Improve Your Designer Skills by Stepping Outside Your Comfort Zone
Everyone knows that the best way to improve your skills as a designer is to step outside your comfort zone and try things that will challenge you.
Here are some specific techniques you can use to expand your design skill set.
Schedule and plan ahead
It’s nice to say you’re going to start on a fun side project “one day”. But unless you take the time to plan out exactly what you’re going to do and how you’re going to do it, it doesn’t count.
One of the biggest mistakes many designers make is that they don’t give the same serious consideration to their personal projects as they do to their client work. The sooner you adopt the mindset that exploring new creative avenues is the most important thing you can do as a designer, the faster your career will take off.
Personal work always matters more
Client work has two functions:
- To provide someone else with a solution to their problem (for a fee)
- To show new potential clients that you’re competent enough to handle their design problems
It’s a closed cycle, and while it does allow you to pay your bills, client work alone is not going to take you to the heights within the industry that you dream about.
It will be much easier to make time for side projects and exploration, if you remind yourself that that is literally your ticket to catching the attention of those elusive, high-end clients you’d really like to work for.
One skill at a time
It can be overwhelming at times to attempt to fill every single need that your clients have. Whether it’s a code, new logo or brand redesign, UX, or even photography or copywriting, clients seem to be looking more and more for a jack-of-all-trades when they hire a freelancer.
If you really want to have multiple specialties, there is a way to develop them without driving yourself nuts in the process. Simply take one single skill you want to learn and develop a project that deals specifically with that skill. Don’t add in anything else to your agenda. You want to focus and get really good at that one thing before moving on to something new. If you try to take on multiple skills at once, you’ll just end up confusing yourself even more, and nothing will get done.
Start with a sketch
Sketching out your ideas on paper (not in Photoshop or Illustrator) can help open up your imagination in ways you might not even expect. If you leap into Photoshop with every new side project, give sketching a try. When you put the tablet down and pick up a real pencil, the ideas flow much more easily and quickly. Complex design problems you could have been chewing over for days suddenly disappear.
Don’t get stuck
If you find that you’re just not seeing any improvement in your new skill area, no matter how much you practice, it may be time to take some drastic measures. For a skill you absolutely must learn to increase your appeal to clients, taking a class or getting a tutor is almost always worth the investment.
Alternatively, you can make friends with a talented person in that industry and ask them to critique your work. It may be that you’re just slightly off in your process. And once you correct your course, you’ll begin to see major results.
SOURCE: Hongkiat
