In this article you’ll learn what it takes to become a better designer.
Designers don’t need to be excellent artists, because design and art are two very different and contrasting subjects. However, it helps to have artistic knowledge when designing a product.
Design happens on the logical part of the brain, while art happens on the emotional side. It's crucial to understand that to become a better designer, the skills you need are not only artistic but rather analitical and problem solving skills.
What is Design Thinking?
One of the most important skill that every designer should develop is the Design Thinking. Whch in my opinion is just a fancy name to say: don't cheat and do the work.
This is the way you're supposed to approach a project. This method has 5 stages and this is how it works:
- Empathize: First thing is to analize and mimic the user/costumer and try to step in their shoes, get to know how they feel. You are becoming the user at this point, thinking how they think, sharing the same values, and understanding their behavior while using the product.
- Define: Once you became the user, you can learn about the pain points and challenges they have while using the product. Now, you begin defining those problems to address them the best you can, creating bullet point lists or a plan to help you structure the project goals and learn how to prioritize them. You do this so that you know what problems you're trying to solve about the product to enhance the user contentment.
- Ideate: Now that you know what problems you actually have to solve, it's time to come up with solutions. You reasearch stuff up, take notes, brainstorm ideas and create concept solutions that meet the user needs and the product he uses.
- Prototype: Make mockups, storyboards, anything to bring life to your ideas to show how they can be great solutions. You can use this as an advantage to seek new ideas too, but be careful because you can always keep improving and refining, but time won't stop and you'll only know new problems when you test it.
- Test: What’s working? What’s not? Role play with it and understand possible critical problems that weren't properly adressed and iterate. And just in case you're wondering the answer is yes, this step starts the whole process again.
It is a cycle and whether you're working on a digital or physical product, there's always room for improvement. But that’s what design really is: finding problems to fix them with better solutions, to create great products to offer the world.
So, how do you become better at desinging? You get better at pinpoint issues and come up with radical solutions.
Design vs. Art
This is the most controversial subject around the world, because some say that designing is just doodling and making pretty things with the computer, but that can only be so far from the concept of design…and art itself as a matter of fact.
Design is...
Design is a methodology, it’s the process of solving problems. It's synonym of project. So, it has to function and serve a purpose, otherwise it’s not much of a solution, right? Designers employ a data-driven process to measure goals and keep their creations - or designs (synonym) - accountable.
Art is...
On the other hand, art is made to evoke emotions, it's a communication vehicle and can't be measured because it doesn’t need to function. It is a form of expression. And it's probably the original form of communication between humans (aside noise making of course).
One thing that keeps them connected and is probably why they are source of cofusion is the creativity.
There are studies showing that the left part of the human brain it’s connected to reason and the right part it’s connected to emotions.
With that being said, and in my opinion, even though they’re so opposite, they’re both needed when designing something. And if you look at it from a prespective of life handling situation, we tend to balance these two out constantly.
Since they have both have other sub categories, I think if you can work with both, you’ll be able to bring the most value out of any product you design. And the more we develop digital tools, the more we match these two fields.
Types of Art in Design
- Architeture
- Literature
- Painting
- Sculpting
- Performing
- Music
- Film
Types of Design in Art
- Graphic Design
- Motion Design
- Animation Design
- Copywriting
- Web Design
- App Design
- Fashion Design
- Industrial Product Design
- UI/UX Design
Done Beats Perfection. Every. Single. Time!
To sum up, once you start developing your designer mindset, you can create anything you want from whatever you have, wherever you are. You were born to be creative, not a machine. Creativity can’t be replaced, but robots can.
The more you make stuff, the better designer you become.
With this comes a lot of frustration and muddy waters on the way, but it’s important that you keep being persistent and teach yourself to enjoy being criticized. Designers best friend name is Feedback.
Author Comments
We humans might not be as complicated as we tell ourselves.
Think about it:
As logical beings, we create stuff out of thin air to help us achieve the goal we set - that's design.
As emotional beings, we customize the stuff we create to also look good while aiding us on our objective - that's art.
So, in my reality, to be a better designer, we must learn more about logical thinking.