Forget the algorithm, designers need to start designing for themselves again

Do you even remember why you got into design in the first place?

I have a confession.

There’s a shameful behavior I’ve been engaging in as a designer for years: when I finally have time to make things for myself—projects where the motivation has come from me, not someone else—I filter my ideas through the lens of what will get the most engagement on social media. It feels like this dirty secret that I’ve been carrying with me, but it would be a lie to act like it isn’t true.

There is obviously some nuance to this—I wouldn’t be here writing these words if my motivation to be a designer was purely based on chasing likes. But social media slowly conditioned me to start thinking this way and, for me personally, that conditioning happened between 2014 and 2018. That was the peak IG era for me. I was regularly getting hundreds of likes on my posts and felt like I was truly “tapped in” to my audience. Then IG changed their algorithm, blah, blah, blah, you know the story. But even in the moments I didn’t want to filter myself in this way it’s like I had developed muscle memory to do it anyway. And that started to scare me. What if I don’t know how to create things just for the sake of it anymore? Why is validation from the internet so important to me?

Confronting those questions was scary and in order to avoid looking deeper at them, I actively chose to only work on projects for my day job or freelance clients. Both are rewarding and fulfilling in their own way, I wouldn’t do it if it wasn’t. But there’s been a frustrated little voice in my head that often wants to do things my way, but I can’t because I’m not the client.

I’ve been working through those feelings for more than a year now and it led me to two insights:

Client work and personal work serve different creative needs.

Client work is inherently not for me. Personal work is. Client work makes me feel competent as a designer, but personal work makes me feel like myself. And it’s really as simple as that!

I need to start designing for myself again.

I need to get reacquainted with myself, my personal taste, and what makes me happy to design. I need to move beyond just being good at what I do, and remember what it feels like to create from a place of pure creative instinct.

It feels a little corny to be talking about design as this sacred, fulfilling activity that makes me feel good when online culture doesn’t want to be sincere about much these days (colloquially referred to as the irony epidemic). But I became a designer because I do care about it.

I’ve been a professional designer for ten years now, and in this current phase of my creative life these are the activities I’m doing most:

• brand design

• brand strategy

• designing websites

• designing logos and doing custom lettering

• designing marketing collateral

• messaging and positioning work

Missing from that list is what drew me to design in the first place: creating work purely to communicate an idea or perspective. No client briefs, no metrics to hit, no engagement to track. I liked being able to say something by designing it. I still do. But I don’t know the last time I did that without thinking about how people on social media will interact with it.

So, I’m reclaiming it. I’m becoming my own client, I’m putting up my social blinders, and I’m designing for me again. To give a small but practical example of how I plan to do this: I’ve been dying to use a calligraphic text font in something but none of my current projects have been right for it—the suggestion is shot down every time. So I’m gonna make the right project for it and no one can tell me not to use it because I’m doing it for myself. And the stakes are so incredibly low that it really doesn’t matter whether anyone else likes it.

I've also found that 'being your own client' pushes you to engage with design at a deeper level by making design decisions based on your own aesthetic judgement and instinct. This creates a feedback loop that’s quite different from social media or client work—you make choices, live with them, and develop an understanding of what works for you and what doesn’t. There’s been a rise in online culture to showcase personal taste lately and I’ve particularly seen this with the rise of curated gift guides that are really just another way to say “look at all the cool things I like and I’m into” regardless of whether they’re actually into them, own them, or use them. But I believe you can only develop personal taste by engaging with things beyond the surface level. I like fonts. But I’m not looking at them, imagining what that font says about me, and then sharing that on social media as a way to show what a unique and interesting designer I am. I know which ones I like because I’ve actually used them (or at least tested them) in real work.

I invite you to do the same if you’ve also been feeling this way. I’ve deleted IG, Twitter (because I’ll never call it X), and Tiktok from my phone—they’re now sites that I visit every now and then on my laptop or iPad. I don’t want to be tapped in anymore. Those little dopamine hits simply aren’t worth it anymore.

It’s taken me a while to get here but I’m ready to start saying something through design again—this time, only caring if I like it.

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Thanks for reading, and see you next year.