What’s Your “Single”?

In the music industry, singles are very important. They are less important for established bands and groups, but are enormously important to brand new and debuting artists. Singles are windows into the artist and if the audience doesn’t like it upon first listen then they likely will not come back. The same process is followed for designers.

If you are not established people will likely take a look at your stuff and decide within the first 5 seconds whether or not they like your work. Whether it’s your website, portfolio, business card or something else, your “single” will decide if people will hire you, recommend you, or ignore you. Sometimes if a first single doesn’t work there’s a chance for a follow-up that does, but that’s rare.

Like music artists, singles aren’t quite as important to established bands because a hype and excitement for new work is already there. However, putting out a really bad single could crash an artist’s image. The same could be said for our designs. We can’t let quality fail just because we’ve become established. It should absolutely be the opposite effect where our work becomes more amazing as we continue to establish ourselves.

I’ll admit it, I’m not as good at coding as I probably should be. However, I also took the step to mention to one of my superiors at work that I’d like to improve upon this and they offered to provide me those opportunities within my everyday work schedule. If you know you should be better at something or just want to learn something new then take that step. Complacency and stagnation is very dangerous area to be as a designer or anyone that deals with technology.

So, what’s your single? What are other people’s entrance into your professional realm and what impression does it give them? That first impression could go a long way into determining your career and opportunities.