Kathy Delano

Very early in my career, I had a boss who told me to trust my instincts. I tend to overthink things a lot - should I do this, playing all the different sides, even with design ideas like 'do you think they'd go with this?' I get caught up spinning on decisions. But this boss said to me, 'trust your instincts, you have really good instincts, and don't get caught up in what's the right answer all the time.' That advice has been really good for me. You don't have to do what's conventional all the time. Sometimes you have a different idea and you kind of know it, but you're afraid to move in that direction. Learning to trust that I'm on the right path instead of constantly second-guessing myself has been invaluable.

Definitely find a mentor. When I entered the field, I had a mentor who was my mom's age - she actually knew my mom, it was just a coincidence. She was probably my age at the time and had really good perspective. When you're new to the field, you actually don't know what you don't know yet, so it's really good to have someone to ask. It's also really good to keep yourself flexible. When I came into the business, I was only going to work for an architectural firm in their design department - that was the only route I wanted to take, and I did do that for a number of years. But it actually wasn't the part of my career that I've enjoyed the most. So I think you've got to stay open and get a lot of different experiences. I don't think you need to stay at one firm from the beginning to the end of your career, because you learn a lot along the way. It's a pretty volatile field at times, and most likely almost every designer I've ever met has been at one point furloughed, or fired, or laid off. I think that's actually a good thing - that's what moved me out of the architectural firm and into other experiences. When you move firms, you work with different designers and different managers, and you just get a holistic look at the field, because it's pretty broad.

I'm really good at working in a collaborative way with the client, and I value that it's not really about me - it's something that we come at together. We do all commercial design, so everything reflects what the client would have done if they had the tools to do it, instead of being about the designer's own aesthetic. A lot of designers are about their own aesthetic, but I don't need it to be about me. It's more of a service than an art project. We're really committed to doing the research, so anything we do is really sought out professionally and really explored, instead of just giving quick and easy solutions to things. It's more of a partnership with the client, and we do a lot of repeat business because of that - multiple phases, locations, working with the same clients over and over. The integrity of what we're doing is really important to me. I've been a big stickler on that, so we're always doing the right thing for the client. We won't get involved in something where someone's trying to push us in a direction we're not comfortable with. We're pretty selective about the clients, so we don't have to get into situations where we're doing things that we're not comfortable with.