The Number One Rule of Design

Don’t compare yourself.

It’s too easy to look at other peoples work on sites like Dribbble and Forrst and cry silently to yourself, thinking that you’ll never be as good as them.

Well, you want the truth? You never will be.

Well, as long as you keep comparing yourself.

A good way to think of this is imagining a timeline. On it, you see various markings indicating the progression of somebody. It’s thick at some points and thin in others. Now I want you to imagine thousands of these lines, happening all at the same time. Now switch them up a bit. Randomize them.

What you see here is a chart of every designer, nay, every person’s, progress through learning what they do. At a given time, someone could be miles ahead of his neighbor, but look again. They all end. They all reach the same destination.

Charts don’t float your boat? Fine, try something a little bit more visual.

A racetrack, with thousands of lanes. At a given time, one car is far ahead of the others. Then, a few seconds pass, and the same car is trailing in last place.

It’s easy in these situations, to look at your neighbor and give up, claiming you’ll never be as fast or as good as them. These feelings are a danger to yourself and others. If you spend to much time comparing yourself, then you fall behind, you may even stop entirely. Feeling as though you’ll never make it, you dig your own grave, climb into it, and die.

Assuming neither of these two analogies did it for you, consider this: if you want to improve, you look upon other’s work and weep. Not for jealousy, but out of joy that such beauty exists.

We all move forward at different speeds, but at the end of the day, we all reach the finish line.