Halli Hallo, I am a Designer!

I’m Luisa, a 26-year-old UX / UI Designer with good communication skills, additionally I was born and raised in Germany, so I’m not a native English speaker.

During college I studied Communication Design, which is about solving problems and expressing information that is easy to understand.

At the university I studied Japanese for 3 years however I only acquire survival skills, meaning that I’m able to place orders at restaurants, buy groceries at the supermarket and licensing better than speaking.

Design is a topic field and Designer doesn’t mean that everyone of them has the same skills and can use the same programs.

Also at Colorkrew our Designers have their own unique skills, abilities and strength points.

Communication is important! But how?

Since Colorkrew started to become a global company, I have worked with many people from different countries and the beginning I was not sure what I should expect. I was a fresh-[wo]man and didn’t know how and if I could express myself.

Back in school I was not satisfied with my grades in English and also my teacher didn’t support my plans of studying abroad. Well, at the beginning I felt that I am in a similar situation. Can I express myself? Will they understand? My english is so bad!

Even since this years I listened to a lot of music, watched movies in english and had some friends from all over the world.

But why is it, that we think it’s never enough? For many Japanese people I recognized the same problem.

I want to cheer you up! No one is perfect and even in America or other English speaking areas they can’t speak 100% correctly but they express themselves with some methods.

Body language is one of the good methods

If you try to put your message in as few words it’s also easier to follow.

I went to a hairdresser a few weeks ago and I was also worried about my Japanese. I asked a friend to join, so he joined for the first 10 minutes to help me communicate about my “complicated” hair-changes that I wanted, actually I recognized it was not a big problem, I also could understand the main tags from him and he could follow my slow english instructions.

Your body language can also tell a story. With eye contact, hand gestures, and tags you can transport the message you try to convey.

Keep everything open!

Well, since I started living in Tokyo, I also work for Colorkrew, now it’s already one and a half year ago since I joined.

Because of corona all of us are working in different places and the communication can be very difficult. So hand gestures and contact is rarely seen and in zoom or skype conferences hard to read. But it’s better to communicate than texting only.

Some texting lessons I learned: Keep everything open!

When you work in a team, it’s difficult that everyone gets updated. So use a tool to invite all team members and post everything about your process.

※We use Goalous as communication and management by objectives tool.

So feedback on your work and others is also essential to keep motivated, motivate others and know what’s going on.

Also keep your text short and put essential words inside, that no one needs to search what you want to say and avoid confusion.

Think first what you want to express before you say something.

Let’s talk with your coworkers!

Even your coworkers were a big part of your day, sometimes you miss this small talks to refresh your mind, get new ideas or chat about private things a bit. So Arrange a meeting to talk with them.

They are maybe also having a rough day but so all of us can have a break. At an international company you could also do some 10 min studies to learn from each other. The cohesion is getting better!