Tiff’s Highly-Biased Guide to Design Jobs

Over the past few years, I’ve realized that what I most enjoy doing is designing and building tools other people can use to make stuff.

Realizing this mission statement and identifying what types of professional opportunities would enable me to do this full-time involved a lot of trial and error. (Making and designing as a practice will always be something that can be enjoyed as a hobby, but it’s a whole other beast to try to figure out how to find / create a job doing it.)

In the process of figuring out what made sense for me, I talked to a lot of different people I admire who have built amazing product in varying capacities (as designers, developers, researchers, educators, and engineers), both for-profit and as part of non-profits.

What I quickly came to understand is that every designer I looked up to was in a “unicorn” position. They seemed to have roles that could only exist under very particular circumstances – just for them.

At first, this was really discouraging because I didn’t think it was possible to find the same opportunity that they had. But then I realized that it’s actually quite liberating, because it’s less about finding job descriptions that match exactly what you’re looking for, but finding organizations that are flexible enough to let you expand your role into one that is customized just for you – a “unicorn” position.

In my search for a job that would let me design and build tools for other people to use, I ended up…