Our team Pixsellz has been specializing in UI/UX kits for the past 10+ years, having achieved lots of success with our lead designer Komol Kuchkarov, we have decided to share our journey and talk about our experiences as designers. We wrote a short guide book in which we talk about all the success and problems we faced as designers and how to overcome these obstacles. This article is a short synopsis of our recent book — “for designers, by designers — a guide to planning a future in design” in which we guide beginner designers in their career and talk about the Do’s and Don’t in this field.
The book has been broken down into 11 main sections, each section will talk about the possibilities of what a beginner designer might face in their careers and how to prepare, overcome and avoid such mistakes and obstacles.
Practice makes perfect
Reading in-depth books, going through hours of online courses, and spending tons of money on bootcamps doesn’t get you the same experience as sitting home and practicing over and over again using your favorite tools, Sketch or Figma.
Copy with good intentions
Practice practice practice! Practice by taking someone else’s work and copy it one-on-one. Don’t add anything, don’t take out anything. Copy it as is, and do it many times over and over again with other artwork (don’t plagiarize and steal!)
Find a mentor
This is important, a good mentor will teach you all the ins-and-outs and all the “unwritten” rules of design. Find a kick-ass designer and follow their work, work with them for free if needed, read their tweets and blogs and apply their concepts in your work.
Conceptual Design
Copying others work can get boring after some time. Lookup some famous apps and re-do their design with no limitations, let your imagination run loose and come up with your version (concept) of that app or website.
Plan B
Save your work from day 1 even if you are a beginner in this field. Work on your personal portfolio, upload work on markets & platforms, get feedback from others and maybe try freelancing because time will come when you will want to do something different than your day job.
Don’t be afraid of change
When you get frustrated and lose motivation from working for the same boss and doing the same job over and over again, just change. Change your job, team, or even the environment around you. Change will re-open new opportunities and give you new ideas to work on.
Choose experience over money
I love money, and so do you (I hope). Always choose projects because there is no amount of money that can buy you experience. Especially in the early stages of your careers, always work on projects, money will come later when you are a kick-ass designer.
If things don’t look good — it’s good!
When you look back at your previous work say a year ago and you find many mistakes and laugh at yourself for how big of a loser designer you were, then kudos to you because you just became a better designer then who you were a year ago.
It’s all in the details
One of the requirements for being a good designer is to be detail oriented. A small change in your color shade or text spacing can have a huge impact on your overall work. Always have a good eye for detail and understand good design principles.
Study the systems
Once you start to get a good grasp of the fundamentals of design, I highly suggest you to start learning iOS (Human Interface Design), Android (Material Design) and of course Bootstrap for web design. Super useful documentations.
Start from scratch
I know this might sound a little extreme but if you are stuck in your design work and you have hit your head 100 times on the table by now and hate what you are doing. Just delete the project and start over. Changing small things here and there won’t make you happy and won’t fix the problem.
This was a short insight preview of our book “for designers, by designers — a guide to planning a future in design” and its synopsis.
Oh by the way, we haven’t stopped updating and releasing new kits, our premium kits and all the best bundle deals can be found in our site.
