How to be a better designer/developer

I would like to share my experiences, and I hope you get inspired.

Learn and create every day

Create every day anything, just anything be it as small as it can be, it will boost your confidence. If you are a web developer try using codepen.io to explore and create. Another great learning source is codeschool.com, you can learn a lot from it, about front end formations, color theory, design principles and of-course code(Recommended).

If you are a designer explore what people are doing on dribbble, and get your stuff published. Though you need an invite on dribbble to publish your content.

Alternatively you can use Behance.net, great community and support, people back you for good work. A lot of motivation there.

Always remember

If you’re not ashamed of yourself of how you were an year ago, you’re not growing.

Be social and get it out there

There is a lot of great people who are on twitter, use twitter, follow a designer or developer whose work you really like. Learn how they work, what tools they use, how they communicate and get things done.

If you do something, made something, do blog about it and use twitter to tag people who are from related field and ask them to review your work(they don’t always respond, but you spread the word none the less), use hashtags to spread your work as far as you can(don’t abuse hashtags, it will make you look amateur and will hamper your good will)

Read, Write and Follow

Read a lot of good stuff and write about what you have done or made. Best resource I have recently come across is medium.com. Being a designer I follow a lot of creative and experienced designers on Medium, I get to know a lot about their process, what they made, how they made it and solutions they came across.

People write a lot about products they came across which were not as user friendly as they thought they should be and what they did to solve it. It’s an amazing place for inspiration and motivation.

If you are a designer i would recommend you to read, Design of Everyday things by Don Norman, you can explore a lot of books from him as well.

In the end I would suggest you to set a goal, because without a goal you can’t score

All the best, I would be happy to connect with you, follow me on twitter or you can email me as well.