Config 2024: Unlocking opportunities: building your brand with side projects (Matt D. Smith) | Figma

[Music] as designers we pour our hearts and souls into our work trying to create meaningful experiences that leave a lasting impact but what if I told you that the biggest impact of your career could come from projects that you pursue outside of your 9 to-5 it could be a random idea that you just can't shake or a new skill that you want to learn or just frustration with the status quo all of these are triggers that can lead to your next side project throughout the last two decades of my career I've come to believe that

the the projects we work on and the things that we create outside of our day job have the power to shape our lives in ways we could never imagine side projects can fuel our growth they can give us a platform to express our true creativity and they can open doors that we never knew existed but there is a catch the Journey of a side project is not for the faint of heart it's a roller coaster ride filled with emotion twists and turns that'll make you question every and today I want to take you on that

journey I want to show you how one side project influenced millions of people and I want to show you how another side project commanded the interest of an industry Giant and I want to show you how through side projects sharing your work through side projects can help you build a lasting brand and a legacy but most importantly I want to help you see the potential that lies within you because when you pursue your passion projects you're not just building something tangible you're building a new version of yourself and that is the most exciting project of

all back in 2013 I attended a conference called circles and I listened to a guy named Matt Stevens a designer and an illustrator share his side project it was called Max 100 and he decided to draw his favorite sneaker the Nike Air Max One a hundred different times with unique illustrations and he put them all into a book on Kickstarter and it completely sold out and as if that wasn't impressive enough Nike caught wind and they put his designs with their shoes and limited edition drops of their sneakers and as I sat there I was

incredibly inspired and it made me think about my own little side project at the time a half-baked idea for a mobile app that would simplify the process of listing things for sale on Craigslist not the most exciting project in the world but this is what I had to work with at the time my wife and kid my wife and I had three kids and way way way too many toys in the house I'm talking exra saucers swings the whole nine yards and I needed to make room we needed to get rid of a bunch of

stuff and every time I wanted to sell something this is before Facebook Marketplace mind you I had to go through this multi-step process of taking pictures putting it on my computer uploading it to the website going through this form every single time and I was super frustrated and I thought there's got to be a better way than this so I convinced my developer friend Adam that scraping web data from Craigslist and turning it into an IOS app was a good idea and I also challenged myself to put all of this form cram it into a

tiny iPhone screen with the keyboard showing at the time I was rocking the iPhone 4 iPhone 15 for comparison a little more room so had about 225 pixels to work with here but I was convinced I could make this work because I was so frustrated with this long process I just wanted to simplify so just like my house had no room for all these toys I didn't have room to spare in this app design so as I sat on the plane inspired by the max 100 side project I fired open my laptop and I started

designing and animating and I came up with something that I thought was pretty cool it saved space it maintained usability and I decided to post it to dribble to my absolute surprise this thing took off hundreds of thousands of views most popular shot of the day people were commenting liking sharing and pretty soon the float label pattern was born people started blogging about it people started sharing their perspective on it and also how they might implement this on their own website not everyone loved it that was okay but a year later Google decides to release

their first version of material design system and they included the floating labels cementing it as a viable option for all forms in the future woohoo since then this has permeated the entire worldwide web you can now find this on Apple on Shopify on PayPal thousands of others many of you may have had arguments with your developers about implementing this very pattern so the next time you see a a label that floats up as you start typing go ahead and send me a donation I'm going to put my venmo stuff on the next slide cuz I

didn't earn any money from this and that was never the point I did this because I was frustrated because I was trying to sell toys on Craigslist that was the goal what started as a small tiny little experiment ended up influencing the way millions of people are now experiencing forums online and it's a reminder that side projects now no matter how small or seemingly insignificant they have the potential to make a real tangible impact on the world about 5 years before the whole float label thing I had my first big idea for a side project

