1. Get acquainted with design patterns
Great outcomes often start with clear goals, context and specific intent. Generally speaking, design patterns emerge as a mixture of visual choices, grid systems and interaction models that solve recurring UX problems across a number of interfaces and flows. Spend time with the best work you can find and analyze why things hang together to solve the problem elegantly.
2. Coach your eye for good design
Inspiration fuels craft. From posters to product design, train your eye to develop a grasp for good visual hierarchy, rhythm, spacing and balance. Collect strong references, recreate small elements for practice, and compare your results to the original to sharpen your instincts.
3. Learn by exploring trending designs
Platforms like Dribbble and Behance showcase fresh interface ideas, design systems, and micro-interactions. Deconstruct what works: typography scale, color usage, layout grids and navigation patterns. Save components you love to a personal library for future reference.
“The pre-eminent and quickest way to master a design is to view and emulate known standards of accomplished designers.”
Some of my personal preferences that help me to stay inspired on regular basis:
- UI motion— group of design admirers who share and debate the most interesting and special UI designs.
- Uplabs — pastors the best of design & development imagination, assets and giveaways. Every day!
- Dribbble — Popular places where many ingenious people : from individual designers, teams and companies from all over the world displaying their best creations.
- Behance — A platform to showcase & discover creative work and is a part of the Adobe family.
- Siteinspire — A showcase of the finest web and interactive design.
4. Execute what you’ve mastered
- Pick a small scope (one screen or flow) and define the user goal.
- Sketch variants quickly; commit to one and build it to completion.
- Test with a friend or teammate and iterate once based on feedback.
Set up your daily design regimen to devote and exercise at least a few minutes every single day as steadiness is important! You will not become a good designer promptly — it’s all about commitment, hard work, a lot of tolerance and practice — you need to keep mastering and working hard everyday as that’s the only way you can grow. Take the time to read
5. Practice makes a designer perfect!
Momentum compounds. Keep a lightweight cadence of study → recreate → apply → share. With consistent reps you’ll notice your taste and execution converging on higher quality results.
Replicating and rejuvenating others will give you that good taste, so you will get a better understanding and idea of what a good design looks like. Despite that, you need to know how to execute all of your research into real world projects! If you do not have any freelance/economic projects to work on at present — just start working on the idea! How easy is that? :) Do a lot of them! From this, you will be able to build your portfolio, so that’s another advantage of using this procedure.
