Original subtitles

My name is Erika, and I'm a senior visual designer.

A visual designer is someone who uses

iconography, typography, color, space,

and textures in their products to

create consistent and accessible design patterns.

For example, if you were to look at an app,

pretty much anything you see on the surface,

the buttons, the colors, the typography,

the white space around all of

those elements is what

a visual designer would be responsible for.

During my last year of college,

I worked at a web design and

development agency where I got a ton of

experience with graphic design and

actually UX design before I even knew what that was.

From there, I went to work at a startup

called Waze, before they were acquired by Google.

There I was hired just as

a general designer where

I worked on things like our website,

our app, designing little icons, illustrations, research.

I was considered a generalist, and I worked on a lot

of different design roles.

From there we were acquired by Google,

and so my role became a little bit more formalized.

I was technically a UI designer,

but I still was a generalist and I worked

a lot on marketing design,

the app UX, as well as a lot of

web design for things like dashboards and analytics.

I branched out to the visual design path at Google,

and that's what I've been ever

since for the last few years.

As a generalist designer,

you work on a bunch of different things from

interaction design and visual design to user research.

This would typically happen at maybe a startup or

an agency where you work on

a variety of different projects,

and your responsibility depends

on whatever hat you need to wear that day.

Some of the benefits of being

a generalist designer are that you can learn a ton,

and oftentimes this will be in

like a fast-paced environment,

you don't really have time to stop and

really go deep into any of these roles,

rather you just learn by doing and it's

a really quick and effective way

of seeing what all the possibilities are within UX.

At bigger companies, there

are specialist designers. For instance,

at Google there are interaction designers,

visual designers, UX engineers,

UX writers, and UX researchers.

For these roles the

expectations are a little bit more clear for you,

so you'll be evaluated based

on what work you're doing specifically within a product.

A UX writer will be

responsible for all of the copy and all of

the strings throughout any product you may see.

They are within their team

known to be the expert in their field.

The benefits of being a specialist are

that expectations are very clear for

what your role is and there are a ton of

resources that you can continue to

just develop your expertise.

What I like about being a specialist is

that I know that anyone on

my team trusts and knows my work and can come

to me with any of their visual design problems.

Having been both a generalist and specialist,

I've really enjoyed both,

and especially earlier on in

my career being a generalist,

it was a really good way for me to

ramp up on all things UX.

I got to work on such a variety of

projects and it really helped me to hone my craft.

Once I had been in the UX space for a while,

I realized that I really was

more drawn to visual design challenges,

and that's what led me along the visual design path.

Now being a specialist,

it feels good to know that you're

an expert in your field.

I can definitely see the benefits

in both being a generalist and

specialist and maybe more

so being a generalist when you're first starting out.