Interview questions about Graphic Designer

Designing Large Scale Distributed Systems has become the standard part of the software engineering interviews.

1. How do you go about explaining complex engineering designs to your clients?

It’s no surprise that engineering terms can be confusing to someone outside of the field. Many clients don’t know much about more complex engineering designs, so it’s essential that you find someone who’s personable and can break down complex ideas for others. “In my previous design engineering position, I was helping to create a blueprint. I was able to help the client understand a process of the design by relating it to a previous project that we worked on together.”

2. Design an API Rate Limiter (e.g. for Firebase or Github)?

You are expected to develop a Rate Limiter services that can:
• Limit the number of requests an entity can send to an API within a time window e.g., 15 requests per second.
• The rate limiting should work for a distributed setup, as the APIs are accessible through a cluster of servers.
• How would you handle throttling (soft and hard throttling etc.).

3. How do you incorporate feedback into your designs? What’s a time you received hard criticism for your work?

You want to make sure you’re selecting someone who can solve design problems, not create them. Great designers aren’t precious about their work, and mature designers appreciate and incorporate constructive feedback.

4. Design Facebook, Twitter or Instagram (a social media service with hundreds of millions of users)?

When designing a social medial service with hundreds of million (or billions of users), interviewers are interested in knowing how would you design the following components
• Efficient storage and search for posts or tweets.
• Newsfeed generation
• Social Graph (who befriends whom or who follows whom — specially when millions of users are following a celebrity)
A lot of times, interviewers spend the whole interview discussing the design of the newsfeed.

5. Walk me through your portfolio. Which pieces are you most proud of, and why?

Every designer should be prepared to showcase their best work. Make sure you ask them to explain the problem each piece was meant to solve and how they accomplished that.

6. How do you measure the success of your designs?

A good designer should always be looking for feedback and opportunities to iterate. They should care about metrics like conversion rates, click-throughs, and user feedback even if they aren’t measured by them.

7. Designing Quora or Reddit or Hacker News (a social network + message board service)?

Users of the services can post questions or share links. Other users can answer questions or comment on the shared links. The service should be able to:
• Records stats for each answer e.g. the total number of views, upvotes/downvotes, etc.
• Users should be able to follow other users or topics
• Their timeline will consist of top questions from all the users and topics they follow (similar to newsfeed generation).

8. Which Design Pattern is used to implement any complex method or object?

There are some cases where there will need to implement complex methods or objects such as where a method needs to be implemented with more than 6 or 7 arguments. In that case, the method is going to be complex and this result in poor quality of code. To avoid this problem, Builder Pattern can be used to implement an efficient way of handling and operating complex methods or objects. Builder Pattern will have a chain of methods and a build () method in order to be executed at the end of calling all the methods. This will construct a complex object easily by invoking in a chain method.

9. Which is your favourite piece in your portfolio and why?

A great answer to this question is to talk about the piece that achieved the best tangible outcomes for a client. It’s also equally valid to get excited about a piece that was particularly innovative or you think is just plain awesome. Just make sure you clearly articulate why it’s your favourite – and again – what problem you were trying to solve.

10. How do you meet tough deadlines? Tell me about a time you completed great work under pressure?

Good designers are thoughtful and thorough, but you also want to make sure they know how to prioritize and work well under time constraints.

11. As a design engineer, what design software do you prefer using?

The applicant’s answer may vary greatly depending on their previous job, industry experience and education. “I prefer to use AutoCAD and CATIA; however, I have eight years of experience using PTC Creo and Solid Edge. I enjoy learning new CAD software whenever I can.

12. You’re asked to design something but you get almost no direction or context. What do you do?

Unfortunately, receiving very little information when you start a design project is not uncommon. Focus your answer on how you’d get started with brainstorming, mock-ups or sketches (whatever is relevant to your process) and then use iteration and feedback from the client to help them uncover the design goals for the project as you proceed.

13. How do you work with collaborators like copywriters, developers and project managers? Tell me about the final hand-off process?

Great graphic designers are team players who ask questions and solicit feedback. A good candidate will feel comfortable collaborating with clients on a project. They should be able to recommend specific file types for review, source files, and deliverables to make the final hand off as smooth as possible.

14. What is the prototype Design Pattern?

The Prototype Design Pattern comes under the Creational Design Pattern which is used to clone the objects in the form of the prototypal instance. This can be implemented in C# programming language by declaring a base abstract class by using the clone() method.

15. What mood are you trying to convey?

For example, is it excitement, seriousness, fun or edgy? This might be something they don’t know and need your help to figure out!
Here’s nothing worse than feeling like you’re rambling, stumbling over your words or just flat out drawing a blank.

16. Describe how your creative process would differ under extreme time pressure?

Like most complex projects, design projects are ruled by the opposing forces of time versus quality. Less time equals less quality (or originality, innovation etc). This question is testing whether you understand the commercial realities of the deadline driven design world.

Preparing answers beforehand is a great way to help reduce your nerves and help you sound confident and professional.