Powerful Techniques to Supercharge Your Visual Design Skills 🛠

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From our latest episode on “Thinking Faster & Smarter as a UX Designer”, one of the most powerful ideas was to incorporate some simple behaviors in our daily life that can help us improve our Visual Design skills without much technical effort.

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It’s true, we all tend to judge a book by its cover. Which is primarily why we are biased towards things that are more attractive.

Rather than falling prey to this cognitive bias, we can instead understand how it works and use it to our own career growth.

There are so many mental models (aka ways to think & observe) that can play a huge role in making you a better visual designer. Initially, we can practice streaks like the ‘100 Day UI Challenge’ to fine tune our design muscles, but to truly make design a part of our lives, we’ve got to do more than that. We must allocate a chunk of our day to develop the ability to recognise what is the reason why we like something.

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One very useful practice we can include in our routine is to begin observing the layers that build something. So, whatever we consume, whether it is a movie, podcast, app or packaged food, we should try to analyse why we are drawn towards it.

Ask yourself questions like — Why did I choose this over the others? Why is this movie poster/ product shape/ book cover grabbing my attention?

These simple questions will help you get insights from different kinds of fields, going way beyond just design. Eventually, you’ll end up with dots of information from all kinds of subjects. In my case, I had built a massive repository of insights from spirituality, literature, entertainment and product packaging. This repository made sure that I always had fresh ideas.

Truth be told, we all have had a very interesting life. Whatever our unique experiences may be, they have the potential to come together in a very special ways.

We may not see it now, but life teaches us everything we really need to know for our upcoming days. The Universe knows how to prepare us.

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Connecting these dots of information would allow you to build a web of consciousness. The more dots you have, the bigger your web.

If you are consistent with learning and ‘dot formation’, there will be a time when your web of consciousness would be covering a wide range of perspectives and techniques. When someone throws a problem at you, it would most likely get caught into your web of consciousness. If not completely, at least it would hit a part of it.

At that point, you would instantly know how to take the next steps.

I believe that this ability is one of the most valued abilities problem solvers have. The ability to expand their consciousness, recognise the nature of the problem at hand and then knowing exactly what to do next.

The above article is inspired from Ansh Mehra’s ‘Foundations for UX Design Series’ on YouTube. He has compiled some of the most key lessons he’s learnt so far as a self-taught UX Designer, hoping it will help every designer who begins after him.

Apart from YouTube, he discusses Design, Life and the Beyond on his Podcast called Take it Easy on Spotify. You can check out his work on www.anshmehra.com.