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Disclaimer- I have not worked in marketing before but here are my 2 cents
Since you already have worked in graphic design, you already have a leg up on most people looking to transition in Product Design.
To address your 1st question you won’t totally leave the graphic design world behind, but it will change. As a product designer your coworkers will change.
Your primary coworkers will be Product Managers, software engineers, stakeholders, Quality Assurance Specialists and Scrum Masters. Your scope of design will change as well, you will still do some design but that’s only 20%-30% of the job. You should spend the majority of your time conducting research and translating those insights into something stakeholders can understand, you will also lead workshops, test concepts with users and map out flows.
The number of hats you will wear depends on the company, if it’s a enterprise company you may just wear the product design hat, if it is a startup you might still wear multiple hats.
Some courses that may be beneficial would include Nielsen Norman Group or the IXDF. (There are others I’m forgetting at the moment).
Your portfolio ideally should have real world work (3-7 case studies) you may be able to have one made up project in there, but the more real world the better.
Hopefully this helps
All this. I would add that you should also be willing/expect to start as a lower level product/UX designer. But I’ve hired people who were transitioning into product design based on competent workshop/certificate case study examples.
ShiftNudge is a great course for visual design as it applies to user interfaces, I learned a lot from it. A UX course or boot camp will be great too. I love that I get to leverage my graphic design background as a product designer to design functional interfaces that people use, it’s incredibly fulfilling for me. Good luck!
As someone who has recently made the jump, it was certainly the right move for me. Three things I found useful in the transition:
1) know how FE code works. Understanding what is an easy change vs a heavy change for developers is critical. Plus being able to provide a solution is an added bonus. Case in Point in our product the icons loaded a completely new SVG on the hover state rather than just using CSS to change the fill color. The result was a FOUC and I was able to suggest that they should just change it with CSS.
2) The biggest difference I see from marketing design and product design is that in marketing design so much about the user experience is about a narrow directed happy path. Product design requires designers to think about all the potential edge cases and error states that could arise and how those can be addressed for the user. Again this ties back to how the technology actually works. What do you do if an API call fails?
3) A good stepping off point our design systems. I began my foray into product design doing visual design for our company’s product design system. Understanding how product designers use design systems is a great introduction to how product designers work.
I did about 8 years of graphic, visual and web design (much of it in marketing too) and then transitioned into UX and have done a variety of UX for 8 years now. UX is creative, but in different ways. It’s all about solving problems. Visual design becomes one of the tools in your toolbox, but you spend a lot more time understanding your users, defining the problem, validating, testing, iterating, implementing, etc. True Hi-Fi design is like 20% of my time on most projects. Most of my time is spent talking to people like stakeholders and users. We also have a design system, I’m rarely designing any UI elements from scratch, its more like legos lol. Having the visual background and understanding of front end code helped me break into UI specific roles which helped me get better at UX and then land pure UX jobs. I loved graphic design for a while but I didn’t feel very fulfilled, didn’t feel like I was using my skills to make peoples lives better, just sell them things.
Just basic HTML and CSS gives you a leg up, especially early on when its the secondary skills that can help you get the job over someone else. A surface understanding of JS is beneficial too but dont spend too much time on that. In most UX jobs you’re not gonna touch any code but you will interface with engineers a lot and it really helps to be able to speak their language, also helps when its time to QA the UI.
To add on I have 10 plus years of experience as an in house designer and a lead designer now. I love design and brand design so much and I want to make sure I get that fulfillment if I jump into product design. I signed up for the Google ux cert course as well!
If this is a major consideration for you, you may want to rethink the switch. I started in traditional graphic design and moved to UI design. It’s all still visual and that element is great, but in my experience there has been very little opportunity for brand design/traditional design. I wouldn’t say it’s impossible, as I’m sure there’s opportunities, maybe with a smaller company that needs you to wear multiple hats, but overall it’s rare. Good luck!
I’m going through the same process eager to see what other people will say.
What I’ve heard from friends I have in the field is that you should take your current/older works and pivot how you present them. In other words if you designed a website as part of your portfolio write up a case study for it and frame it as a product or ux exercise.
I’ve been wondering this too and all this info is super helpful! Thank you!
Mentor
Fundamentally speaking, marketing is trying to get somebody to buy something whereas product is trying to get somebody to enjoy something they bought (with some upscale components.) so marketing designs are more perceptual whereas product designers are more interactive. Marketing designers help consumers evaluate a product to buy but product designers ensure that the products are satisfying users needs.
Keeping that in mind, it isn’t about whether you do visual designs or not. That depends on the job, the company, and the product.
But there are some important differences. In marketing fresh new ideas are important. But sometimes with products, it’s about fine tuning a process, moving stuff around, adding and removing small elements, until a process is frictionless.
Marketing also desires fresh new designs frequently but as you have used digital products, you know that the visuals and patterns in a product tends to stay the same for a while.
Subsequently, marketing work have shorter turn around but product initiatives tend to go on longer and you maybe dealing with the same process flow for weeks, months, even years.
Again, depends on the product.
If you want to be a product designer, it helps to be well-versed in interaction design, and it helps to be able to translate user goals and needs into process flows. You don’t really need a course to get there.
Product designers also tend to have deeper knowledge about the underlying technology, which translates to feasibility and constraints. Showing that you can design to particular tech stack and data model is a big plus.
But essentially, if you have a passion to craft and refine process flows, if you have a passion to help users stay on a product for months or years, then product design is for you.
As for visual stuff. Some products are more visual. Also, you could look into design systems designer and maybe even be a marketing department of a product company.
Well said!
From my perspective, visual design and brand design are very different from XD/UX/product design. So loving one isn’t going to ensure the other is a right fit. I would really dive into the UX side of things. Take training. Watch content. Learn. And decide if it’s for you. It should and will feel like you are starting over.
I do believe it will feel like you are leaving behind visual design. At least in large part because the work, while visual, emphasises an entirely different design skill set than marketing and branding.
From my perspective, UXD & Product design go hand-in-hand -- and the best of the best can do both well -- however they are different & complimentary practices. UXD focuses on the user, learning, translating, abstracting, mapping, and connecting the dots. PD focuses on the product, leveraging UX assets and a knowledge of design principles -- along with other HCD practices -- to further develop UX into feasible & interoperable designs that can be engineered.
Mentor
As for resources… I’d join product design groups, go to product design meetups, conferences, etc. Figma hosts quite a few of those as well. That way you get to absorb how product designers think, talk, and act. It’s not rocket science. Design is design. You probably just need a different context and environment.
Have you read the Design of Everyday Things?
If you work at a larger company, product designers tend to have specialties or work in squads or pods. If your experience is in marketing, it might be worth seeking out either a job at a small startup where you’d be wearing a lot of hats and have less expected of you, or applying to a product designer job that focuses on acquisition / conversion- because that’s not a big leap from marketing! My specialties are design systems and engagement which I think are very different from doing graphic design for marketing.
Thanks everyone for the amazing feedback. Really helpful. Any resource recommendations would also be amazing!
I’d be happy to hop on a call to review your portfolio and give any advice I might have, if that interests you!
In general I’d love to see more work in progress.
The way it worked for me was getting a Visual Design role on a Product (from a marketing role), then eventually moved to more UX than Visual. Two-step process made for smoother transition.