Design Replica: Practice makes perfection
Visual Design in Sketch
Creativity is part of our daily bread as designers. However, it’s good for us to remember that it doesn’t come out of nowhere because at the end, every style or design element is born of others that precede. Yes, I am referring to that beautiful and inspiring references or masterpieces that guide our art and design trends.
How do you think one designer turns into a great designer? It’s as easy as becoming different from others. But pitifully, my dearest reader, this can not be achieved without effort. With this premise in mind, I’m going to share with you a little –but significant– secret:
Making design replicas is the best way to practice and acquire knowledge to achieve your own creative perfection, your own uniqueness.
Don’t be fooled, copying isn’t that bad at the beginning
If you want to start improving your design skills, you should copy at first. Yeah, I know, I know… it may not look good, but as I said It’s the best way to practice using as reference artists or designers who have much more experience than you have.
Obviously, these copying exercises are for personal use and therefore you mustn’t post any replica of design using your name as if you were the true author. In that case you would really be considered a fool, so don’t push your luck mate!
Now, I’m going to introduce you one example that you can follow. I was given a UI design to practise and the objective was trying to accomplish a perfect clone with some alteration of these two screens.
This app lets people plan trips with friends and share a daily itinerary with activity and location details.
The challenge here is to create every element of visual design using Sketch and its tools. In fact, everything can be made up of basic shapes like squares or circles, but it takes time to modify them the way you want. Anyways, for complex icons there’s a trick, as you can use The noun project to import them. Don’t tell anybody ;)
Here’s the final result of my version. I changed the background images to another ones that were lighter so you could tell the difference. The balance is in perfect harmony and in addition, I stole some of my teammates photos to turn them into the users of the application… don’t tell them either.
In conclusion, this is the fastest way I know to achieve your dreams as a designer, since you learn a lot about other people’s work. And best of all, you learn to use a program for free while doing it!
