Taking the Content Creator Leap

Tommy Geoco calls himself an accidental designer. He got into it because he wanted to build his own things, spent a few years at an agency, and co-founded Stream Pro, a tool for Twitch streamers, back when people called live-streamed video games a fad. It sold in 2015. After years in Silicon Valley as a first design hire and a design team leader, he was laid off in April 2022, went full time on the audience he'd been mentoring on the side as "Designer Tom," and is now building UX Tools into a place to learn from people still working in the field. His critique of bootcamps is that instructors who aren't in the business teach curriculums that date quickly. His answer is focused modules, starting with the problems nobody teaches: being a design team of one inside a dysfunctional company, and freelancing in a market shifting toward term contracts.

For designers thinking about starting their own thing, his biggest lesson is the difference between value creation and what he calls performance theater: the political, alliance-building work big companies reward but customers never see. Shipping something of your own, however small, is the fastest sanity check on which is which. Designers already have the rest of the toolkit: taste, the ability to bring ideas to life, and the habit of measuring whether they work. On hustle, he's burned out before. Now he allows short "monk mode" stretches, a weekend or a week or two at most, and then takes the time back. Hard work isn't the problem. Working without balance is.

His advice for new designers is deliberately a little controversial. He doesn't support unpaid take-home tests, but a low-paid or charity project can be worth more than any spec piece, because real work forces you through the messy problems between zero and one, and that's what gets you to the next interview round. Senior designers who say never work for free aren't fighting the same fight. On content creation, he sees the same shift he saw with Twitch: anyone with a phone can now distribute ideas without a middleman. Don't be cynical, he says, because early critics are late adopters. If your job already asks you to share knowledge internally, do it somewhere it also builds your reputation. Your first post will be bad. Your hundredth will be pretty decent.