At this year’s WebExpo Conference, Jan Řezáč delivered one of the most insightful and practical talks I’ve heard in a long time. His talk, titled “12 Core Design Skills,” focused not on tools or trends, but on the essential skills that make a designer truly effective. Instead of obsessing over Figma or pixel perfection, he urged us to zoom out and look at the broader responsibilities of a designer.
One of his most striking points was that Figma is not design, it’s documentation. This might sound surprising at first, especially since many of us use Figma daily. But his message was clear: design happens before the tool. Real design is about solving problems, not just arranging rectangles on a screen. Figma, like Corel Draw or Photoshop before it, is just one of many tools to express an idea, but it’s the thinking behind the idea that matters most.
Jan criticized the tendency to focus only on the last phase of the double diamond process, execution. By doing so, we ignore the equally important stages of discovery, definition, and ideation. This is where his list of 12 core skills came in, but rather than listing them all, I want to highlight the ones that stood out the most to me:
- Design Thinking: Jan called this “creative problem-solving.” He emphasized being intentional with whichever design process we choose. What matters is not the method itself, but how we use it to explore and solve problems.
- Business Thinking: Designers need to understand business goals. Learning to speak the language of strategy, money, and spreadsheets allows us to have better conversations with managers and stakeholders. Without this skill, good design ideas often fail to get implemented.
- Workshop Facilitation: This was a key point. While junior designers may come in with strong ideas and enthusiasm, experienced designers know how to guide a team through a process. Good facilitation involves tactical empathy, structure, and the ability to improve outcomes by leading people, not just projects.
- Customer Research: Jan talked about using both qualitative and quantitative methods: interviews, surveys, testing, analytics. The takeaway: good designers don’t just guess; they listen, observe, and test. Senior designers carry this mindset with them all the time, not just during research phases.
- Testing Business Ideas: A great reminder that ideas need to be tested early and often. Jan suggested testing 20–100 ideas per week. It sounds intense, but it shifts the mindset from perfection to learning.
Throughout the talk, Jan returned to one core message: the most important tool we have is our brain. Tools change. Trends come and go. But the ability to think critically, communicate clearly, and collaborate strategically is what defines a strong designer.
This talk encouraged me to step back from the screen and refocus on the bigger picture: problem-solving, strategy, and working with people. It was a refreshing and important reminder of what design is really about.
