Design is amazing.

Can you imagine being paid for your creativity?

To a designer, it’s exciting to be brought interesting challenges by clients, then being asked to come up with solutions. It’s also flattering to be picked out of a lineup to join a team to plug a hole with your gifts of visual communication.

Imagine being picked by diverse teams from around the world and getting to travel and  expand your world by interacting with different cultures, visiting historic landmarks, and then letting those experiences influence your future creativity. Having one million people see the visuals you created and enabling them to achieve something valuable and serviceable is the height of career fulfillment; it’s a reward that goes beyond the money.

It seems hard to believe that we designers can be paid for what we do (and paid well). But the unique intersection of creativity, empathy, and problem-solving has created a role that is actually highly sought after.

We work with a digital medium in a newly digital economy where its uses continue to expand by the day. A designer’s ability to understand disparate needs and wants from a variety of sources and produce something that offers an exceptional user-friendly experience thrusts us into a very enviable category.

Focus on user interface (UI) design, and think about what a marvelous act that is. You are taking in all of the requirements from the business, then adding the desires of the users and the possibilities of the developers to produce an interaction layer to satisfy them all. Your work sits at the center of dozens of threads, and your responsibility is to weave it into something that enables people.

Exciting, right?

It’s a dynamic field that constantly brings new challenges and opportunities to those up to the task of providing solutions. There are dozens of niches and levels of expertise that can be pursued and are awaiting empathetic, creative problem-solvers.

What path do you care to go down? Want to focus on mobile interfaces? Or perhaps animation? Do you get a thrill from solving difficult interaction challenges to achieve a company’s goals? Or maybe you wish to have your websites receive the industry’s highest honors.

If you are interested in multiple niches in this industry, you’ll come to learn that it’s a field that carries very few barriers between disciplines for someone open to the challenge.

What’s important to remember is that this type of design requires more than simply output. Your work can change the fate of a large company or someone’s small business. You can enable clients to reach their target market in ways they have never been able to before. When you engage clients with care, empathy, and purpose, you can enable a business to succeed, a user to create, or a life to be enhanced.

Design is amazing. It is an immense opportunity calling to those who can tap into their creativity with a desire to leave things better than they were.

I assume this is you, and this book aims to give some practical advice to help you achieve a career that enables what was just described.

Design is amazing.