Top Skills You Need On Your Design Team: Part 1

Running a team can be difficult. There are plenty of projects you are working on and it’s often a wide variety of skills you will need to draw on for success.

That’s why it’s important to know the most essential skills you need to have on your design team. It sets you up for success and makes planning easier.

Let’s cover five of them today. 

Most Important Skills on Your Design Team (1-5)

1) Competency With Software

Depending on what exactly your company or agency does, there is a variety of different software your team might need to be an expert in. Consider this when hiring for different positions.

If your company provides only one specific service, it’s probably ok to specialize in just a few. For example, if your design team is only working on building out websites and submitting designs for web pages, Figma might be the software that they spend most of their time with. However, perhaps they are tasked with numerous tasks for a variety of different needs. In this case, proficiency in software like Adobe, Trello and Slack might all be required.

Regardless, your design team needs to know how to use design tools, and needs to be capable of learning if they don’t yet have skills in a specific one.

2) Time Management

Similar to almost any role, one of the most important skills for your design team is time management. Your designers will almost certainly be working with a number of different clients at any time. 

This is where solid time management comes into play. Good time management results in work that is high quality, dependable, and easily streamlined. Bad time management, on the other hand, makes almost every area of work for your design team more difficult. 

Thankfully, time management is a skill just like any other that can be learned. Check out this post on time management skills for more information.

3) Creativity

Of all the skills you need on yruo design team, creativity is one of the most important. That’s because there is often a variety of clients you are working with that all have different needs. You can’t simply approach them with a “one size fits all” style of work. Instead, you have to be creative in how you provide your service to them. 

In addition, creativity is also essential for some of your design team’s “major breakthroughs.” For example, maybe your design team is working with a company to design a new logo. While they may already have a vision of what they are looking for, creative ideas from your team are going to result in a better finished product. Be sure to track any ideas that you have so you can act on them later.

As for how you get more creative? While this can seem like an impossible task, creativity is indeed a skill that you can get better at. Check out this post for more information on a reliable process. 

4) User Experience

The skill of “user experience” is actually a collection of different skills. This includes things like market research, website design, product launches, and customer service. Indeed, user experience can be considered as anything that has to do with your user or customer. As you can see – quite a lot!

This is why user experience on a design team is so important: it applies to just about every area of your business:

• The experience that your website visitors have on your website
• What your customers think of your company when they are using your product
• How easy it is for your audience to find the free content that you provide

Good designers know all this. They know how big of a difference a positive user experience can make, and they develop the skills needed to provide it.

5) Visual Communication

On a design team, you need to know how to communicate via images. This is non-negotiable, as much of your work will involve working with both pictures and videos. 

Visual communication is especially important when working with clients that require creative work. This can include:

• Websites for clients that want to focus more on storytelling through images
• Management of social media channels for clients that request it
• Logo design for companies that need a fresh new brand or design

Regardless of what your team will be working on, effective visual communication is a necessity. Not only does it make your clients happy, but it showcases your own brand as both competent and professional.

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Are you an enterprise, nonprofit or small business looking for help on your website? Give us a shout! We provide a free consultation. Email us at info@lughstudio.com or call us at (718) 855-1919!