my wife and I were pretty fresh off of our first home buying experience and this was pre Zillow shout out to Jenny if you were here for that talk and I found myself again incredibly frustrated with the state of Real Estate websites every single virtual tour was a clunky slideshow set to cheesy piano music and I found it disgusting and I thought there's got to be a better way so I decided I'm going to create a real estate app and call it lockbox sorry for the graany photo here but in 2008 this was actually highres

this was the first time I convinced my developer friend Adam to build something with me so we got to work and we spent all the time that we could possibly gather aside from our day job building this app thinking this is just when we get this done it's going to be good so we also built an iPhone app it was the very first iPhone app I had ever designed very first one he had ever developed the App Store wasn't even the App Store until this year this would allow real estate agents to take pictures of

their property and upload it directly to the website and I know that now this sounds like the most basic app you've ever heard of in your life but in 2008 we were on to something here so we we put in a bunch of late nights we did a ton of work oh and by the way I I my mom was also a realtor at the time and I thought at the very least she could be our guinea pig for this so there we were we had done all this work all those late nights all that

passion into this project we get ready to to launch and we just wait for the users to flood in zero people signed up well one if you count my mom this was a failure right yes according to the technical definition this was a failure but this this project was the very first time I had ever thought through the entire process of an app on boarding and different states I did wireframes I did mobile designs and it gave me this crash course in Mobile design that I didn't previously have and a few a month or so

later I found myself in a meeting with an agency that was considering hiring me for a mobile project to redesign the AT&T Erse mobile app and they said we noticed you had mobile experience cuz you better believe I put that lock box in my portfolio and I said yes I do have mobile experience and I showed them all the wireframes all the designs and they were impressed because there weren't a lot of people that had mobile experience back in 2008 guess who had just come walking in the door they ended up hiring me for that

project and what started as a small little pilot project ended up turning into a big 3 to six month project and that kickstarted the next phase of my career where I got hired again and again to make these mobile apps iPad apps and responsive web apps and more mobile apps and on and on and pretty soon my mobile experience from my failed side project just became mobile experience and I kept at it and kept at it and it's a good reminder that the value of side projects doesn't often come immediately but in the opportunities that

it creates and the personal growth that it ignites side projects can be a catalyst for personal and professional transformation so not long after the float label experience I felt empowered and motivated to share more about my design process online so I started writing more I started blogging and I had this one blog post in particular that really took off and I was outlining my process for how I organized my wireframes and how I presented it presented it to clients and on a hunch I created a little wireframing kit and I sold it online I made

my first dollar online and my mind was blown at this possibility this led to people asking even more about my process and so I thought I'm going to create a course about this so in 2015 I created AI ux ahead of its time no this is not artificial intelligence this was Adobe Illustrator for ux design specifically for the systematic process of Designing wireframes across multiple devices a process I felt like I had mastered so naturally I needed to teach everyone who was interested about it and I had a little bit of success with this course

back in 2015 I had some success stories and I almost fell out of my chair when I got an email from this guy I had people told me that they they had a their ux career got kickstarted because of this course and it made decent money like not quit your day job money but it was not bad and I thought man I might need to take this more seriously I had creative freedom I was building skills I was feeling fulfilled but just as I got all excited about the future of AI ux sketch comes along

takes over the design world and seemingly everyone including me ditched Adobe for this new interface design tool and I couldn't keep promoting ai ai even though I was super excited about it super excited about the thought of teaching and doing things in addition to client work and I I spent way too much time on this AI project it was a side project but I was hoping it could potentially become more than that and I got dangerously low on cash and now that sketch had come out and I had switched I had to pull the plug

like a year of work again failure and I said to my myself you know what I am never making a course about software again never so I doubled down on client work and just as I was getting really really good at sketch figma comes along with its cool new collaborative features and its online capabilities and even though I vowed to never make a course about software again I broke my own rule early this year and released figma 101 12 fast-paced videos to teach you how to use figma for free today I learned I've got to

redo all of that and I know that all of you have already mastered figma but for your friend that doesn't know anything about it you can send them this link it's probably going to have some old interface designs in the videos so there I was I had pulled the plug on AI I decided to double down on my client work because things just got kind of scary and I was like okay I'm not doing that again I'm gonna if I do this again I'm going to be more calculated but I I couldn't shake this idea

