5 tips for designing something new
In the last months, I’ve been working a lot and I’ve started to experiment with my artistic side as well, having to design and develop things I’ve never tried before. In order to recreate special scenes for virtual reality (for work) and very artistic renders for my personal page (purely recreational), I had to interface with different software such as Oculus Link, Blender, Illustrator, and Photoshop in a partially new way, thus forcing me to define a workflow suitable for this working environment rather unknown to me. They were not easy months, and I had to follow numerous tutorials and redo the same things dozens and dozens of times. So I want to share with you both a series of practices that I already applied in the past and that I learned these last months, which are valid for any type of design field.
5) Look for speed designs instead of tutorials
Often speed designs are considered useless for learning because they don’t explain in detail what happens (like hotkeys etc) and maybe the videos are sped up too much, but they hide a very important detail: whoever makes them wants to be fast and often is, and therefore knows the tricks of the trade inside out. Looking at a speed design you’ll get 1 fundamental piece of information:
- How to cheat.
Everyone cheats. Maybe you’ve spent hundreds of hours modeling your 3D meshes in Blender, or you’re burning out making your own icons in Figma/Illustrator. Wrong approach. Most of the things you’re going to use can probably be found on the internet for free. I’ve spent my whole life doing it all by myself, and let me tell you, the results didn’t satisfy me more than when I started reusing elements made by others.
A great example of how reusing content is extremely effective is Max Diamond. This great designer does draw from scratch some of the elements he uses, but if you follow his fantastic speed designs, you see how often he grabs and artistically elaborates premade images and vectors.
If you want to learn how to master that amazing surrealistic 80s style, give him a follow.
By “cheating”, you can also do something you wouldn’t actually consider when approaching some kind of design. I’ll give you an example: Pedro Correa, a great artist and illustrator, is famous for his vintage-looking digital artworks. how does he “cheat” to achieve such an amazing quality? He actually draws on paper. Not digitally. Then he scans the artwork and continues coloring digitally. This allows him to have maximum control over what he does.
Cheating means bypassing the limitations of the medium you’re using in order to achieve the best result possible. the process is irrelevant: the result is what counts. For example, I usually lost many hours trying to perfect the color tones of my 3D renders and looking for a way to incorporate some humans in the scenes: loss of time. Just bring the final raw render into Photoshop, edit colors and composite images. Better results, 10 times faster. Yeah sure it’s not entirely a 3D work, but who cares.
4) Find the conceptual building blocks first
When experimenting with something new, you need to understand how to set up raw building blocks.
For example, I love vaporwave and vintage sci-fi-looking art. I started looking at the recurring elements in those kinds of compositions, finding out that 99% of the designs you find online were made reusing the same concepts and elements: spheres, grids, eyes, doors, stairs, hands, chrome, and pink.
Once you know which elements are both enough and essential, you know what you’re going to need and also which software tools. Then, you also know what you can add to give your original touch to the design.
If you’re into UX, look for the websites and apps you like and start deciphering the code: which recurring elements are there? How do designers use them?
3) There is a tool for everything. EVERYTHING.
don’t waste your life doing something you think can be automated because that’s just how it is. Let’s take Figma. Do not make table rows by hand: there are components and auto-layout for that.
Before you start designing something, look for tools that can help you obtain what you want.
A common mistake I did many times is thinking that the only way to do something is by doing it by hand because you can’t find the right tool: often the most obvious things that you need aren’t premade or activated in the software, but someone has developed them for you. The greatest example of a fundamental but unactive tool in the original software is LoopTools in Blender. It contains extremely useful functions to edit faces, especially flattening based on view.
The correct use of tools leads us to the next fundamental tip.
2) Never never never do tiring and repetitive tasks in the first place.
Modeling 3D stairs, designing HTML tables, creating surrealist checkerboards, or other things. Never do them by hand. Use a tool, because of 4 major inconveniences:
- It’s boring
- It consumes a lot of time, also because it’s new for you
- It is always imprecise
- The fixing time is double the time you spent doing it
You probably think that you can be precise enough, but if at the end of the process you made a single point wrong, you’ll know and it will frustrate you. Even if it’s invisible for other people. You’ll know it. And you’ll get obsessed with it and you’ll redo everything again in an endless loop.
1) Some styles or kinds of designs are simply hard as hell.
Maybe you’re a fan of 60s psychedelic posters like me, or you love those E-Sports team logos and you want to start with them….only ending burning out. Those for example are pretty hard and require you to master different skills, especially freehand drawing, which is a skill on its own.
I’ve tried many different styles in these last years and found out that every style has its difficulties (for example, my style requires to communicate with, but some are pretty technical and can’t be mastered with talent only.
Even minimal web and app design can be extremely challenging: the fewer elements you have in a composition, the more you have to communicate with each element. That’s why most contemporary interfaces rely on elaborate animations: try removing motion from a 2022 website it will just suck. (That’s also one of the reasons why you probably hate your mockups: no animation.)
So if you find that your designs suck even after months of trying, it’s probably because you’ve chosen a field or style that requires a lot of skill and it’s normal that you suck. Try something easier.
Let’s recap:
- Discover how to cheat through speed designs
- Find out the essential conceptual elements of a design style
- Prepare the right software tools
- Use them for everything that needs repetition to avoid time loss
- If after a couple of months you still suck, change the style. At least temporarily.
