I almost quit design after my first paid job

My first paid design & dev project went well which, unfortunately, became part of the problem.

I knew I had done a good job, but the client just hadn’t launched yet so I was stuck in this strange creative purgatory where I couldn’t fully move on from the project and couldn’t exactly celebrate it either.

So, I did what any (this is up for debate) perfectly rational designer would do.

I made a content calendar. A beautiful, organised, completely useless content calendar.

I had ideas for what I wanted to design every day, neatly planned out in advance. The problem was that when it was time to actually make something, I didn’t want to make any of it.

I had too many ideas in my head and somehow none of them felt worth opening Figma for. Worse, whenever I did try, it just didn’t feel like me.

Eventually, I stopped trying.

I came back to it two weeks later, stared at the screen for fifteen minutes, and still had nothing, so I gave up on having an idea. I just opened Unsplash and searched for a completely random word. School.

I found this illustration and I liked it, so I decided to play with it. By the way, did you know that you can edit the illustrations from Unsplash in Figma? That was the day I found out by pure good fortune and boy, did I have fun with it.

I started playing around with it, moving things around, changing bits here and there. For the first time in a while, I wasn’t trying to come up with the idea… I was just making something.

And then I had a first draft. I had made something.That alone felt like a small victory, then came the copy, and that’s where I remembered that I had one tiny problem. I had an illustration, but I still didn’t have a product. I had no idea what this thing was supposed to be about so I started asking myself what kind of product could actually live inside this illustration. Eventually, I landed on the idea of a children’s audio story app. Suddenly, the screen started making sense; I had a direction, I could write the copy, I could figure out the flow.

Except…

Now, I couldn’t stop looking at the illustration.

The more I worked on the copy, the more obvious it became that the illustration wasn’t doing the idea justice anymore. The concept had grown past the thing that started it.

So, I switched again.

This time, I knew what I wanted the product to feel like, I just needed the visuals to catch up, so I went back to the drawing board.

I started looking for illustrations that felt closer to the world I had created in my head. I wanted something that could carry the warmth of the stories, the cosy feeling of the app and still give the onboarding enough personality.

Eventually, I found a direction that felt right and suddenly, I was designing again.

The copy finally had somewhere to live, the illustrations made sense with the story I was trying to tell, and for the first time in a while, I could actually see the product I had been designing towards. Which was funny, because two weeks earlier, I couldn’t even get myself to open Figma.

I think what scared me was how unfamiliar everything felt after that project. I had spent months building my client’s web app and suddenly I was wondering what I was supposed to make next; I even thought I might have lost my creativity.

That project had raised the bar in my head, and every new thing had to feel just as good, preferably better so I kept waiting for the right idea to arrive before allowing myself to make anything.

I’m still working on the design as I write this, and I have no idea where it will end up yet. I’m just happy to be designing again.

Two weeks ago, I couldn’t get myself to open Figma, now I’m annoyed that I have to close it and go to bed soon.

I’ll take that.

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3:46 AM, Friday, September 25, 2026.

I almost quit design after my first paid job was originally published in Bootcamp on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.