for a new way to teach design that would be even better something that would be fundamental foundational principles and so as I was doing client work I started Shi sharing more teaching more started speaking at conferences teaching workshops sharing everything that I could and I came up with this idea for something that could stand the test of time and I wanted to build this new brand that I could put all of my educational stuff underneath I called it shift and nudge and over the next two years juggling all the things I got to work on

this this kind of a picture of what those next two years look like lots of ups and downs when the house was quiet and my thoughts were loud I'm thinking to myself am I making the right decision by working on this thing am I risking my family's Financial stability for another side project haven't I already been burned by this one time and the the weight of responsibility was heavy but we had we had been more calculated this time I had saved up more money I had done research and I had a lot of work done

on this I was getting ready to launch it and then I got new news that my dad was hospitalized with a life-threatening illness right before I was going to launch I was already doubting myself I was already questioning everything but now this was filling me with new worry new fear new anxiety and I didn't know what to do so for the next three months of uncertainty he finally did start treatment and although his recovery wasn't full it was no longer like threatening so I pressed on I put my head down despite the emotional to toll

that it took on me my lack of focus I just knew that I could just sense there was some kind of change on the horizon and I had to finish this I felt compelled to finish pursuing my vision so I changed the name to shift nudge because I forgot the password to the first Instagram account so I had everything ready to go I had all 80,000 words written 80 videos recorded and edited design files downloads homework exercises I ran an early private beta group lots of success I had everything ready to go ready what for

what I thought could be the biggest moment of my career let's launch this thing I can't launch a course in the middle of Co so at this point I was officially crushed I had been telling clients no I'm not available for the last 6 months and when you send emails like that they they stop emailing you so the one silver lining here was that I could use this time to double down on the existing beta students and I ran another second private cohort and I just put my head down helping everyone in the course making

lots of critique videos trying to make this as good as it could as good as it could possibly be and so finally in the fall of 2020 after all of this struggle all of these doubts I launch it and it was fantastic it was amazing I couldn't believe I'd finally put this out into the world my ambitious side project that I thought that I would never finish the one that I constantly questioned if I was good enough and the one the one that I was worried would be a failure my side project has now become

my full-time project and my exclusive Focus for the last four years we've trained 4,000 students through shift nudge and it's been the absolute honor of a lifetime to hear feedback like this people sending their teams through shift nudge and individual signing up as well this project has been absolutely life-changing for me and I truly feel like I found what is a calling none of this would have been possible without stacking all of these side projects and while the journey was far from Easy it was worth every moment of uncertainty and doubt the projects outside of

my client work gave me the skills and the resilience to take on this Challenge and I can see how the past projects taught me valuable lessons about creativity perseverance and the power of sharing my own work these projects not only shape my career but they transform me as a person as well you can see a lot more of these stories on this URL so these seemingly inconsequential side projects their opportunity is opportunities to learn experiment and they give us the freedom to explore new ideas and discover our true potential and that's the thing with creative

uh with side projects you have full creative control there's no client preferences there's no deadlines there's no co-workers to argue with you get to decide what you put out into the world it might be a drawing of a shoe it might be a new take on a form or it might be something that gives you new experience but it ends up transforming your career but it's not all rainbows and lollipops most side projects will fail you'll pour everything you have into an idea only to watch it fizzle out and die kind of like my figma

101 course you'll face moments of uncertainty and doubt and you'll question why you ever started in the first place but here's a secret that no one no one ever tells you those failur they're not just inevitable they're invaluable looking back we can see how each of these failures no matter how painful are often a critical piece of our puzzle those missteps they were the lessons we needed to learn and the resilience we needed to build to continue our journey so don't wait for permission don't wait for the perfect moment your next side project could be

the key to unlocking your next big opportunity so embrace the failure celebrate the flops and trust that every stumble is one step closer toward success your next side project might not change the world but it might just change your world and that is a journey worth taking thank you [Music]