What is the difference between a designer a junior designer and a senior designer?

What is the difference between a designer a junior designer and a senior designer?

The journey to being a successful designer can be difficult. It is a journey founded on a wide variety of perspectives, a solid base of professional knowledge and a wide range of learning opportunities. What’s more, time is not the only factor when it comes to being the greatest designer you will ever be. Strong designers need to be willing to continually update their expertise, improve their methodology, and extend their experience.

Take a deeper look at the five main distinctions between junior and senior designers, below:

1. Senior designers take over to see the larger picture.

As a junior artist, it’s quick to get swept up in eagerness or anxiety to get the job finished. When you inquire for a deadline, and it feels unlikely, you only find a way to make it work. Senior designers are much more inclined to discuss a timeline focused on reasonable timeframes and with a view on how this role can work into the larger project. Through switching from a task-based mindset to a project-based mentality, designers will evolve in sophistication.

2. Junior designers could not have discovered their specialism

There are some amazing generalists out there, but most designers have a field of excellence. Junior designers could not yet have selected the niche they want to follow when they move ahead with their careers. This is why it is a vital move towards success to gain exposure to new talents and forms of functioning. If you grasp your niche, you will accept it, creating a breadth of experience that makes you stick out from your peers.

Junior designers could not have discovered their specialism

3. Professional artists can clarify their job.

As a junior artist, it’s convenient to believe that a task is completed. This ensures that you can submit work to a senior colleague or customer without having the time to have a justification. Senior designers realise that meaning is everything, and that failure to include a reason for design decisions will leave the work vulnerable to misinterpretation and misunderstanding. It is important that you truly care about your design decisions and be prepared to present them in a thoughtful manner.

4. Sometimes, young designers don’t see about the brief.

Junior designers often lack the experience to see past the constraints of the mission they set. On the other side, senior designers have the broader skills and expertise required to challenge and, when possible, work outside the scope to create a product with better flexibility or enhanced user flow. Knowing how to walk the fine line of having a job completed and producing the best value is an ability that is improved over time.

Sometimes, young designers don't see about the brief.
Sometimes, young designers don’t see about the brief.

5. Senior designers tackle challenging challenges

Both designers encounter roadblocks sometimes. But it’s under this kind of scrutiny where senior designers will demonstrate their merit. They propose possible options amid the greatest problems, whilst junior peers might not be exactly how to resolve or shape their answer to more complicated issues. Junior designers may develop their nuanced problem-solving abilities by acquiring expertise through a wide variety of disciplines and paying careful attention to the way talented senior designers tackle challenging tasks.

5. Senior designers tackle challenging challenges
5. Senior designers tackle challenging challenges

Communications

Connection is a central element in intimate partnerships as well as in company and graphic design.

Senior behaviours are typically proactive, senior designers are not looking for direction from their customers. They work with all of the resources at their hands and use their expertise and experience to solve issues.

And if they require support, which is very common, they inquire only when their own view on the issue has already been developed or they have an answer to it that they want to consult with the customer.

Junior programmers, on the other hand, are looking for assistance in the early phases, because if the roles are not well specified by the customer, the project may not go ahead.

Feedback is another inseparable aspect of the conversation. It’s a smart way for designers to ask for input from the audience or from the customer.

However, what kind of questions designers are posing is really interesting.

A junior designer normally poses subjective questions like “Do you like my design?” The response to this question, though, has no particular sense for him/her, it is just nice for the ego (considering that he/she is going to get a favourable answer).

In the other side, the senior designer poses straightforward yet open-ended questions where the solutions help to streamline the procedure or specifically solve the issue.

Connection is a crucial element in the whole design process, but not the only one. After some time employed, designers have a deep portfolio that represents their workflow.

Workflow:

A designer’s workflow relies a lot on the order in his/her data.

The senior designer has a well defined folder structure that allows easier and more effective long-term work. This refers to all shared files and client folders.

Resources like Sketch provide artists with the opportunity to build symbols that are a must-have in a long-term project. Typically, there is little time to label layers and classes, so while you deal alongside other designers and creators, you can’t forget about it, or the other designers would waste a lot of their time.

Examples of poor vs. nice titles

Another aspect that influences the efficiency of the designer’s workflow is the general perception of the project.

Through a greater knowledge of the product/service, a senior designer will recommend a far better approach. This will translate to a significantly improved customer interface and fix challenges as a whole (eg. it can increase the downloads of an app).

Junior programmers, on the other hand, are typically able to overcome only the basic challenges, so they need to acquire more overall expertise and practise. They might render a perfect UI, but the UX is lagging behind.

The UX of the product can be enhanced and iterated on the basis of consumer research, where 80 percent of the errors can already be found by as little as 8 users. Checking before deploying the final design would certainly improve the value of the design as well as the creator.

Last but not least, I want to discuss the job structure of the designers. Junior designers I worked with didn’t have a specified job framework. The united room for them was a taboo, they used lorem ipsum whenever it was feasible, which shows that the designs are not pixel-perfect and not quite elaborate.

It’s perfect if the artist is testing out modern visual trends and is still open-minded towards new technology. But as I look at the work of the top senior designers, each of them has their own theme, as if it was their handwriting. It’s because they have clearly described their own attributes, and they’re developing them more.