Making the Transition from Design Student to Working Professional: Pedro Sanches, Designer
This is episode six of a series of edited conversations between David Karlins and accomplished communication designers on the theme of making the transition from being a student to becoming a working professional. The conversations explore the challenges of making that transition, the insights of people who have made that transition decades, years, or even months ago, and observations of the relationship between one’s passions and talents, making a living, and changing the world.
In this installment, David speaks with Pedro Sanches, a freelance designer and technologist from Brazil. In this interview, he spoke with us about how he learned to code, his end-of-year student thesis, and his current project.
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DK: Welcome Pedro Sanches from Brazil, coming to us live from São Paulo. Tell us about yourself; where can you be found?
PS: The easiest way to find and contact me is my website, which is psanches.com. It has my Instagram and email address. I’m a freelancer at the moment, and I’m playing around with the idea of starting another studio. I had a studio in New York before with three other people. It closed three years ago, and it was called HAWRAF. I do mostly graphic design in the realm of digital. My specialty is in where branding meets the digital world. I started my career doing generative graphic design with code to make things like logos. Not that I was necessarily making generative logos all the time, but I was trying to make work that shines in the digital space. There’s a lot of designers that really love print, and I’m on the other side of that where I really like digital things that can change color or are interactive.
DK: What’s your background in web development and coding?
PS: I studied graphic design at SVA. At SVA, there was a time where I was already interested in digital design more than my fellow students. I like print as well, but I saw this really big potential with digital work and I started with Processing. Processing is this programming language for artists, which makes it really easy for you to draw pixels with code. You can just write “ellipse” and then give the coordinates and radius, and then it just draws it. It will follow your mouse. It was a very easy language to learn for visual people and I started bringing that into some of my school projects in a very simple way. I think coding is seen as a very daunting skill to pick up, because it just goes on forever and you can’t learn all of it. If you try to learn all of it, you just get taken aback and stop. I was learning things quite slowly and methodically, and using Processing to create some simple graphics.
That was all self-taught and I was learning some HTML/CSS and Javascript using Code Academy. There was also a free class on Udacity that I took and highly recommend. I think it was the first time I fully understood code. It was a Python class, which I don’t even know anymore, but it was the first course that taught me the fundamentals of coding. This class covered topics such as: “What is a function? What is a full loop?”. It’s really talking about the basics of coding. Even if it’s in Python, it applied to every single coding language I learned afterwards. That was a very helpful class even if I never did anything else with Python. After that, it led me to learn other programming languages a lot better.
There’s a philosophy that I have stuck with for a long time. I remember back in school, there were a lot of things about how you had to specialize, which I didn’t like. “You can’t focus on too many different things! You got to specialize!”. I always wanted to do the most random things. I ended up having this philosophy of learning, which is to ‘take the path of least resistance’. Whatever I felt like learning, I would learn, because it was the easiest way for me to learn. If I’m trying to learn something that I’m not interested in, I just can’t do it. It’s like having a bad class. If you think you should learn coding, but you don’t want to actually learn it, it’s going to be terrible. But if that’s the time for you to learn something you’re interested in, just go for it. Because those skills will be applicable some other time. When I was learning Processing, my teachers were a little bit confused about what I was doing with all this code. But that’s what landed me my first job, even though it wasn’t graphic design. So you never know.
When I was working at my first job, I was still studying and there was a lot of talk about VR. And I was interested in the question of: “What if the world became all virtual reality? What would the graphic designer’s job be?”. And I ended up doing my thesis on that. “Are Architects going to replace our jobs if everything is 3D? Where is the place for the graphic designer? Is the graphic designer going to become like a pseudo-architect?”. I made this weird 3D website, and it had no portfolio material at all. It was very scrappily done but it ended up being what got me a job at Google.
I ended up having this philosophy of learning, which is to ‘take the path of least resistance’. Whatever I felt like learning, I would learn, because it was the easiest way for me to learn…if [there’s a] time for you to learn something you’re interested in, just go for it. Because those skills will be applicable some other time.
DK: There is a process you’re describing that never ends. I’ve seen many technologies, techniques, and cultures come and go over the years. I’ve seen so many contemporaries left on the side of the road wondering what happened. Things change so quickly. But the ability to look around for free classes to pick up something new is helpful.
What was the process behind your thesis project? What was the journey you took that landed you a job at Google?
PS: I’m not sure if it was specifically that project that got me a job at Google, but it definitely was one of the projects that they were very interested in. So I was able to work and study at the same time during my last year of school. It was a very tough year for me with very little sleep. But because I already had a job, I was able to focus my portfolio on things that didn’t necessarily have to be ‘professional’. A lot of students were doing branding projects so they could get branding work after graduating. On the other hand, I was able to explore some things that I was interested in that wouldn’t necessarily get me a job because I already had a job. Which is an example of where you’re doing something that you’re interested in, and then there are repercussions in the future that you don’t foresee.
After I graduated, I wanted to leave the job I had and I got an interview at Google. That was one of the projects that they were really interested in; my end-of-year thesis. It was this website you could walk around in. Google was very interested that I could code, although I never ended up touching a line of code during my time there.
DK: So I’ve been talking with different people about their passions outside of work. What is something that you’re working on outside of your job?
PS: I can talk about a project I started doing during the pandemic. Oftentimes as a graphic designer, you’re doing something at work, but you’re not necessarily happy with what you’re doing. Maybe you’re doing branding, but you want to do print. There’s always this gap of: “How do I become a professional in that area I’m interested in?”. A lot of things we do as graphic designers are doing our own side projects, so you can get those skills to do something else. In my case, one of the things I actually wanted to see if I could do was get out of graphic design. I had a studio in New York which did well. We got to work with companies like Facebook and Google. But there was something about graphic design as a service industry that was bothering me. You got these projects that you did for other clients, and you have to keep on chasing new projects and clients.
It’s fine in some cases and I do enjoy it, but there was something about this idea that on the other side, the client had this project that they would stick to, make something, and then keep on working on it. This idea of a product. So for example, I have several projects that might not necessarily have an immediate financial return. It might have a financial return in the form of getting new projects in the future. Designers would make their own projects to get other client work in the realm that they want to pursue. And there are a lot of graphic designers playing with this idea of having a product.
DK: An example would be where I used to work with a JavaScript coder to make WordPress themes. A client would approach us to make a theme for their WordPress website, and we would retain the rights to the design, and find ways to customize it and make it generic. There’s this concept for freelancers of making design templates to monetize.
PS: Right. So in my case, I actually decided to make an iOS game. I was interested in the fact that it was a conjunction of several things I liked: graphic design, interactivity, and music. It was something I was interested in, but there was also this idea that maybe I could make this into a game that could sell. And if that worked out, I could make more games in the future.
I’m developing this in Unity, which uses a programming language called C#. Unity is a game development engine and can be used for building VR experiences. It’s essentially for interactive 3D. You can make it all on Unity and then export it into native code like iOS, Android, and other things. I didn’t really know it before. I messed around with it a little bit. But because of the pandemic, you have a lot of time to learn things and I wanted to learn how to do it for a long time. During the beginning of the pandemic, people canceled some work so it gave me the opportunity to put some time into a project that I had no idea would make money or not. But the journey is often the reward.
DK: Thanks so much for joining us and for being so candid and insightful.
David Karlins is an adjunct professor of design and digital and written communication at NYU and CUNY, and author of 40 books on digital design technology and culture. His courses are distributed through LinkedIn Learning and other channels.
The following links to the rest of the episodes in this series are here:
