This is a guide to teach yourself design.
Update: If you're serious about learning design and willing to commit every day, I'm running an project to help keep you motivated here: 100
Step 1. Learn to see
The biggest mistake is jumping into Photoshop too fast. Learning Photoshop does not make you a designer, just like buying paintbrushes doesnât make you an artist. Start with the foundation.
First, learn how to draw.
You donât have to sit in a room with a bunch of other artists trying to draw a naked woman.
You donât even have to get that good at drawing. Just learn some basics so you can be comfortable sketching with a pen.
You only have to do one thing to learn how to draw: get the book You Can Draw in 30 days and practice for half an hour every day for a month. Iâve looked at a lot of drawing books and this is one of the best.
Learn graphic design theory
Start with the book Picture This. Itâs a story book of Little Red Riding hood, but will teach you the foundations of graphic design at the same time.
Learn about color, typography, and designing with a grid.
If you can find a local class to teach the basics of graphic design, take it. Go through a few of these tutorials every day.
Learn some basics in user experience
There are a lot of books about user experience. Start with these two quick reads that will get you in the right mindset:
The Design of Everyday Things
Donât Make Me Think!
Learn how to write
Donât fill your mockups with placeholder text like Lorem Ipsum. Your job as a designer is not just to make pretty picturesâââyou must be a good communicator. Think through the entire experience, choosing every word carefully. Write for humans. Donât write in the academic tone you used to make yourself sound smart in school papers.
Read Made to Stick, one of my favorite books of all time. It will teach you how to suck in your readers.
Voice and Tone is a website full of great examples of how to talk to users.
Learn to kill your work
This is the hardest step in this whole guide.
Be prepared to kill everything you make. Be prepared to violently slaughter your precious design babies. The sooner you can embrace this, the better your work will become. When you realize your work isnât good enough, kill it. Start again.
Get another pair of eyes. Ask for feedback on your work from people who care about design. Donât know anyone? Make some designer friendsâââgo to designer meetups and events.
Get the opinion of people who donât care about design, too. Show your work to people who would be your users and ask them to try your website or app. Donât be afraid to ask strangersâââI once took advantage of a delayed flight by asking all the people in the airport terminal to try out an app I was designing. Most of them were bored and happy to help, and I got some great usability feedback.
Listen.
Really listen. Donât argue. If you ask someone for feedback, theyâre doing you a favor by giving you their time and attention. Donât repay the favor by arguing with them. Instead of arguing, thank them and ask questions. Decide later whether you want to incorporate their feedback.
Step 2. Learn how to use Photoshop and Illustrator
Hooray! Now youâve got a pretty solid foundation â both visual and UX. Youâre ready to learn Photoshop. Actually, I recommend starting with Illustrator first and then moving on to Photoshop after. Illustrator is what designers use to make logos and icons. InDesign is good for print design like flyers and business cards.
Learn Illustrator
There are a ton of books, online tutorials and in-person classes to learn Illustrator. Choose the style that works best for you. Here are the books I found especially helpful to learn the basics of Illustrator:
Adobe Illustrator Classroom in a Book â Itâs boring, but if you get through at least half of it, youâll know your way around Illustrator pretty well.
Vector Basic Training â This book teaches you how to make things in Illustrator that actually look good.
Now for the fun stuff! Follow these online tutorials and be impressed by what you can make. Here are two my favorites â a logo and a scenic landscape.
Learn Photoshop
There are a million and one tutorials out there. A lot of them are crap. Fortunately, there are sites with really high quality tutorials. PSDTuts by TutsPlus is one of them.
Hereâs a good photoshop tutorial to make an iPhone app.
Hereâs another good photoshop tutorial to create a website mockup.
Carve out an hour or two every day to go through some tutorials, and youâll be impressed by how quickly you progress.
Step 3. Learn some specialties
Do you want to design mobile apps? Websites? Infographics? Explore them all, and pick and choose the ones you enjoy to get better at them.
Learn Logo Design
Learn how to make a logo that doesnât suck: Logo Design Love
Youâll want to take it a step further than a logo though. Learn to create a consistent brand â from the website to the business cards. Check out this book, Designing Brand Identity.
Learn Mobile App Design
Start with this tutorial to get your feet wet on visual design for mobile apps.
Read this short but very comprehensive and well-thought out book on iPhone design: Tapworthy. It will teach you how to make an app that not only looks good but is easy to use.
