#18 Peter Nowell (Sketch Master) - The freelance designer that stopped selling his time

The Hacking UI Podcast - with Sagi Shrieber & David Tintner

Episode #18: Peter Nowell Our guest today is a super talented designer with an entrepreneurial fire burning in his veins. We are pleased to present to you Peter Nowell, a designer based in San Francisco. Currently, Peter is splitting his time between doing amazing endeavors, design work for high end clients, and running Sketch Master, his scaling platform of professional courses for Sketch. His course was quickly considered one of the greatest resources for designers to learn Sketch and improve their skills.

Peter works with clients big and small, ranging from Apple to the Juice Shop, and absolutely revels in the high-level design vision and the execution of every detail in each of his projects. Living by his ideals of simplicity, honesty, and intentionality, Peter continues developing his design brand and do the things he really believes in.

This is the sixth episode of the second season of the Hacking UI podcast, 'Scaling a Side Project'. In this season we interview designers, developers, and creative entrepreneurs who built and scaled successful side projects that we admire.

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The Side Project Accelerator Registration for the second batch of the

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Key points from this episode:

• Learn why Peter get’s the most out of long blocks of time, focusing on one thing at a time instead of many things over short sections of time.
• Understand why batching is important for the creative process and why these long periods of time can unlock more potential.
• What does it mean to be a successful creative in this era of social media and constant distractions, and how to combat this?
• Learn why Peter’s best piece of advice is to be defensive with your time, and how simply saying “no” more often has helped him succeed.
• Peter finds spending his time on vastly different projects brings him the most excitement. Why is that, and how does he implement that with his work?
• Find out what first motivated Peter to design his courses for Sketch and how that has changed the design world.
• Learn Peter’s top tips for batching to work on your side project while working a full time job.
• What was the best advice that Peter had and how reflecting on each project to find out what role you want business.
• Find out how Peter gained his following, and how Medium helped his content launch to a greater level of acknowledgement.
• What pushed Peter to launch Sketch Master? Find out how the launch was done by Sketch themselves.
• Understand the importance of having others test your product pre-launch and how that feedback is critical for success.

Links from the show

• Peter’s website
• Sketch Master
• Peter’s Medium
• Link to An Event Apart
• Peter’s Twitter (@pnowelldesign)
• (15% off) Discount on course

Transcript If you'd like to read the full text of this episode, you can

download the transcript.

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About The Hacking UI Podcast The Hacking UI podcast is hosted by Sagi Shrieber and David Tintner, a designer and developer who are also both entrepreneurs, bloggers, productivity/time-hacking maniacs, and all around tech geeks.

We started this podcast off with the 'Scaling a Design Team series' where we spoke with design leaders from top notch companies like Facebook, Apple, InVision, and Intercom, to discuss team structures, responsibilities, and workflows.

A few months ago we quit our day jobs to work on our former side project, Hacking UI, full time. So we found it fitting that our second season of the podcast should touch on that subject. The second season is called 'Scaling a Side Project', and we'll interview creative entrepreneurs that we admire in order to get them to share their tips, experiences and secrets to success.