Five Quick Tips To Improve and Grow Your Design Skills
As designers, it’s so important to keep on developing our skill set. With the ever-changing digital landscape; new software, new technology, and new trends are always emerging, disappearing or evolving (eek!). It's a fast-paced industry and it's important for us to keep up. With this in mind, here are a few of our top tips on what we do to improve ourselves as designers.
Personal Projects
We always recommend having a personal project on the go. It gives you a chance to push the boundaries of design without the restriction of brand guidelines and, honestly, clients. You discover as a designer what you are capable of when there are no limitations. Push the limits, experiment, and learn new things.
Talk To Other Designers To Get Feedback
Putting your work out there can be a scary thing to do, but it can also be beneficial. Sometimes you can be too close to your project; there may be things that you may not have thought about or little details you might have missed! Taking criticism from other designers will help you grow and learn different ways to approach things.
Experiment With New Ideas
Experimenting is another vital part if you want to improve as a designer, rather than churning out the same design layouts over and over again, try and break out of these restraints and try something different. If you are stuck, look for some inspiration to guide you. you will find yourself discovering what works and what doesn’t.
Revisit Past Work
Once in a while we revisit some earlier work and redesign it, just for fun! This is a great way to see how you've grown as a designer, and it's always reassuring when the result is always a better, more refined version of what you had before!
Follow Design Blogs
It's great to follow blogs to keep you in the loop on what's happening in the design world. Here are three design blogs that we keep up to date with:
Creative Digest
This is an online resource for designers as well as creative professionals and digital entrepreneurs. Their blog covers topics from digital design to branding.
http://www.creativedigest.net/
Creative Bloq
Creative Bloq is great for inspiration and news from any creative discipline - ranging from 3D printing to UI Design, and everything else in between. As well as blogs they also offer a range of free resources to help improve your skills such as tutorials and free resources.
https://www.creativebloq.com
InVision
As the name suggests, this blog is run by InVision - the worlds leading design collaboration platform. Their blog also covers a wide range of topics and is entirely written by contributors and readers.
https://www.invisionapp.com/blog
How do you continue to develop your design skills?
