Practical Insights from Chris Do for Young Designers

Notes from an Asa Coterie session

In June 2022, Chris Do had a live Twitter session with a Nigerian design community called Asa Coterie. I admire Chris’ insights, work and practical advice, so this session was a golden opportunity for me to hear him speak to the context of young designers, like me.

The result of the session? Guidance that I still apply today to my design career.

And so, I’d like to share six insights from Chris Do’s session with Asa Coterie.

1. When trying to build a relationship with someone in a higher level, GIVE first. One of the best things to give them is time. You can present yourself as available to help them save time by offering to take off some things from their plate. Because their time is valuable.
2. Niche down in your early career. Multiple types of projects will confuse your target client. Then when you’ve gotten the kind of clients you want, you can expand your portfolio.
3. Ask good questions to build clarity. If you help people rephrase their questions, you help people gain clarity. Check your assumptions by asking “what evidence do I have that this is true? Can I disprove this by asking a different question?”
4. When you ask a question from someone who has more experience than you, try not to ask binary questions. Ask open ended questions so you can learn, as opposed to confirm or validate a viewpoint you have.
5. To be attractive to your clients, you need to create demand. So if you are currently working on a project, and a company that you would really love to work for comes along and asks you to take on work, creating demand looks like telling them to give you time (specify how long), because you are booked up. If it can wait, it will. And you would have created a demand on your personal brand.
6. Chris was asked: How do I put together a better body of work (read:portfolio) that can attract the kind of clients I want?
   He answered: What type of industry do you want to work in? Take for example you want to do brand design for shopping centres. You’d need to think of 2 important questions:

• How many shopping mall projects do you have on your on your portfolio? How much of your body of work is most closely aligned to the kind of jobs you want to get?
• Is the marketplace big enough to sustain you and your life ambitions? Is there enough of this type of work that you can work on and stay busy with for the rest of your life? Does this problem scale locally and globally?
• Other things to have in mind:
  - If you don’t have experience doing the type of work you want to do, how do you get that experience? Think of what you can do to be the obvious/only choice for the person or companies looking at your portfolio. Do self-initiated speculative projects — give yourself an assignment, make sure its creative and solves problems in relation to the your desired industry.
  - Don’t underestimate the power of taking small steps towards your big career goal.