How to Sharpen Your Graphic Design Skill — Being a graphic designer is not easy. A designer is required to have both soft and hard skills in graphic design before they are ready to dive into it. After that, the next step is to practice what you learn, because without practice, your skills will be useless.
A graphic designer needs to always hone their graphic design skills so that they get better and better. Designs will continuously evolve, so we, as graphic designers, should too.
Graphic designers need to be up to date with everything related to design. So this article will give some tips and tricks to sharpen your graphic design skill.
Check it out!
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Every designer has their own way to hone and develop their skill, depending on their own habit and comfort. There are also many general ways to improve it, such as following design trends, joining offline or online design courses, consistently practicing, and learning together with other designers.
Here are some tips and tricks to sharpen your graphic design skill:
Explore many sources of design inspiration, such as websites that talk about design, books, magazines, or, the easiest thing to do nowadays, follow designers’ social media. It helps you get used to getting trendy design information that can encourage you when designing.
You can start by learning and imitating others’ designs. Imitating others isn’t necessarily a bad thing to do, as long as we do that only to learn and improve our skills, not to commercialize or plagiarize them. Sometimes we are amazed at professional designers’ artwork. It makes sense, you know, and it also proves that you do have a good sense of design.
Spare and dedicate some time a day to learn and practice designing to improve your skills. It is not an easy process in the beginning and seems tiring too, especially if you are busy with other stuff. However, trust the process! Discipline, practice, and dedication will make your graphic design skills optimally honed.
Don’t be scared to try something new. We, more often than not, are interested in new trending styles; however, we sometimes give up trying them. It is rather impossible to be an expert right away unless you are a genius or gifted person, so you need to be patient in the process, which takes time and requires continuous practice. The more we practice, the more styles we can make and the more skills we can achieve.
Try using many software and design tools to explore features and new techniques. Each software has its own feel and comfort, so exploring it until you can find which one suits you the most will be good for you.
This may be something you really need to do to sharpen your design skills. Why? You will get many benefits when you join design communities. Communities usually share knowledge, information, tips, and stories about design you will not find in other places.
Rapid advancement in technology enables us to acquire various types of information and knowledge. Additionally, we can also freely enhance our design skills through online platforms.
Here are some free websites we can visit to hone our design abilities:
Coursera is one of the best e-learning platforms. Here, the mentors are credible and professionally recognized. You can improve your design skills, and you can also learn some new skills.
Coursera also gives a credible certificate to those who successfully finish the courses.
You know this website, don’t you? Well, Udemy is a very popular e-learning website among designers. It offers a free design class called Introduction to Graphic Design.
There is no doubt about its credibility, as Udemy provides you with deep knowledge of design. The material is also delivered with tutorial videos that make learning easier.
Pluralsight (then Digital Tutors) has been an e-learning platform since 2004. We can learn many design skills, such as design software application and editing skills, here.
This website provides progress monitoring through IRIS technology. So you can assess the extent of your design skills, thus making it easy for your learning process.
Class Central compiles all various online course materials’ providers that are monitored. This is a very complete online course, as it provides more than four hundred courses and three degree programs that are accessible online.
The purpose of Class Central is to enable people to learn online anytime and anywhere. This website is good for improving and sharpening your graphic design skills.
In order to improve your graphic design skill, you can indeed learn from design courses, books, or other materials. However, you can also do something a lot more fun, such as playing games.
Learning and studying can be exhausting, so we will let you know about these online gaming sites that you can use to learn and hone your design skills.
Learn what you play, and play what you learn. Here are some websites for you to use to do just that.
If you are looking for the most suitable color for your design, then this practice is for you. This game teaches you to practice your sensitivity to color matching with a variety of rules, such as hue, saturation, complementary, analogous, triadic, and tetradic. All are presented in color wheel format.
A reminder, though: if you are still unable to understand those terms, you will need to first learn about color theory from other websites, as those terms are very important.
This is a game for a pixel art master. There are many designers who use pixels as their design style. And this game will help you gain a better understanding of pixels.
Pixactly is an interactive game; you will need to draw a square according to the provided pixel dimension, and it will give you a score in each level of the game. You can only level up if your score is up to the standard, so pay attention and remember pixels’ width and height carefully.
Is it hard to use a pen tool for you? Your first time using it must not be a pleasant memory, is it?
Well, this game presents you with the way to use a pen tool in a fun and interesting way. You will no longer feel frustrated trying to form the shapes you want.
One of the most essential things in design is typography, as it provides aesthetic looks in your design. In this game, you will be taught how to choose the right fonts to make a harmonious combination.
Additionally, type connection explains a lot more, from the terminology to the history of fonts themselves.
Have you ever memorized hex color codes? Gear up, as this game will make you do that. Hex Invaders simulates colors with codes, and you have to destroy monsters that have certain hex codes. Isn’t that fun?
At first, you don’t think you have to memorize hex codes. Even so, recalling that many types of devices are being used nowadays, hex codes have become something more essential than they used to be. Different devices affect brightness and color contrast; thus, using hex codes will make your color more accurate.
Those above are some ways to hone and develop your graphic design skill. There are many ways to do it; you can learn alone, join a community, or you can even play games.
The main point is to never say enough about sharpening your skills, because the more, the better. This advanced technological era provides you with many ways to access information and gain knowledge easily.
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