web-design

A Designers’ Five Challenges To Polish His Skills

Posted by David Watson on

Trying something new and building something of one’s own is challenging. If you feel your designing skills are drowning, push-start your mood and get your creative neurons working by side-stepping boredom and entering the world of Art.

A slice of bread is never enough to make a delectable sandwich. Likewise, the greater the know-how in deigning, the better the designer that grows in you. Your portfolio could be improved if you use conceptual designs; blogs are also strong players if you wish to share your experiences. Challenging is never off the calendar of a competent designer.

Being different does make a difference today. In fact, try your best to be as unique as you can be. Although a change is not always suggested and sometimes these can backfire on us, it is just a part of our growth, as designers and as humans. Experimenting on a client’s site must be avoided in any case unless you are purely confident about it.

What are the designer’s Five Challenges To Polish His Skills

1. Try to Build Something New

I personally think challenges that include building something afresh is cool. Playing with designs is again much helpful; try different layouts, build an interface, something that’s well accessible. I admire a three-column website and full-screen interactive background image positioned decently.

Here, you don’t have to worry much about browser compatibility or related issues. All you need to do is gather enough creativity and discover new CSS modules and other techniques.

 2. Copy a Complicated Layout

No, we aren’t exactly asking you to copy some random website. By “Copy”, we mean scrutinize their layouts, patterns and designs. Don’t look at the source code but build a similar layout from scratch. Identify each of the elements used and figure out how you can give the brightest of colors to your website. This step focuses on exercising your design skills in JS/HTML/CSS and not for a live site.

As you try to imitate other sites this way, feat must be a sure target. You can always appreciate and figure out how HTML or CSS elements in other retail sites are used. Discover, play and learn as you continue moving on. If you are interested in handling chunks of responsive images and text files, you need to copy a news site.

3. Design and/or Code a Site Using New Tools

Drop your favoritism for good. Try exploring different alternatives! Switch to Bootstrap if you’ve been using foundation. Try different pre-processors and different CMSs. Be used to different file managers and text editors. As a programmer if you are great at JS framework, that great, but try other options.

The bottom-line? It definitely is a challenge worth being given a chance. It wouldn’t take too long to absorb the operating principles of other tools. The key ingredient to this is to keep your workflow intact but it will expose you to an environment that thinks logically with potential ideas crawling in.

4. Try out a New Methodology

A new method implies the same principle as mentioned above: be different and adopt new pathways. For instance, if you are a graphics specialist, observe how others fill their mockups. Observe how different layers are organized, learn from these observations and implement them yourself. Atomic Design as a complete design methodology may pique your interest as well.

5. Follow a Tutorial (the Hard Way)

Resort to the old-school practice and follow tutorials which are reputed to have a wealth of information. The same rule applies here: Never copy and paste. Try out the example codes yourself, those of which are provided in exceptional tutorials with clear steps. Follow clear steps in Photoshop too. Every piece of the puzzle then fits right in!

Whilst you proceed, you’ll realize that the challenge here is not about creativity but it’s about understanding with a hint of endurance. Ultimately, Google is your tutor if you have any doubts.

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