Ever wondered if you have the right skills and qualifications to get a design role? Do you need a design background? I want to share with you five not-so-straight-forward career paths into design. David Anderson of Houzz started with anthropology, Amir Hadjihabib at Zendesk transitioned from photography, and Michael McWatters of HBOMax shifted from fine art. Each career path highlights the unique and unexpected routes to design.

Let’s get stuck in.

David Anderson, Lead Product Designer at Houzz

Part of what led me to design, believe it or not, was my undergraduate degree in anthropology! At the time, of course, I had no idea that social science was such a good match with UX design, but once I started exploring the industry I quickly saw that an understanding of anthropology and UX really go together.

Studying social science helps me ask the right design questions — discovering the psychology behind how people use not only your app, but technology in general. It’s really given me an interesting way to look at users to find out what they’re looking for and what they expect.

I ended up at Houzz because I was excited by the opportunity to design for an app that’s used by millions of people who truly love it – our reviews average five stars. The talented team and the incredible content are a big part of the apps’ success and why I was attracted to working at Houzz.

Laura Lozano, Sprout Social

I kind of had a non-traditional start to design. In my past life, I worked as an assistant account executive. When I was picking my career path and deciding which college to go to, I never really considered a creative career – I just didn’t think it was a viable career option, so I decided to study English and minor in Business instead.

Design is simply addressing a business problem visually – It’s important to remember that before you get lost in the nitty-gritty of color options and grid systems.

Right after graduating, I started at an ad agency and after, like, a week and a half, it was clear that I was not in the right career path: It just wasn’t the right fit for me. But I was sort of stuck there, because you need a portfolio to get a job in design and I had no idea how to go about that process. After about a year and a half of talking to all of the designers at the ad agency, I eventually just took the plunge and quit to go back to school: I just wanted to see if I could follow this crazy dream of becoming a designer. I opted to go back to school as a chance to build out my portfolio, and just to learn more about design in general – I felt like I needed a good foundation before I could start looking for jobs.
Design isn’t about who you know, or where you went to school: it’s about what you can do.

Jason Lang, Head of Design at Glue.ai

My parents were always really good about exposing me to the arts, and my dad was a programmer, so that helped. The classical music, drawing, painting, and being surrounded by my dad’s computers and programming talk around the dinner table bred the product designer in me. I was always drawn to building things that could be used. In 5th or 6th grade, I did a pretty cool project for a science fair: Instead of doing a PowerPoint presentation, I decided to make an HTML website. I lugged my tower case and CRT monitor to the science fair and showed my project on one of the original web publishing programs that came with Windows.

InVision is great because it actually cuts down the technical know how to [create prototypes] and then makes the process faster and easier to edit.

Through high school, I thought I might do biology or something, but towards the end an art teacher encouraged me to pursue graphic design. So I went to college for graphic and interactive design. I spent some time doing print work for a while, and when I graduated I got the opportunity to move out here and work for Posterous. That’s when I really dove head-first into doing product design and UI.

Amir Hadjihabib, Zendesk

Originally, I was never into design. I love photography: it’s my passion. Any time I can shoot I enjoy it. My mom gave me a camera when I was 5 or 6 years old and so I was always running around with a camera. I started to develop a really strong interest in photography and now I have 15-20 cameras, both film and digital. I was thinking about going to school for photography so I started researching photography as a career, but it just didn’t seem like something I wanted. The industry is pretty rough. It’s really competitive and it just wasn’t an attractive culture. Zendesk is a really fun environment but if I was doing photography it would be a lot more nose-to-the-grind. As I was researching careers, I found out about new media. I grew up on computers, and it just made more sense to me to try design on a computer. I’ve always had a strong interest in art, but design is a relatively new thing since college. It was always photography.

Michael McWatters, Vice President, Product Design for Max

I didn’t have a straight path to where I am now. My Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees were in fine art, but after grad school I decided I wanted to make things for people to use or interact with—things with a function or purpose. This led naturally to design. These were the early days of the web when we were all just figuring it out.

“I like to write a simple narrative—like a screenplay—that describes a user journey: how they arrived, what they hope to do, what might make them stumble.”

Most of my career thereafter was spent on the agency side of things, but over time I grew frustrated with the fact that, as a consultant, I didn’t really own the products I was designing and couldn’t help them evolve and improve after launch. Plus I was often disconnected from the engineers building them.

So about 6 years ago I moved to a tech firm that was in the business of designing, building and maintaining products. I was the only UX guy—it was exhilarating. Thanks to that transition—and a bit of serendipity—I wound up at TED a couple years later. It’s been the greatest leap in my career so far.

Wrapping up

In conclusion, if you are looking to transition to design don’t feel inadequate because you don’t not have a design background or a design related qualification. You just need to start from where you are with what you have and realize it might take time to break into the field. And that’s okay.