From Waiting Tables to Winning Design: Your Past Experience Is Absolutely Everything
Hello everyone. So, we’ve got ourselves a little career retrospective here, dripping in nostalgia for table service and soufflé timing, wrapped up in a neat little bow of “everything I learned in life I learned waiting tables.” Stephanie Campbell’s tale starts with the notion that your past work experience, no matter how unrelated, shapes your design career. Fine. Sensible, even. But does this article deliver a Michelin-star menu of insight, or is it just reheated leftovers served with unnecessary garnish? Let’s dig in, shall we?
The Appetizer: “Your Past is Your Advantage” – Or, Well, Sometimes
We kick things off with anecdotal restaurant nightmares – actual nightmares. Flames, no clean glassware, an apocalypse of drink orders. Fair enough, but the grand epiphany is basically muscle memory = useful habits. Adaptability, anticipation, grace under pressure. All solid skills. But just like in modern gaming tutorials, this is the part where you’re told to ‘press X to not die’ before being dumped into open-world chaos. Useful? Sure. Groundbreaking? We’re still in the salad course here.
The twist – these hardwired instincts can sometimes mess you up. That’s the important point here, and the one that deserved more deliberate chewing. Speed can sabotage quality. Over-anticipation can over-complicate. You need self-awareness, not just blind nostalgia. That’s the type of nuance too often skipped in LinkedIn-flavored origin stories, so bonus points for at least touching it before moving on.
The Main Course: Five “Lessons” Served Up Family Style
1. Reading the Room
Ah yes, interpreting microexpressions and subtle cues. In restaurants, this means spotting the cocktail lingerer. In design, it means reading stakeholder indifference or feedback word-salads. This is solid advice – listen before you leap. The problem is the advice never really evolves beyond “here’s a thing I did then, here’s the same thing now.” It’s like reskinning an existing level in a game without adding any new mechanics.
2. Speed vs. Intentionality
Pacing your service to prevent collapsing soufflés translates to pacing project deliverables. Fine dining requires relentless motion; good design sometimes needs you to camp in one spot and survey the map before charging ahead. This section earns critical XP for pointing out that hustle culture can lead to mediocre builds. If only we could patch that into every productivity app’s onboarding.
3. Presentation Matters
Metaphor alert – plating your dessert equals framing your design. Yes. Obviously. Half the battle is making people believe your idea deserves the budget. But the standout here is the rejection of pixel-perfect obsession: it’s about storytelling, not just surface polish. If only more design juniors grasped that early on instead of burning three sprints on a button’s drop shadow.
4. Collaboration is the Backbone
Restaurant teamwork analogies are predictable but still effective. In kitchens and agencies alike, everyone has a role – unless, of course, you’ve been invited to a design stand-up that turns into a political cage match over spacing grids. Credit where due: the author flags the dangers of barging into someone’s workflow uninvited. That’s the UX version of pulling aggro before the tanks are ready. There will be consequences…
5. Composure Under Pressure
This one actually resonates – panic has the same smell in both kitchens and client meetings. The best designers aren’t just problem solvers; they’re problem finders. Staying calm under bad feedback or unclear direction is crucial. However, it could have gone deeper into the psychological side – let’s face it, in design and in service, the difficulty spike comes not from skill gaps but from managing egos, expectations, and bad RNG.
Dessert: The “Would I Go Back?” Reflection
We end on a nice sugar high of “own your background as a superpower.” Makes sense. Bring your transferable skills to the table, keep your blind spots in check, and boom – you’re now the hero of your own multi-class origin story. While it ties the piece together neatly, it borders on motivational poster territory (“Trust your instincts, they’re real and they’re earned”). Veteran players will nod politely and skip the cutscene; newcomers might actually take some notes.
Final Verdict
This was a well-set table of sensible, if familiar, advice, garnished liberally with food-service metaphors. It stays mostly in safe territory, providing competent reminders rather than surprising insights. There’s value in drawing connections between past and present careers, but too often it felt like the menu was focused more on plating than on new recipes. As a read, it’s reassuring comfort food, not a groundbreaking special.
Overall impression? Decent – like a restaurant you’d go to on a weeknight, not somewhere you’d travel for. For experienced designers, this won’t unlock new skill trees. For career-changers, it could be the gentle nudge you need. And that, ladies and gentlemen, is entirely my opinion.
From Line To Layout: How Past Experiences Shape Your Design Career, https://www.smashingmagazine.com/2025/08/from-line-to-layout-past-experiences-shape-design-career/
