7 things about visual design I didn’t learn in art school.
There’s no one way to get into graphic design. But the way I chose is rather common. Whether or not to attend university is always a tricky choice. I knew I would end up as a graphic designer, I just wasn’t sure how to get there.
When I finally decided to go to university, I chose to study Art and Media because it allowed me to combine traditional arts with modern media. I could mix user interfaces, experience design, and the basics of programming with photography, painting, and graphic design. A perfect pairing to my mind.
These days, I work as a Visual Designer at Brainly. A few months working there have already taught me much more than three years of study. That’s not to say I got nothing out of my education. I learned all the basics there: composition, hierarchy, form, color, typography, art history, etc. But have I learned in my six months in the Brainly Design team?
Design guidelines are your friends
Instructions from your stakeholders are your lighthouse on the raging seas, but a design system is your map and compass. Before I dug into the deeper design documentation of Brainly, I memorized as much as possible from the brand book. A good brand book contains not only brand colors, illustrations or logo usage but also the brand voice, strategy, values, and concrete examples — which will give you a fuller understanding of the company you are working with. Soon after my start at Brainly, our Design System was created — the single source of graphical truth for everyone. It’s a user-friendly place on the internet, where all Brainly’s employees look from time to time if they struggle with design questions.
Feedback is not your enemy
As a student, you learn how to present and defend your project in front of just one or two people. In the beginning, you commit so many mistakes that your teacher doesn’t even have time to explain them to you. But as your skills and knowledge grow, you start noticing them on your own. It all comes down to the effort you put into the progress of your design skills. But one day, you start noticing imperfections in your the work of your colleagues too — and you kept your thoughts in your head. As a student, I never had space to voice my critiques. There was never time for that.
In my current team (hi Pencils ✏️!), we have meetings twice a week (named Sharpener of course ;) ), where we discuss our ongoing projects. We are all involved in the feedback process. How to achieve it? We follow Brainly Design Principles, a set of high-level guidelines that keep our team sync up on what we consider good design.
Teamwork
Bless your team. Even if you have a library full of books, the best documentation, and access to all the guidelines and principles — talk to your buddies. They’ve already been where you are now. They started somewhere too. Maybe not in the same company, but they have knowledge. If you want to be a good designer you should know how to ask questions — go and practice on your team! Learn from them, listen to them. Communication skills are very important in our job. The first thing my manager said to me was, “Ask more questions”. Remember, if you work or support a product team, you are a team player. You will learn how to work with frontend, data, and mobile engineers.
Use symbols
First of all, make your life easier. When I was a student I used Adobe Illustrator and Photoshop to make wireframes, interfaces, and web designs. The truth is I used these two for almost every project I made. I wasn’t complaining, cause I wasn’t conscious about the existence of anything else. I got to know Axure, Adobe XD, and Sketch when I was completing my portfolio. It was a milestone for me. All those rulers, artboards, symbols, libraries in one place — magic!
Plan your work
Sound cliché? Deal with it. Do you remember the time when you had a whole semester to finish all school projects? Now you have two weeks. It’s called a sprint. And it’s awesome if you manage your time in a proper way. Some tasks are easy to estimate, others — not. But it’s ok if you have a patient manager and helpful colleagues. After a couple of weeks, you will know on your own how much time you need for every task, you will know how to plan your day and when to plan meetings, and you will still have time for lunches!
Everything is embedded in a context
Most of the school projects and tasks were real-life examples. But they were given to you without the bigger picture — you could rely on your imagination.
This is good to warm-up, or to practice. In real life, though, all the projects you work on are live. It doesn’t matter if you design an app, a web interface or a magazine — your users are real people, they have their habits, cultural background, and quirks. Your job is to observe user behaviors and facilitate contact with the product. Which brings us to the final point.
Research and user test matter
Realizing you’re designing for real people, you can start to hone in on them. Who are they, what are their needs, what drives them? First — research, at the beginning of any project is good to look for inspiration. You can start with pages like Pinterest, dribbble, or Behance, but then go and look for real-life examples. If you want to design new input — check how all the giants did it, go to social media pages, music, and video streaming platforms, check Material Design, marketplaces, e-commerces. Look there for patterns, examples, check all the use cases, states, placeholders, labels and analyze it. What will fit into your project, will you add some micro-interactions, will your input be dynamic or static? After every bit of research, you learn something new.
If you have your project ready — go and test it. It’s an ideal situation if you can test it on the living product and see how users behave with a new element. Last December we had a workshop with our Product Designer — and what I remember very clearly from that day is: ‘Testing one user is 100 percent better than testing none.’ Steve Krug
If you think seriously about the career in design, start your path in a design team! I’m a junior with a long way ahead of me, but working means learning. Don’t doubt yourself, go and learn design! 🚀
Kudos to best editor Shyama Johnson!
