For Meet the Pros speaker series we had Solomon Doley as the guest speaker. Solomon is a product designer working at HBO and also is a COMD CityTech Alumni. Knowing a person that once took the same major COMD and now works at a big company like HBO is very inspiring.
For his personal background, he started talking about his past where he was doing commercial modeling and was in Wutang music video when he was young. He stated that he wanted to make music when he was 17 and it catapults him to poetry, storytelling lead him to advertising and design. Solomon says for him family is always first and his inspiration is his father.
Solomon has done a lot of product designing for designer such as David Lerner with his brand design, He used to work for Viacom a conglomerate with their ui/ux design for their VH1 app, designing the Xbox one application for MTV and other product design related work.
Whole he was a student at CityTech he stated that Professor Wong pushed him to sharpen his designs. While he was learning and sharpening his design skills he got into undertanding that effort not equal result no one cares on the effort but the result.
After showing us some of the work that he has done he gave us the 5 things to remember
– Effort = Result
– Never stop learning
– Never be complacement
– Question everything
– Live your life
After the talk he started doing Q&A and I’m going to highlight some of them.
Was it hard to get your first job?
Worked on openlab, layout, interference
Did you have used your skill in poetry, music in your design?
He has a project and app for kids while making the ui interference he also make tunes for the buttons.
What do you do be creative everyday keep up with the design?
To be with the time up to date he read 20 articles every morning to freshen up his creative juice.
Do you find it hard to get inspiration?
There is information everywhere in your figer tip you just need to find it.
His talk was very inspiring and his points of never stop learning and question everything will stick with me forever.
