As a designer you have to constantly work on your design skills. This is the only way to stay relevant. Improving your design skills will also help you attract new clients, or employers, and create new work opportunities. These 5 tips will help you with it. Learn them, use them, improve your design skills and become a better designer.

17 Tips to Improve Your Design Skills and Become a Better Designer Part 1.

17 Tips to Improve Your Design Skills and Become a Better Designer Part 3.

Learn about something different

There are two general ways to improve your design skills. One is by getting better at what you already know. You are already quite good in design. Now, getting better doesn’t require that much effort and time as you had to put in in the beginning. Thanks to this, this way is the easier, safer and more comfortable option to improve your design skills.

Unfortunately, there is always some ceiling, or limit, to how much you can get. Sooner or later, you will hit this ceiling. When this happens, any progress you can make by improving what you know will be very small. At worst, paradoxically, you will not make any progress at all. Your design skills will be so polished addition training will have no effect.

Cross the borders of your expertise

Fortunately, there is a way to overcome this plateau. The solution is by trying something different. You have to start experimenting with areas where you are not that good, or where you have no experience at all. Whatever your area of expertise is, take that risk and try something where you are a beginner.

For example, if you are very good at web design, start learning about print design. Or, take a look at user experience design. Another, more distant, option can be game design. These experiments may seem like a waste of your time. Yet, in the majority of cases, they really work.

When you step into different, less or more distant, area not only will you learn new knowledge. You will also be able to look at what you know from different perspective, from different angle. Thanks to this, you will be able to come up with more, and more innovative, ideas.

Another reason this works is that, at least in design, there are universal principles you can apply across different fields. This is why experimenting in related areas of your expertise is not a waste of time. Principles you learn in one area you can transfer into another.

#design development #webdesign #programming