve UX skills

These are hot tools for a designer/developer today. We hear about them all the time and if you want to be on top of the wave you better start learning.

The problem is that I don’t have the time and honestly I want to remain sane. It’s literally impossible to keep up with all the new tools, programming languages, methods etc... and if you are already 39, have a baby and work most of your day then forget about it.

So what then?

Focus.

You cannot know everything and it’s necessary to take things at a slower pace. After thinking about it for the last couple of days, I know where my path is and what my limits are.

The path I want to follow leans more towards UX rather than front-end development, more planning and less building. I know that given my experience and actual skills, the final picture will make more sense.

So I’m scratching Github, Node, Grunt and such, besides I don’t need them for my everyday work. I will just learn Sketch 3 because I’m curious about it and also read the UX books I recently purchased. That’s all.

Besides my lovely wife just bought a night lamp for me, so I’m off to make good use of it.