Website Design Blog. Evoart

Talent is one thing, but In the design industry you can’t just rely on your natural ability. Its important that you take the time and effort to further your abilities. After all the industry is moving at a startling pace. We’ve all got our weaknesses. Mention Flash to me, and you’ll find me cowering under the nearest desk. Last week I realised I needed to do something about my phobia, so here I am sharing my thoughts with you.

In this article we’ll explore a few simple ways in which you can further you design abilities, all by taking 30 minutes out of your working day. This process should be on going as its not something that can be achieved over night, but rather something you’ll have to be prepared to work at.

1. Follow a couple of tutorials each week

Following tutorials is a great way to learn and discover new ways of doing things. If you, like myself, have a particularly weak area of your design arsenal, try and set yourself an easily achievable goal. Remember to make your goal just that — easy. Its no good setting yourself a really tough goal, you’ll just get demoralised when you don’t meet it. Set aside 30 minutes when you get home from work and follow one single tutorial each night for two weeks. Im prepared to guarentee that you’ll begin to improve and feel more confident within that area of weakness within the period of a single week.

Some places to start…

• Good-Tutorials
• Psdtuts
• Pixel2Life

2. Collect design inspiration

My old boss use to do this when he was at university. Get yourself a folder, a box, or even better several shoe boxes, and use them to store leaflets, flyers, magazine ads, posters, business cards — absolutely anything that might give you an idea for a concept. Its amazing how an A5 advert sent through the post with your mobile phone bill might inspire you to create the next web design masterpiece. Just because you’re a web designer doesn’t mean you shouldn’t consume design thats offline and then transfer that into your work online.

3. Visit online (and maybe offline) design galleries

If you’re a designer you should enjoying parousing other designers work. Thats a given. Each day take some time to visit each of your favourite design galleries and feast your eyes on the gorgeous designs. Instead of just aimlessly staring at the array of colours, try and analyse the design in your head. Think about why it works, how they created that awesome effect in Photoshop, why they positioned the ‘call to actions’ where they did, and other such elements that go towards creating a completed website.

My personal favourites…

• CSS Remix
• Webcreme
• Best Web Gallery

4. Collaborate with other designers

This one is tricky, but if you’ve got the option of several friends in the business who are readily available and willing, try collaborating with them on a fun project. Working with other designers will open you up to all sorts of avenues for improvement. You might find a new way of creating an effect in Photoshop, or something new that you can achieve with CSS. Its all these small discoveries that go towards providing you with fundamental skills that can further your career.

5. Isolate problem areas and address them!

The most important of all these tips has got to be the realisation that you need to work on a particular area of your skillset. Everyone has weaker areas so don’t see it as a bad thing. After all, you can’t be a guru in every single aspect of web design. I think its far better to have a superb knowledge of CSS and intermediate knowledge of PHP, ASP, and AJAX, for arguments sake, than to be awesome at CSS, but not know anything about any other languages. I hope I managed to get my point across there!

Closing thoughts…

I hope that these tips have been helpful to you and got you thinking that perhaps you might need to revisit a few areas of your skillset, or even learn a completely new one at that. Perhaps you’ve got a tried and tested way of continually improving yourself as a designer? If so, share it with us in the comments below. 30 minutes isn’t much time to take out of your day, so sit down and start furthering your abilities as a design again today. You ‘re never to good (or old) to stop learning!