6 Effective Ways to Master the Skill of UI Design
If you are a UI designer or connect to the field somehow, you must know the worth of a skilled designer. Many fresh entrants in this field often have a quest to become the master of UI design. However, the easier it seems in conversation, is not in reality. It requires a vigorous and persistent effort to master the skill of effective UI designing.
Most of all, the difference between the design of a skilled v/s a nonskilled designer is usually evident from their work. Nevertheless, no one can become a skilled designer overnight. I would say again, it rather calls for rigorous and consistent practice.
Knowing the right way to do your task yet eliminates a lot of difficulties from your design career and can direct you to the right path in lesser time. I have gathered a few important and simple ways to master design skills. Yes, I assure you of a dramatic change in your design skills if you follow the below mentioned ways strictly and consistently for a couple of months. Here you go:
1. Develop Familiarity with design patterns:
You know the tools, you have the software! The next most important thing you need is an inspiration. Getting familiar with the UI/UX design patterns is a sound way. Learn what problems each design problem caters to. Design patterns comprise standard reference points, templates, and guides that a designer may possibly use to cater to specific design and development concerns while designing a website or mobile application. This especially saves you from creating a completely new move every time you try to solve a particular issue.
You can take help from popular design resources. Platforms like mobbin.design and UI.patterns provides designers with an inspirational collection of latest trends and captivating mobile design patterns from apps all around the world that reflect the best in design. With these platforms, you can easily solve common design problems and it also affects organic search results.
2. Step Up Your Design Standard:
Design influence is major. Get the right influence. Wherever you are in the world, you can connect to the best designers gathered on popular platforms like Behance, Dribbble, and Pinterest. Go and explore, and keep exploring to be updated with time.
Developing the right influence will help you get a keen eye for the right design understanding. A good designer always keeps a quest for creative inspirations and effective ideas not only from the design website and platform but also from their surroundings and nature.
Keep admiring the good design on a daily basis to stay inspired and become more productive in your job. What you need to do is studying carefully the designers you get inspired from — their way of using the background space, typography, color combinations, spacing, and placements. You can save a good design to create your favorites in design and take inspiration when you need them.
3. Learn from the Best:
This is a piece of expert advice that can elevate your design career to its fullest. Learning from the best teachers, seniors, tutorials, websites, courses, and guides is the best way to refine your talent in the best form. If you have experts around, learn from them.
What else you can do is copying from the best designers. Recreate the designs you admire the most. It will help improve your design skills beyond your current level.
It will require you to learn so many new things that definitely would require you to move outside your comfort zone. Eventually, you will be able to expand your design skills. Behance is a popular platform that you can follow to recreate some exceptional design efforts. Take care you do not publish the plagiarized work anywhere. It should solely be for the practice purpose. And, if you share with your friends, give the credits to the original design.
Moreover, do remember that every designer takes inspiration and there’s nothing bad in taking inspiration. Even, most of the new ideas are a combination of two old ones. If you are creative enough, you can blend two of your favorite ideas to innovate a new one.
4. Implement What You Learn:
The benefit of recreating the best designs is the good taste you get from them. Then onwards, you will be better able to understand the quality of an idea and design. Moreover, you will learn how to implement better techniques and ideas into your design.
If you are already employed in a software development company for UI/UX design, then apply your learning into your work. Otherwise, set a task for yourself and treat it as freelance work. Keep doing the same until you build a variety of quality designs for your portfolio.
Do remember not to be demotivated or discouraged from failures or criticism and keep your work going with persistence.
5. Do Practice:
The above paragraph says to implement your learning into your work and that’s not possible without a realistic practice routine. Set an hour for your practice on a consistent basis. Dedication, consistency, patience and will are some key determinants of the design game. Use them and rock.
To make your practice best. You can learn from various courses and tutorials available on the internet. CareerFoundry and interactiondesign.org is a well-known UI/UX learning platform that provides you with some excellent design wisdom and ideas.
You can also opt for certifications as it does provide a certificate at the end of the course. Whether that piece of paper benefits you or not in the future, but it does contribute to the completion of your course/learning. And what you learn will eventually benefit you through your expertise.
Sharing your work has multiple benefits. It grows your network, can get you a freelance task and a better job opportunity. But the major intent I want to share here is sharing let you learn through feedback. When you share your work with designer friends, design platforms and social media, you get a chance to improve your work with the advice of experts around you. Always be receptive to criticism and try to improve them in the next effort.
Designers are often noticed and discussed for the repetition of a single task for a lot of times. This probably is because they want the end result to be error-free or even a perfect one. Their quest for better to best can only be fulfilled with the motivational remarks from people around them and especially from the seniors in the field.
Similarly, when someone tells you something improvable in your design, don’t take it negatively. Constructive criticism can improve the quality of your work only if you do not get offended by it. Also, you should always ask good designers to evaluate your design and provide feedback on that.
Keep learning, practicing, and sharing to get to the heights of success in the field of UI design.