Geek out on the apps on your phone. Critique them. What works and what doesnât?
Learn Web Design
Read Donât Make Me Think to learn how to make a website that people find easy to use and navigate.
Read The Principles of Beautiful Web Design if you want help making a website look good.
Make a list of the websites you think are beautifully designed. Note what they have in common. Some great examples are on SiteInspire.
Now for the hairy question of whether you need to know HTML/CSS as a designer: It depends on the job. Knowing it will definitely give you an edge in the job market. Even if you donât want to be a web developer, it helps to know some basics. That way you know what is possible and what isnât.
There are so many great resources to learn HTML and CSS:
My favorite free one is Web Design Tuts.
My favorite paid one (pretty affordable at $25/month) is Treehouse. If youâre starting from the beginning and want someone to explain things clearly and comprehensively, splurge for Treehouse tutorials.
Step 4. Build your portfolio
You donât need to go to a fancy design school to get a job as a designer. But you do need a solid portfolio.
How do you build a portfolio if youâre just starting out for the first time? The good news is you donât need to work on real projects with real clients to build a portfolio. Make up your own side projects. Here are a few ideas:
Design silly ideas for t-shirts.
Find poorly designed websites and redesign them.
Got an idea for an iPhone app? Mock it up.
Join a team at Startup Weekend and be a designer on a weekend project.
Enter a 99 designs contest to practice designing to a brief.
Do the graphic design exercises in the Creative Workshop book.
Find a local nonprofit and offer to design for free.
Resist the temptation to include every single thing youâve ever designed in your portfolio. This is a place for your strongest work only.
Steal, steal, steal at first. Donât worry about being original â that will come later, once you are more comfortable with your craft. When you learn a musical instrument, you learn how to play other peopleâs songs before composing your own. Same goes for design. Steal like an artist.
Go to Dribbble for inspiration on some of the best designers. Check out pttrns for iOS inspiration, and siteinspire for website inspiration.
Step 5: Get a job as a designer
When I first started learning design, I went to a job search workshop for designers. I walked into a room full of designers who had much more experience than I did â 5, 10, 15 years experience. All of them were looking for jobs. That was intimidating. There I was, trying to teach myself design, knowing I was competing with these experienced designers.
And yet less than a year later, I got a design job. There was one key difference between me and many of the other designers that gave me an edge: I knew how to work with developers.
The biggest factor to boost your employability is to be able to work with developers. Learn some interaction design. Learn some basic HTML and CSS. Designers in the tech industry (interaction designers, web designers, app designers) are in extremely high demand and are paid well. Thatâs where the jobs are right now.
If you donât have any experience working with developers, get some. Go to Startup Weekend, go to hackathons, or find a developer through a project collaboration site.
Make a personal website and make your portfolio the centerpiece.
Go out and make serendipity happen â tell everyone you know that youâre looking for a job as a designer. You never know who might know someone.
Research companies and agencies you might be interested in. Look on LinkedIn for 2nd and 3rd degree connections to people who work at those companies and ask for intros. The best way to get a job is through a connection. If you donât have a connection, thereâs still a lot you can do to give yourself an edge.
Once youâve got the job, keep learning
Iâve been at Exec for a year now and have learned a ton on the job. I seek out designers who are much more talented than I am, and learn from them. I find design classes (good online ones are Skillshare, General Assembly, Treehouse, and TutsPlus). I work on side projects. I geek out at the design section of bookstores. There is still so much to learn and to improve on.
Keep your skills sharp, and always keep learning.
Questions? Say hi at @karenxcheng. If you decide to start learning design and want to seriously commit to practicing everyday, drop me a line at karen (at) danceinayear (dot) com. Iâm running an experiment to help keep you motivated.
âNobody tells this to people who are beginners, I wish someone told me. All of us who do creative work, we get into it because we have good taste. But there is this gap. For the first couple years you make stuff, itâs just not that good. Itâs trying to be good, it has potential, but itâs not. But your taste, the thing that got you into the game, is still killer. And your taste is why your work disappoints you. A lot of people never get past this phase, they quit. Most people I know who do interesting, creative work went through years of this. We know our work doesnât have this special thing that we want it to have. We all go through this. And if you are just starting out or you are still in this phase, you gotta know its normal and the most important thing you can do is do a lot of work. Itâs gonna take awhile. Itâs normal to take awhile. Youâve just gotta fight your way through.â â Ira Glass
This article was originally published on Karenâs blog.
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