From Video Games to Visual Design. How to Combine Your Interests to Break Into a Career (w/ Darold Davis)

June 19, 2023·28 min·2 clips

An anthropology graduate with zero design experience landed a UX designer job at Riot Games through Daryl's mentoring.

The starting point is not a tidy discipline. Daryl begins with childhood curiosity, comic books, drawing, and video games before there is an obvious academic path for that mix of art and technology. He studies a bit of computer science first, then leans further into art and design, still carrying the same question: how do creative instincts and technical systems fit together? The useful part of the conversation is that earlier interests do not get treated like wasted time. They become raw material. UX/UI gets translated into plain language, too. Daryl describes it as turning business processes into software processes, with the designer starting from people and their actual tasks before moving toward technology. That makes a career change feel less like a hard reset. Someone with accounting knowledge, for example, may already understand the work behind accounting or fintech software in a way a new designer would have to learn. Observation is the transferable skill that keeps coming up. Daryl talks about sitting with stakeholders, shadowing customers, taking notes, and using methods like cognitive walkthroughs and contextual inquiry to see what people actually do. Design is not just taste. It is the work of mapping human routines into screens, features, and flows that make those routines faster, clearer, or easier to trust. The confidence piece comes later, and it is nicely grounded. Daryl does not frame confidence as something you simply announce about yourself. It grows when other people validate the work and when the work keeps pulling you back toward real users. That feels like the coaching center of the episode. If you are trying to launch or relaunch into design, the point is not to erase your past. It is to notice the useful pattern inside it. The path stays a little messy, which is part of the appeal. Daryl keeps bringing it back to practice, people, principles, and the possibility that your old domain knowledge might become part of your design edge.

As heard by us

A grounded path from mixed interests to a design career.

This career-change story follows comic books, sketchbooks, early computer science, and the first internet era into a single practical path. Daryl Davis is strongest when he turns that personal history into a simple point about UI UX: begin with how people actually work, then…

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If you want a grounded path from art obsession to UX design, press play.

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