Lunch Time Lecture: Dan Kanach

In this week’s lunchtime lecture, Dan Kanach shared his journey to becoming a professional designer. One of the biggest suggestions that he made for turning design into a job that you could get paid for was to brand yourself and put yourself out there by talking to people. He also discussed his current experience as a designer and talked about the importance of deadlines in his field of work. He said that to be a successful designer, you had to figure out how long things would take you and how to optimize your methods so that you could be efficient enough to finish things by the deadline. I think that this would be a big transition to make after having a practice where I spend as much time as possible on a project. It makes sense though because without deadlines, there would be a lot of pieces that I have made that I would have spent much longer on. Dan Kanach also talked about how he had to find something that worked for all of his projects but it didn’t have to be the perfect design or something that you were working on and you didn’t meet to absolutely love it because if it worked and the client liked it, than it was good. I think that this is an interesting way to think about design. Lastly, Dan Kanach shared that it was also important to learn the software. By this he means that you should learn to use all the tools that you need to complete a project. This can be helpful in the long term because you will be able to say I can do that if something asks you about a project that would use that software and in general, the idea of learning all of your tools is good because you are being curious.