Tips for developing and improving your visual skill set
The process of improving the aesthetics and your own visual skills comes with its own development path and a learning curve, and is extremely important for every designer.
A common expectation from a designer is to always think about functionality because design without function is unusable. What’s equally as important is that we as designers also constantly think about improving our visual skills and aesthetics, as they are very important parts of design and visual communication.
The human eye is drawn to aesthetics, it recognizes when something is beautiful and it has more trust in beautiful. This balance of trust between the aesthetics and functionality should be on even grounds — a functional product needs to aesthetically pleasing, just as the aesthetically pleasing product needs to perform well (consumers usually choose products according to their function or aesthetic, but in either case, a good product needs to satisfy both aspects).
In this text, I’ll go over a couple of tips that will help you improve your visual aesthetics, as well as your visual skill set.
1. Research & get inspired
I like to separate visual research into two categories — ad hoc research and continuous research. “Ad hoc” research is carried out in situations where we are limited by time (e.g. when working on a client project) and when we need to find inspiration within a short timeframe. When we’re in the process of developing an idea, we primarily want to explore similar existing concepts and see what others did to tackle the issue. One of the biggest drawbacks of ad hoc research is the amount of time we can spend on it as we’re usually very limited by deadlines, and that prevents us to really dig into the subject at hand.
That’s why it’s much more important to carry out “continuous research” on a daily basis. If we conduct good continuous research on a regular basis, improving our visual skill set becomes much easier because we can recall and get inspired by examples that already exist and that we’ve already seen. The better we explore different areas, the more familiar we are with different examples of high-quality work.
I truly believe that continuous research is something that every designer should do on a regular basis (ideally every day) — inspire yourself, explore different areas and fill out your visual database (I like to call it a visual and practical library). And really make sure to cover a variety of different aspects of design, from typography, illustration and UI, to web, print, interaction design etc.
2. Collect the ideas
By exploring and collecting ideas, we designers can upgrade our visual perception — when we save them into a physical place or a folder, we also remember them mentally, and this ends up being a great exercise that improves our visual aesthetic. You see, the more we look at and remember different work and ideas, the richer our mental visual library becomes. The richer our mental visual library, the quicker we can find the right solution for the project we’re working on. And all of this happens because we explore and surround ourselves with great ideas. The only thing we then need to do is to innovate, upgrade and improve upon them!
“Design, broadly speaking (fashion, type, graphic, industrial, gaming etc.) almost always starts with observation and looking at what’s out there.” — Marc Hemeon
There are a lot of platforms that can help you get inspired, find high-quality work and create your own boards filled with ideas. Some of the most popular are Tumblr, Pinterest, Behance and Dribbble, so use them to start collecting ideas!
3. Find your role models
When you are just starting out in a new area, you probably feel lost and you don’t know what to do or what your first step should be. One advice I always give new designers is to find a role or even a couple. Start by following them, exploring their work and analyzing how their work progressed during the course of their career. Social networks make all of that extremely easy — with just a couple of clicks you can explore the entire history of a person, see what and how they used to work and how they do it today. And if you’re really interested in learning more, don’t be afraid to contact them directly and ask them for advice. A lot of people will be happy to help you out — all you need to do is reach out.
To end this section, I just want to say again that it’s extremely important to follow great creatives who do great work if you want to improve your visual skill set. So find your role models, follow their work, follow them on social media to see what or who they follow to get inspired — do this and you’ll quickly get a ton of new knowledge and insights!
Here is my list:
Claudio Guglieri
Ben Mingo
Anton Repponen
Alexander Engzell
Bryan James
Bastien Allard
Brijan Powell
Mario Sestak
Adam Ho
Josh Warner
Nathan Riley
4. Invest your time in skill development
Observing and researching without a specific way to apply it — it just doesn’t work. That’s why I like to test out all new designers in the team by asking them to find examples of high-quality visual design. The goal here is to see how well can they conduct research and are they following the trends that are occurring within the industry. This gives me an overview of the designer’s current level of visual aesthetics and what I should do to focus them in the right direction.
This aspect of collecting ideas is needed to improve one’s visual perception — that’s one crucial element. The other element is the process of reproduction of high-quality design — that’s what improves one’s visual aesthetics. By reproducing high-quality work, we as designers actually reverse-engineer it and we can better understand how its author approached it and what went into its production. So, if you see work that’s visually interesting, try to reproduce it. After you do it once, do it again, but this time add your own personal touch. With time, this exercise will enable you to think faster and reach better solutions faster.
Another great exercise is developing concepts. I like it because it allows a designer to have an almost unlimited freedom to produce and design anything he or she thinks would visually best solve the issue at hand. You see, the whole point of creating concepts is to have designers create tasks for themselves. Something they should solve alone by creating a solution that best represents their current skill level. This is great for improving your skills, but it also has the added benefit of getting community feedback — you’ll receive it and you’ll get to learn so much from it.
To conclude
By sharing our ideas, we influence the development of other creatives in the field. We may even potentially influence the creation of trends in design. You see, we all subconsciously always reproduce something interesting we’ve seen in the past — by improving that idea and by adding to it our personal touch, we transform and upgrade it. That’s why it’s important for any designer to be involved and be a part of the whole community, and to use its work to influence the development of trends.
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Hope you will find this article useful, and if you need even more design inspiration you can follow my work on Dribbble and Twitter.
