There are not many shortcuts in our field of work — you have to put in the hours to hone your visual skills, gain field knowledge and experience, and spend enough time in the industry to learn how the sausage is made. But one thing has proved to be extremely efficient in terms of advancing at your craft: seeking out the absolute best, the Michael Jordans of your profession, and religiously following their work, trying to get as close to it as possible.

When I was starting out as a designer, the tool of the industry was still Photoshop. Since it’s quite a monsterpiece of a software, I watched tons of YouTube tutorials (how many of those have you watched for Figma?), and there was a particularly skilled guy who knew all the intricacies of the tool, but the work he was producing was, to put it plainly, unimpressive. Even back then, as a newbie without much experience in design, I felt like this guy has stuck on a plateau. And there was one thing he said after which I started to look for another teacher to follow: “People who do photo editing (back then it was a whole thing, a full-time profession to edit pimples on portraits and such) will always be in demand.” At that moment, I realized that the guy’s conviction is that he sells only the knowledge of the tool, and that’s the reason he never venture beyond mastering Photoshop. The work he sees around him is the work he produces.

Such plateau-ing, lack of curiosity to learn more, and declaring “it’s enough” are major causes of designers producing blunt work. Because your digital info-sphere: your instagram or X feed, shows you watch, websites you visit, and books you read—are directly correlated with the work you produce. As a species, we learn by mimicking, and whatever we put into our headspace to brew, some variation of that will come out, carrying the flavor of the original content we consumed. So consuming Michelin-level design will help you reach the same level.

There are two books on agency that I read recently: first is the classic US fast-food self-help bestseller — Extreme Ownership by Jocko Willink. The second is a book recommended by the Anthropic CEO: Replacing Guilt by Nate Soares. The difference in potency, how strongly the thoughts and advice resonate with me is similar to the difference between design work from Behance regulars and work posted on X from Vercel/Linear/... designers. It’s immense. And the contrast in readership counts of these two books is just as immense: 99.9% of people who could benefit from what Nate wrote in his book never went past Extreme Ownership. That’s usually the case with any content, the deeper you dig, the better quality content you’ll find. Spending time on such knowledge archeology and going past widely known sources (god forbid you stopping at LinkedIn posts) pays off with interest. Doing such research long enough also develops your taste palette, and with time you can call bullshit simply by throwing a quick look at a thing.

Since we spend at least two hours a day consuming content on the internet it’s important to tend your digital garden, so it yields peaches instead of sour plums. But the internet is not the only channel we get our information from: our network and the people around us shape our worldview, values, and taste, whether we want it or not. That’s why parents are often ready to pay exorbitant sums of money to get their children into prestigious universities: because they enter a certain environment for a prolonged period of time, and that forms them. A sibling going to an Ivy League university and another to a local school will end up having two completely different lives and value systems.

You have two levers to exercise while building your community: the first is your existing convictions and beliefs, things you like, want and do. Just by living your life, you project yourself into the world, and by being interested in certain things, be it beer or ballet, you automatically attract people who are interested in the same stuff (that’s why alcoholics rarely have a problem finding friends). The more vocal, passionate, and outward you are with your interests, something that people like to call “being yourself”, the more people gather ‘round you with the same interests.

Sometimes there’s a mismatch, though: I personally really love one particular boardgame, Magic The Gathering, but I find its community quite toxic, so I don’t indulge in it and just play casually with my friends (those who are just as nerdy as I am).

The second lever is the opposite, an approach similar to curation: noticing who you aspire to be and who you want to be around. Creating a role model has great power to motivate you, and you can harness this power. Find your role models: it might be people from the past, on the internet, or those around you. Notice the traits you admire and nurture them in yourself. Just as you notice traits in your role models, do the same with your design influences: deconstruct and analyze what you like in their work and practice it in your own. I don’t mean plain copying, but making your own spin on it, an interpretation. Think about how to apply the principles you discovered, not the 1:1 execution of them.

After finding such role models, read, really read and watch everything they recommend. If it’s a person with a burning passion for their line of work, they dig through thousands of related content, often way more than you do, and hand-pick absolute gems. You don’t even need to do the digging yourself, the only thing left for you to do is consume. Just like in a good course-style restaurant, serving delicacies on silver platters.

By the amount of food references in this article you might have gathered that I was writing this piece quite hungry.

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