Chase your curiosity, find your niche

There is no shortage of advice for designers on portfolios, take-home assignments, and interviews. But very little of it asks a more fundamental question:

What kind of designer do you want to be?

Most of what you find is about landing your first job or getting “good enough” at tools. Very little speaks to the messy middle, to designers 2 to 4 years in experience, who are trying to figure out what kind of career they are building.

Early in my career, I kept circling the same thing:
What is my niche? What kind of work do I actually want to go deep into?
Or, put simply: what is something I could eventually do 100x better than most designers?

The path is not obvious

The first thing I realised is that this is not a question with a straight answer.

No resource can tell you what your niche should be, and no senior designer can map it out for you. It is a personal exercise.

Still, it is an important question to ask once you have gone past the basics.

For me, the only honest way to answer it was to experiment and try different things.

Things I tried that did not stick

Illustrations / visual design:

Early on, I wanted to be the kind of designer who was very strong visually. I tried my hand at making my own product illustrations and icons.

At Juno, I even volunteered to create all the blog cover illustrations in the beginning. I thought it would set me apart as someone who did not need to rely on an illustrator for visual polish.

I quickly realised I was terrible at it. Worse, I did not enjoy the process.

Motion design:

After that, I tried motion design. I was not bad at it. I could follow tutorials and get decent results.

But After Effects never felt fun to me. I used to dread the thought of opening it.

Business / product thinking:

At one point, I thought my niche might be becoming a designer who deeply understands the business side of things. I started learning from the PMs at Juno: how they structured problems, how they made business decisions, and how they tracked whether a feature was working or not.

I also became curious about metrics. How do we know if a feature is successful? What does retention look like? What can design do to influence performance?

At Juno, all the designers regularly looked at analytics to see how our features were performing. We did not rely on an analytics team to interpret it for us.

I never got to the level of fluency a PM has, but that phase taught me to take business goals and constraints seriously in my design work.

What actually stuck?

Niche #1: Design and code

The one thing that stuck with me consistently was working with engineers and learning how code works.
From the start of my career, I made a habit of working with frontend developers and reviewing how they built my designs. I would open up the code, follow the logic, and ask a lot of questions.

That is how I stumbled onto TailwindCSS. It also made me notice how differently engineers and designers approach problems. This awareness slowly started shaping my day-to-day work. I would structure my auto layout with the final code in mind.

I then began learning how to code more seriously. At first, it was small experiments, not full apps, but enough to build intuition.

Over time, I started building real projects. As I did that, my designs improved, not just visually but structurally.

Eventually, this became one of my core skills: being a designer who can code.
It also helped in unexpected ways. In cross-functional teams, when conflicts came up between design and engineering, I could mediate better because I understood both perspectives. 

Niche #2: Domain depth in fintech

The second niche I developed over time was domain expertise in fintech.
Both my parents worked in banking, and finances and taxes were regular dinner table conversations when I was growing up. So when I started working, I found myself genuinely curious.

How do card networks settle transactions? Why do credit cards give rewards, and how does that work behind the scenes? What happens when you buy a stock? What do brokerages and exchanges actually do?

That curiosity pushed me to dig deeper into how financial systems are built.

Early on, I thought crypto might be my space, but I never felt the same pull towards it. Fintech, on the other hand, kept me engaged.

Fintech became a niche for me, not just because I worked in it, but because I was curious enough to understand how it actually works.

Why having a niche matters

Once you cross the 3 to 4 year mark as a designer, generalist skills will take you only so far. Having a niche helps in ways that compound over time:

1. Your team and manager know where to place you. They’ll understand what kind of problems you thrive in.

2. You become easier to hire. Your name might be among the first to come up when someone’s looking for a specialist in that space.

3. You stand out. There are far too many designers who can do a little bit of everything, but don’t go deep into anything.

It also matters more now than ever, especially with how fast AI is evolving.

Someone once explained it to me best using the concept of T-shaped skills.
The horizontal bar is your breadth: the tools, platforms, and workflows you’re familiar with. The vertical bar is your depth: where you go deep, where you specialise.

That depth is where your leverage lies.

Curiosity shows you what you enjoy. When you enjoy something, you are more likely to stick with it. Do more of it. Get good at it. Do it long enough that people start to associate you with it.

Jack of all trades and master of some will always beat Jack of all trades and master of none.