What Young Designers Need to Hear

Being young is this industry is daunting, you are surrounded by people who know so much, it’s amazing! But it’s also quite scary when you’re first starting out. When I first started I tried to read every book, watch every youtube video and random podcasts which helped for sure, I’ve read some books which helped me out tons, but nothing is worth more than talking to people, both creative experts and not alike.

A word of warning, listen to these people, they will have some great insight to your work that you may have never saw, but do things your way. A process that works for someone else might not work for you and vice versa, simply down to even how you lay out your artboards. Your creative journey is yours to carve out, take peoples advice, but make it your own.

Bearing that in mind, here are some things I wish I knew when I started out, hopefully these may provide some insight but again, this journey is your own to create, be advised at your own caution.

Designing for function

Designing when in school and college is all about appearance, and rightly so! Designing is obviously a creative subject, but it is also one that can serve a huge function to its viewers. Designing for services breaks down content making it easier for a viewer to read, adding a hierarchal format. When designing for any medium, think about your audience and the user experience, something may look cool but parts do need to serve a purpose. Just because of this though doesn’t mean you can’t get creative, take something boring and make it interesting for the viewer to look through.

Take inspiration from all sources

Take as much inspiration in as you can, some of my best work has come from the most random sources like local bubble tea shop menus. Its always good to expand the horizons of your inspiration beyond your usual taste, designing for a leaflet, take inspiration from the layout of The Economist, it may seem boring and basic but it might just be what you need. Expand your knowledge to sources of inspiration that have a different type of creativity than usual, if you read the same magazines and go to the same instagram pages for inspiration, your ideas will be repetitive and like everyone else’s. The more unusual your source, the more you reach out of the ordinary for inspiration, the more interesting your work will become.

Don’t give options, give solutions

Artists, especially when starting out, try to come up with as many options as possible for a client, trying to please as much as possible. Of course you should want to please your client, however, think strategically about the options you give to a client, your work should be a solution to a problem the client is facing. Design is 80% problem solving.

SKETCH!

When we work digitally, we can get caught up in moving stuff around, wasting time and coming up with tons and tons of variations. It’s a popular way to do things, I have done it a lot. Limit your time ,with initial ideas have a time limit for yourself, 30 minutes, a hour or even two, but no more. Limit yourself to a pen and paper, it makes the design process a lot quicker. We can’t faff about, we can only just get the ideas out of our head quickly. Mistake? it doesn’t matter, move on and try another go. Failure isn’t as big a deal as we make it out to be, if something goes wrong then it’s okay. Get these variations out the way now, go back to the client or colleagues and workshop what you have. There will be a spark there that you can go deeper in to after that first session.

Don’t just learn, teach!

The best way to learn is to teach, hands down. It gives you a new perspective on practises, it shows you how to streamline your processes that you thought were perfect before. It helps you develop how to speak and be more confident in your on work. It makes you break your work apart completely, analysing all of it and relaying that information in a way people can easily understand and learn themselves.

Doing this makes you really think about your work from the perspective of a beginner, how do you wish you learnt this? Is there a way to make this better and simpler? All this makes you a better designer for it, a simpler and more efficient process is key to becoming a better and more confident designer.

Develop your portfolio

A portfolio is probably the hardest thing you’ll ever have to create, it’s a personal brand and it’s a never ending project. Your portfolio should tell a story, take a viewer on a journey. It needs to be organised, clear and stream lines. Update and revise your portfolio constantly, make it punchy, reel people in. Your portfolio is a reflection of you, so do it your way.

If you’re going to have a web portfolio there are a few things to keep in mind. Create a site map before you even start, plan the journey you want a user to take and think about their user experience. It should take just 3 clicks to get a user where they need to be, so keep that in mind.

another thing I see a lot in creative projects is a lack of context, there are so many beautiful pieces of work but there’s no overview of the client or project, the biggest question is WHY? That should be a constant reminder, design is problem solving in a creative way, images may not always show how you’ve solved a problem for a client. A one liner of how you developed a project will be amazing, don’t make these pieces of content too long, often times hiring managers will skim through work and not read through massive paragraphs of text.

Ignore the trends

When creating something, especially for a client, we want our brands and creations to be timeless, and while trends can be good, modern and bold, they are also fast. The issue with trends is they move so quickly, by the time you’ve created something a trend could have moved on easily or can go wrong. Chasing trends leads to constant redesigns of work and when it comes to brands it means losing that brand consistency that is so important. Find a way to evolve a project or brand that doesn’t follow a trend, but develops and progresses in a way that suits what you’re working one.

Break the rules

Rules are meant to be broken, to some extent. Obviously there are processes and practices that can help you with your design work, and when your’e first starting out especially, it is so useful. But rules are meant to be broken, creativity knows no bounds, it affects us all, it touches all our our lives daily. Surprise yourself, the client ad the audience. Take the Economist for example, bunch of financial professionals? Surprise them, make them jump, make them inspired. Obviously this isn’t always appropriate, but when creativity calls, answer it.