Generalist designers
I love this recent note from Adam Stoddard about generalist designers because it describes me so accurately:
A generalist designer, axiomatically, is someone who doesn’t specialize in any particular area of design. They’re not UX designers, UI designers, content strategists, illustrators, product designers, copywriters, graphic designers, front-end developers, or animators, even though their work may touch every single one of those roles. The proverbial “jack of all trades, master of none”.
I'm curious to know if generalists suffer more regularly than specialists do from imposter syndrome. It's something that I have experienced a lot (and still do, to be honest) because when working with specialists I constantly think I'm less knowledgeable or skilled than they are.
However, as Adam mentions in his full post, working as a generalist is satisfying because of the variety of jobs that you get to do. I think one of the biggest benefits is that being a generalist also makes you more valuable to a company. I can think of many occasions during my career where being a generalist has allowed me to keep my job when specialists were losing theirs. For example, during COVID-19, a lot of the specialist designers I was working with were put on furlough and were eventually let go because there wasn't enough billable design work coming in for them to do. Fortunately, there was always plenty of dev work to do and I was able to switch to doing front end and keep myself busy.
Check it out in full:
