Hi, I'm Oli Batstone and this is Design Tales, a weekly profile of bright creatives. If you’re not a subscriber(!), you can subscribe for free with the button below.
Today’s Profile
Esther T is a freelance designer based in Singapore.
Thanks for joining me Esther. What’s a product you use that deserves more attention and why?
Sorry, I'm going to cheat and mention 2– OneTab and PostureMinder (Chrome extensions). OneTab saves all your tabs into a list in one click and allows you to share your list(s) as a webpage. PostureMinder because we all need a mum to remind us to stretch and get up for a walk.
What do you wish you knew at the start of your career?
Not being able to design like other designers doesn't make you a bad designer. (Be it style, process, method, time taken, etc.)
How do you unwind?
Hmm, it varies. Either cooking a good (and simple) meal or watching a good show that's either in the genre of comedy or fantasy.
What advice do you follow?
Embrace your mistakes and ignorance (and obviously, learn from it).
Lastly, do you have anything to promote?
I write sometimes on my site esthertch.com and on Medium
Fin
I’d like to thank Esther for sharing - in particular:
Embrace your mistakes and ignorance (and obviously, learn from it).
We’re hard-wired to fear mistakes. But we will always make them, and without them we don’t grow. To grow from each mistake, find the learning opportunity. Bloody hard? Yes it is.
I have not failed. I’ve just found 10,000 ways that won’t work — Thomas Edison
And, the beauty of a beginners mindset — perception without assumption or experience, is a one-time superpower you can recharge.
If you’d like to share a learning from a recent blunder, thoughts on anything you’ve read, or just want to say hi, tweet me. And if you enjoyed this issue, I’d love it if you’d share it with a friend or several thousand friends.
Next Week
Tim Moad, UX Lead and Founder of The Proto Process joins us. Tim describes his frustration with a bootstrapped agency that cut too many corners of the UX process, which in the end became far more expensive than they had tried to avoid.
Want to feature in an issue or know a friend who would like to? Start here
See you on the other side — Oli