Keeping sharp
What I do on a day to day to stay up-to-date in my craft.
For a job, I’m a UI/UX designer. Now you’d think that designing 9–5, five days a week would be ample time to practice my craft. But what I’ve found is all it does is keep me steady and complacent. It’s not developing my skills but simply repeating things I could already do. A project comes in, and in a short space of time it needs to be designed and sent out for build as soon as possible. Because of this, I have little time in my working week to learn, get overly creative and improve my personal skill set.
I noticed this early on — thankfully — and decided complacency isn’t for me, I’m here to grow, push boundaries and press on. Finding your passion isn’t to do with anyone else, it’s digging deep and finding what you enjoy and what you want to with the time you’ve got. Design influences all aspects of my life, below I’ll divulge my 8 main ways to stay sharp in my craft.
Personal projects.
I always ensure I have a personal project on the go, constantly. These projects can be anything.. I’ve made typefaces, brand identities, interactive instillations with universities, up cycling, pallet furniture, arts & crafts sessions — the key thing that they all have in common is they are creative.
Taking up new crafts.
I adore you people that share your craft, take out an evening each month to put on workshops and events for next to nothing — you people are wonderful. These sessions further my creative time and side projects, by learning new skills and techniques. Last year included: pottery lessons, life drawing, letterpress workshops, screen print sessions, paper making — in fact, almost anything I could get to after work or on a weekend. It keeps my creativity going allowing me to bring it into my design work and enhance the projects I’m working on with fresh ideas and skills. Obviously, some crafts such as pottery making have very little direct impact on my digital designs, but it does allow me to get creative in what I’m making, see design in a different light and explore different techniques that before I didn’t think were possible.
Studying up.
I love learning new things, knowledge is a blessing and with it, so many doors can be opened in your designs and in life. I challenged myself at the start of 2016 to learn 1 new thing a day — it didn’t need to be paradigm altering, just something new no matter how small. Most came from sites such as Medium and their morning emails offering new insights from other designers and people in my craft. TedTalks each morning whilst I’m getting ready for the day is another. In the latter half of the year I took a free online 10 week course based around physiological theory within UX design that gave insights that would have taken years to stumble upon myself. Books, books, books. I went on a reading spree — a bigger deal if you understand dyslexia. Again, there are pages of knowledge just waiting to be read so I took advantage. A few recommendations: Know your onions: Graphic Design (Drew De Soto) — some insight in this then became part of our design team process. The Design of Everyday Things (Don Norman) — anyone in UX needs to read this, her basically coined the term User Experience Design. Universal Principles of Design (William Lidwell, Kritina Holden, Jill Butler) — covers nearly all workable theories of design. Sketching User Experience (Bill Buxton) — Full of process based insights, included roles, tool sets and merging with other departments.
Talk to the cultural.
Design and Art galleries in most places are free, or at least parts of them are. I visited the other half in Leeds and whilst she was in a 2 hour lecture, I checked out the design and crafts centre — saw a new type of screen printing being done that I hadn’t known before, so then got in a conversation with the woman doing it — and from that she gave me a few links to videos of lectures/workshops she’s done.
Trends and Insights.
This is the most direct to my work. I think keeping up with the latest news in my field important as it allows me to stay on top of practices and theory. Every day there is a new tool, new approach, new style, new pattern, new device, new OS and so on. So I stay up to date to ensure the products I’m designing are current and utilise the most recent technologies available to me. I use sites such as TEDtalks, Medium, TechPost, Dezeen magazine, Design Week and Howdesign to get updates/news on trends and insights. Disclaimer, not all trends are right (please see “To kill a mocking burger” for more on that point..) but not knowing they exist is worse. Try this: once a week I check out Gizmodo’s “apps of the week” and download a few to see how they look and feel, find there UX flows/process and then try and pluck it to pieces to see where it could be improved. Some are on there because they have a crazy high download count, it doesn’t mean its a good app, but find what it is that is making those users download the app and gain some real user insight.
Get sh*t done.
I don’t know how you work, but quite often I’d start a drawing, icon set, blog post, and then just stop half way through because I moved onto something else. I think that can be quite damaging because I then didn’t want to go back and try again because I feel like “ah I couldn’t do it before so I wont do it again.” When I finish something , even if its crap, I at least get a drive to do it again, but better. And even after five attempts and its still a load of crap, I can chalk it down to experience and practice.
Help others.
At work I get asked now and then to jump into other peoples projects and help out, which is perfect, because 9 time out of 10 it will be to do something that I’m not doing currently. What I mean is it gives me a chance to do something else creative, help a colleague, and better my own skills. For instance, a pal at work had a deadline which needed some web screens being made up, but in that design there was a need for a demonstration of how the banner section behaves and animates. So I jumped into After Effects — something I hadn’t done since uni — and made a short animation video. I often get asked for type advice on either finding a typeface or advice on what type should be used — but again it gets my mind off my current project and into something else creative for 5 mins and strengthens that skill that little bit more.
My design role models.
I follow a few designers quite closely, for either their style, knowledge or because they simply make sense. My main three are:
Mike Monteiro (Co-founder & design director of Mule Design) — the swearing knowledge pool. Check out “Fuck you, pay me”, “let us now praise ordinary people” or “13 ways designers screw up client presentations” — real, powerful stuff.
Aaron Draplin (Founder of Draplin Design Co.) — Logo king. Side note: he created FIELD NOTES. Check out “the logo challenge” or “the art of the side hustle”
Jared Spool (Co-founder of Center Centre) — UX mastermind. Check out “Anatomy of a Decision”, “Is design metrically apposed?” or “How do we design designers?”
