How To Become A Better Graphic Designer
There is this common and false notion that the true artists are naturally born with their talent, and all their success is merely a spontaneous expression of that talent. This is wrong on so many levels. First of all, a talent that is not nourished on a daily basis will undergo atrophy. Further, even the greatest talents require constant work, progressing and adjustments. It is far less important how good you were when you started being a graphic designer, but how much do you progress on a daily basis. Behind every significant and steady success lie endless hours of hard working, patience, and practicing. Here are some approaches, habits, and actions you should integrate into your routine to become a better graphic designer.
Learn, understand and know from the source
Yes, there are tons of quick ways to go through the basics of various designing applications and tons of tempting tutorials available online that guide you through the steps of learning something by heart, but that is quite fragile knowledge and skill. If you want to truly understand the job you’re doing and be able to apply your knowledge in various ways, take the time to learn the design theory. Read about techniques, new trends, approaches, common solutions and try to gain the knowledge and create “designer’s brain” before you focus on training your mere skills.
Train your sense of good design and improve your style
This is somewhat a mental training and a game, but it is essential for sharpening your taste, aesthetic levels and finally for shaping your designing style. Explore and analyze in details examples of truly good and experienced designing solutions, trying to figure out what makes them good or specific. Be careful not to copy someone else’s work or style, but merely to use great designers as your teachers and leaders. After all, you don’t want to be a lousy copy of someone’s work, but to establish your recognizable style.
Allow yourself to make mistakes
Unleash your creativity and original raw ideas of any kind of limitation. Create some place for yourself where you’ll try all the new ideas and techniques you want to try out and don’t be afraid of making mistakes or getting poor results. All of this is just a part of growing process and improving yourself as a designer.
Contrary to dominating trend of using safe, neutral and low-volume colors that was accepted for years so far, new trends are promoting bold, bright and loud color matchings placed on the neutral background. The idea is not to use flashy or cheap combinations, but to go with plane shape and clear, accented colors. This trend is particularly welcomed by some designers who prefer using minimalistic shapes and graphic solutions, because it allows them to express more freely while staying within their modest boundaries of few details.
Messy and crowded frontpage usually repels visitors. Make it minimalistic, simple and direct. Avoid extended explanations, descriptions, and dozens of elements scattered across relatively small space. Use icons, photos, and striking sentences to project your point and send a message. So-called “calls for action” should be presented, but if it includes a significant amount of plain text and content, make sure to divide it into paragraphs and make it easy to read. Do not design a homepage that will require effort from a visitor to read it.
Two aspects of a modern world dictate some rules in web designing. First, information flows within seconds nowadays, and you have to catch readers attention at first glance if you want them to stick to your webpage. Second, displaying technology is becoming more and more advanced, and the designers have to keep up with it. So, keep your content organized and make a smart strategy about the intentional scattering of elements that will catch readers attention. Use typography tricks and colors matching to make encaptivating scenography at your web pages.
Compared to Adobe Illustrator, Inkscape is quite a solid replacement. This powerful and completely free to download application integrates myriad of advanced tools, effects, and complex operations required for creating and editing vector graphics. This free vector editing software is available for Windows, Mac, and Linux and its major format is Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG).sdfvds