A few non-tech things to become a successful web designer

While mentoring a young designer at my company, I felt it’s not just design techniques and technologies that a person must master in order to be a successful designer. A few hundred resumes that I have seen this year while recruiting for a certain Denmark based e-commerce company, always have a standard set of skills and the core emphasis is on the number of design programs that a designer should know. But, does a working day of a designer involve just design tools and pushing pixels here and there? I work for a technology centric firm and to my team mates and executives tools don’t matter; they would even accept interface/layout design files made in Microsoft PowerPoint and still be happy.

So, here are a few things, tips/trick or attributes/qualities, that a designer must have to succeed, things that we usually overlook:

  1. Be an adventurer, keep on exploring things and continually experiment. If you are truly passionate about something then by default you’ll be curious about it.
  2. Imagination is vital, almost like oxygen. How else can you bring value to the design you make? But imagination must always be practical. Bring new ideas and trends to the table, present arguments that justify those ideas to convince your team mates or clients.
  3. Self assessment is very important, if you see your work from the eyes of another person, it may reveal very interesting facts about your person and profession.
  4. Designers must be able to communicate, language barriers, both text and speech must be eliminated.
  5. Awareness of global trends and social context is important to create an effective design; global trends specially affect online design ideas, or campaigns that are for global brands. Things would sound more appealing to your clients if they are based on market research and social trends.
  6. Don’t get bogged down by people who object unreasonably. Concentrate only on those issues that are vital to a project, and be open to ideas. Self-esteem is another vital ingredient.
  7. Attention to detail is the key, always look for minor details optimize for the target audience, not everyone has a high spec. computer like you do.
  8. In order for the golden formula of under promising and over delivering to work, you need to work on a limited number of projects preferably stick to just one, it maximizes the attention to detail and things start to fall into place.
  9. Keep a clean workspace. It would surely boost your concentration and creative juices would start to flow.
  10. Take unlimited number of small breaks if you have to. If you are having a creative block, step outside, engage into conversations or take a walk, look into directions that don’t seem like a road block.

So, basically more or less these few things are true for any creative profession, you can either be a regular pixel pusher or you can be a successful web designer. Which one are you?

Tags: , , , ,


This entry was posted on Friday, July 31st, 2009 at 3:12 pm and is filed under Do's And Don'ts. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

Comment