How to become a Better Designer

A couple of the most common questions that a designer faces are how to become a better designer and how to improve their creativity skills. While it is quite easy to improve your design application skills, improving your creativity requires longer time and frequent improvements that increase your design skills step by step.

Before continuing reading this post did you already join our Twitter and subscribe to our RSS feed? If not, rush and join us now to receive updates of new posts and free resources.

The designer’s creativity and the ability to bring new ideas and design style, helps to judge his or her success in their work and career. Designers’ first task in every project, after getting the project information and requirements, is to get or formulate ideas and building the design or the animation workflow.

Designers from all fields are seeking self improvement in their abilities to create new, unique, and attractive ideas at a fast pace in order to meet project deadlines. Many designers will notice that searching new ideas can take more time then the idea implementation or the design tasks itself; this can and does affect the whole project’s workflow.

The purpose of this article will be to shed some light on some tips that have been proven to help designers in improving their creative skills and their ability to find fresh new ideas.

Let your eyes gain experience

Image by shutterstock

The human eye is the gateway to sending visual information to the brain. The human eye gains experience and sends it to the brain in order to learn and to improve the overall visual experience. However one of the important advices for designers is to gain experience through watching many different designs and styles; this helps your brain to record design ideas and use them to generate new unique ideas.

While your daily internet surfing allows you view websites and designs from every where, you can miss a lot of visual experiences because you are focused on looking for other content such as text, directions or services.

Gaining the visual experience requires long hours of continuous training; the best practice to improve your visual experience is through a good plan for visual experience. You can choose to view two or three different sites every day; but your visit to these sites will not the same as it could be when you are searching out specific information. When you view these sites, try judge the site’s usability, design, style, colors and other design principles that was previously discussed in the ‘Guideline for The Principles of Design’ article.

Build a library of ideas

Image by shutterstock

Since visual training is a continuous process that will last years, it is not uncommon that you might forget some of these ideas and experience. That is why it is a good idea to record and archive your resources for future reference.  For example, you can save the websites that provide design ideas and inspirations and every time you are looking for ideas or new inspirations you can go back to those sites and review them. Also, you can document your ideas and notes into a file to use as reference anytime you need too or before you start on a new project.

Learn required software

Image by shutterstock

The software you use in design will be your tool for creativity and it will be the platform where you turn your ideas from draft thoughts to final designs. However your deep understanding of the software will help you find the steps needed to visualize your ideas. When you learn new features and tools you can find the inspiration to create more visual effects and styles.

Some companies and firms hold training plans for their employees; however you can also put together a training plan for yourself in order to help yourself in getting more design tasks and gain more experience. Any training plan can be:

1-A Short-term learning plan that includes learning about new applications, updates, and read new tutorials that can teach you new tips and tricks that help you to create graphic effects. This plan can be on a daily basis; for example you can include in your daily schedule time set aside just for learning new tips and software updates.
2-A Long-term plan that includes learning new software and tools that you can use in your work and career. Learning new tools can take either a lot of time and effort or very little time and effort. However, you can add a plan for weekly training of this new software to help you gain new experiences and new software. tricks

In any long term career, applying a training plan is important for it will help you learn more and get more knowledge throughout the years.

Be Focused

Image by shutterstock

The Design industry is quite large and it includes various specialties and diverse fields; each of these fields has its own tools, specifications and focus. While learning about the different design tools and concepts is important in order to gain more clients from these fields.  It is best not to limit yourself to one specific field in the market. Meanwhile, focusing your efforts to learn about one specific field has its advantages as it allows you to become better and to excel in it.  Being field specific allows you to have more time to dedicate to learning and building your experience in it, instead of having to split your time between multiple fields of experience.

You can gain the several benefits by learning the basic design skills that are shared with nearly all of the different design fields such as Adobe Photoshop and Adobe Illustrator from one perspective, while focusing on one specific field in order to concentrate your training and experience in it.

Conclusion

Image by shutterstock

The creativity improvement process is all about having a good plan in place for learning more information and skills needed. Once you are able to put a good plan into motion and stick with it, you can improve your skills and experience faster then if you were working without a plan.

You can apply the above tips not just in the design field; for example, developers can implement the same concepts in order to gain more experience and ideas in their own specialized line of work.