Whenever someone compliments something I designed, I get insecure. I haven’t gone to art school, studied color theory or memorized grid systems.
I just kinda started doing it a few years ago. Though I considered myself “not a visual person”, I made one visual per day. Some hits, more misses. Now I believe I have some taste in design and can make cool-looking things (sometimes). Yet the word ‘designer’ only starts rolling off my tongue after two (or more) glasses of wine.
Whether I call myself a designer or not, I love learning about and practicing design. At this point, I could easily critique graphics I see and improve them. But I also lack the skills to design like the people I look up to.
That’s an expression of a principle I’ve found about every skill I’ve learned: The floor is always lower than you think, the ceiling is always higher.
At first, new skills seem like witchcraft. They’re so illegible you wouldn’t even know where to start, even if you had the audacity to believe you could.
Even the floor, the lowest level, towers over you. You tell yourself the skill is reserved for people with degrees, certificates and better brains.
The ceiling is the top level of the skill. It’s the Michael Jordan, Steve Jobs and Magnus Carlsen of your field. Before you started, you knew they were good. But as you improve, you grasp how good they are.
From below the floor, you don’t care about the distance between floor and ceiling. Standing on the floor, you realize the decades of daily practice that separate you from those at the skill ceiling.
The skill floor is always lower: You can get to some understanding quickly in almost any skill. But the ceiling is unreachable for most of us—unless your new skill becomes your singular pursuit.
Luckily, the road to effectiveness is short. I’m no paradigm-shattering art director, but I like the graphics I make—and so do other people. Whether you want to learn design, coding or crocheting, you can learn it. The floor is lower than you think.