How to Improve Skills in Graphic Design

Graphic designers are well identified by their unique skills, creativity, ability to design visuals, and ability to communicate outcomes via marketing material. Graphic designers have skills such as coding, branding, typography, managing projects, and editing photos. There are projects on which designers work, such as design brochures, fliers, logos, commercials, and websites. The diagram below illustrates how a designer works and the expected results:

Reasons to practice graphic design skills

To have a competitive outcome as a designer, it is required that you update your skills, which can be paramount for the following reasons:

• A designer should be able to speed up the process of design.

• To get a promotion, a designer should have unique and additional skills as needed in any organization.

• Ability to design the requested task

• Build a creative portfolio as a designer

• Create engaging designs

Practicing graphic design skills

A graphic designer needs to practice the skills they have gained by following these steps:

Assess current design skills

To improve and update design skills, a designer should be familiar with the current skills to understand the basics of design. Be comfortable with skills such as how to use fonts, texts, and typography.

Create a list of skills to improve

After working on design projects, you should be familiar with skills that you need to improve to produce competitive results, such as the ability to learn design software and sketch ideas on paper to improve different tactics of designing. The method of skill improvement helps determine the progress and measures of how to handle projects.

Build a portfolio by volunteering design skills

Volunteer your design skills in non-governmental organizations, with coworkers, to help friends, participate in hackathons/boot camps to advance projects, and also beautify your design portfolio. Volunteering helps to create confidence on how to handle different types of projects and by doing so, your skills will improve.

Design skills practice

Set aside time to learn and experiment with the skills you have learned, this will help in sharpening skills that need improvement. Practice design fonts, typography, sizing, and branding to different formats to help with an easy transformation of ideas into reality.

Apart from sharpening basic design skills, trying out different design tools to deliver the output of the same projects helps diversify the skills to deploy to any available client in the market.

Ways to improve graphic design skills

There are different ways to help improve graphic design skills, which include:

Research to learn and understand the basics of graphic design

Learning the basics of graphic design helps you to be creative and have unique ideas using foundational rules which an employer or a project requires. The basic graphic designer principles to learn include color, text formatting, typography, graphic branding, space, hierarchy, alignment, balance, proximity, and repetition.
Understanding basic principles will help the designer have impact, clarity, and cohesiveness in delivering multiple projects.

Learning the art of design

Learning design aspects helps keep the best level of graphic design in the market in demand. Being active in learning basic principles and design arts helps sharpen design capabilities. Improving the depth of knowledge in design can be done through the following steps:

• Read magazines and books: Reading will help you understand effective ways to handle design problems and also familiarize you with shortcut tactics for creating a competitive task.

• Read blogs and articles: Keeping up to date with techniques, tools, and the latest styles designers are using globally will create a better outcome.

• Test different available design software and tools: Familiarizing yourself with different design software and tools builds the capacity to handle different tasks with different technological requirements such as in Canva, DesignStripe, and Pixelied. It helps to understand the capability of the tool, such as how to resize pictures and objects, remove backgrounds, and generate design templates.

Create different design versions of the project

To remain competitive and attractive to employers, a graphic designer should understand the different tools available and create alternate versions of designs to showcase creativity as part of creating a portfolio. Creating different versions of the design work helps to compare the work and choose the best out of the outputs, which can also be used for future reference.

Assess design feedback

Graphic designers should create more templates in which they will receive feedback on what set of skills and parts of the design to improve. Feedback helps the designer survive in the market and rectify mistakes made. Criticism and feedback help graphic designers realize the areas with errors and understand tactics to use to make the task more efficient and attractive to the end user.

Ability to collaborate

Active graphic designers should be able to work in a team and create visuals with other designers, which helps communicate design skills more confidently and with clarity. Interacting with teams helps the designer develop the ability to share ideas with clients and customers more effectively.

Create your own projects

Creating your own design projects as a part of a broader portfolio helps show the end user how effective and reliable your skills are in the marketplace. Apart from designing, the designer can write blogs and articles on common and advanced tactics used to handle projects.

Be a graphic perfectionist

To be a great designer, be unique and try to make the work as perfect as possible. This will help you to remain relevant and reliable in the marketplace.

Handle design problems that look scary

Handling projects that seem impossible will help you diversify your creativity on available scopes in the best way possible.

Study experts in the design arena

To be the best, learn from the best. Learning the design tactics used by other successful designers will play a vital role in designing and generating great visuals.

Understand and pick your specialty

Be specific on which design area you excel in and stick to it, this will help you understand your area of design with clarity.

Understand and trust your design instincts

When a design idea comes up, you can either sketch or draw it immediately. To make the best out of it, create a better visual by brainstorming all the ideas you have on the specific project.

Participate in design competitions

To remain the best in graphic design, participate in open competitions and collect feedback about your work. This will help to improve your skills and interaction drastically.

Apply for a design internship in a company

Apply for any open internship program which will help you learn how to communicate design branding and templating. An internship will also help to learn available tactics to create a better design.