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Do you name your layers? (be honest)
Hi Reader,
Today I have a 🔥hot take🔥 on layer naming for you (as well as a poll), but first I want to update you on the results of the surveys I’ve been doing as part of my book research.
The main challenges designers face in brand & marketing design
Thanks so much to everyone who voted on the poll in issue 54. If you missed it, I presented two different potential framings for my book and asked which one you related to most. Here’s where the votes landed:
The results surprised me somewhat (and made me very glad I’d asked!). Up until now I’ve been framing my book around the career growth angle, so this poll made me want to dig deeper.
In the last issue I shared a link to a survey in order to dig in on where you’re at in your design career, what your goals are, and which challenges you strongly relate to. Here’s the results from that last part:
I’d still love to collect more answers, so please click below to take the survey for yourself and add your perspective to my research.
| Take the survey |
Observations from responses
As well as the raw numbers of course, I’ve learned so much from reading the open text fields in the survey. Here’s a couple of my high-level observations:
- Too many designers feel like they’re unable to make time to improve their work, because they’re dealing with the firehose of new requests coming in.
- Many are frustrated that their work isn’t respected within the company either by leadership or by the developers implementing their designs.
- Designers genuinely want their work to have an impact. We love making things that look and work great, sure, but we also want to build authority within the business by being clear on the impact our work is having (and several raised the point that they aren’t sure how to know if the design decisions they’re making are the right ones, with this in mind)
The good news: I can help with all of this!
I’ve decided I’m going to focus the book on sharing my process for designing and maintaining high-impact brand and marketing design assets. It’ll take you through how to efficiently audit what exists, conduct user research and look at data to spot areas for improvement, then make a (realistic!) plan for implementing changes to make your designs have more impact on business metrics like signups and traffic. It’ll help you get off the production hamster wheel too by setting up a better process for prioritising design requests.
If this sounds like something that will help you, first of all, please fill out the survey so I can learn from your perspective!
And second, I need a few willing designers who are ready and wanting to take action on what I described above to volunteer for some free coaching sessions where I’ll guide you through parts of the process so I can get your feedback on what works for you and what doesn’t.
If that sounds like you, click here and I’ll follow up with you for more details.
I’m so pleased to have gotten this clarity. And thanks to y’all sharing your challenges, I honestly already know what my next book will be. But let’s just focus on this one first shall we…
Do you name your layers?
Okay let me start by saying that there is no single correct answer to this. Your design process is your process, and you should do whatever works best for you. We cool?
That said, I’m with Dann on this one 😅
April 28th 2022
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I firmly believe that naming layers is a waste of my time in most stages of the design process. When I’m iterating; I’m in the flow. I’m not stopping to rename a layer that quite honestly I don’t know will still exist in my final design.
As a result, my Figma files look like this:
And I have zero shame in the Group 195 and Rectangles 3–6 hanging out in my file. What are they? I don’t know, quite honestly. But I do know that, unlike in the days of designing websites in Photoshop, it’s very easy for me to simply click on the layer that I want to edit right on the canvas itself. 🤷🏻♀️
My chaotic approach to layers has its downsides when it comes to collaborating and finalising a design though that’s for sure. And now that I’m actually collaborating on a design system I’m vowing to get better about ending my process with nicely named layers in components or groups in landing page designs. I have great respect for designers like Ryan who find layer-naming seamless.
April 28th 2022
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But since it’s not that natural for me (and because I don’t care enough to change my ways on this) I’d rather spend the extra time to name things at the end rather than break my flow in the beginning and middle stages.
Place your votes
The design software poll was fun a few issues ago, so let’s do another! Click on the option that describes you below and your vote will be counted.
❎ I only name layers when i have to
🧨 I literally never name layers
I’ll report back in the next issue with the results and we’ll see how chaotic this crew is 😅
If you missed it over on YouTube, I uploaded a 101 introduction to FigJam video. If you’ve been wanting to dive in to the tool, I hope it’s useful for getting you started!
I also recently decided to give in and make a TikTok so follow me there (I’m @charliprangley) if you want to see some design process videos in your feed.
Click the 💜 if you enjoyed this issue, and I’ll see you next week.
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