5 Design Tips From Our Lead Designer, Karlee Proctor
Graphic design is one of the most powerfu
l tools a business can utilize. It allows your company to create a cohesive digital and physical experience where your customers can fully immerse themselves in your product, business, and brand. With the help of colors, fonts, elements, and textures, designers are able to build brand awareness and influence the customer’s decision-making process.
In this post, I will share my top five advice tips I’ve learned as the lead designer at Blackhawk. The digital design landscape is quickly evolving, but if you follow these techniques, you’ll be ready to put your graphic design game-face on and create some killer content for your clients.
Keep Go-to Resources On Hand
Being a great designer means learning how to work efficiently. This means finding out which areas of your workflow can be optimized so you can save time and energy. Having several resources on hand is a great way to do this.
Instead of spending time creating simple designs, find vectors, icons, and background textures you can download for free online. Get access to crisp, clear images with free stock photo websites. Having these on hand will quickly cut down your design time, allowing more time for the bigger concepts.
BUT DON’T FORGET TO SAVE THE LINKS YOU LIKE. Keep them in an easily accessible place so you can download what you need when you need it.
Here are some of my favorite resources:
NEVER Delete Your Work
As a designer, you are creating and recreating designs 24/7. It is important to keep EVERYTHING you do! Each design asset will become part of a visual library for you to continuously look back on. You never know when you might need to reuse them or let them influence new designs.
Especially if you work for clients, you need to keep everything. More than likely you will be using the same items over and over again. Your clients will also want you to pull up past projects even though they have been completed. Because of this, it is important to stay organized within every project you do – this habit starts from the very beginning.
Get a Dribble Account
Update your portfolio regularly and establish an online presence. Especially if you are applying for new graphic design jobs. Employers won’t even look at your resume if you don’t have a strong, solid portfolio showcasing just how great of a designer you are.
Dribble is one of the largest online platforms built for designers to share their work online. It serves as a design portfolio platform as well as a job and recruiting site. Dribble is great because it’s free and easy to add new design pieces. It’s also a great resource to draw inspiration and stay connected to the design community and stay on top of trends!
Switch to Figma
Gasp! Not an adobe product! We know. Switching software is never fun, but this one is well worth it. Ditch Sketch, ditch Photoshop, ditch Illustrator, ditch XD. When it comes to web design, Figma is the ultimate tool for faster, more collaborative, and more scalable work.
Figma is very similar to the platforms mentioned above in that it is a vector graphics editor and prototyping tool. The layout of the platform makes it very easy to have all of your projects divided into a clean and smooth working experience. Blackhawk is able to keep track of every single social, email, and other content we do for each of our clients. And it’s all in one place! Everyone on our team can access and change these projects with ease. It is the ultimate shareable cloud for designers.
Trust Your Intuition
As designers, we have to be highly intuitive and empathetic to our client. Sometimes they don’t know what they want or have a hard time communicating their idea in their head, so we have to ask the right questions and “guess.” Don’t doubt your power of intuition when making design decisions. Design at the end of the day is a visual way of communicating ideas or solving problems. Be confident in your decision making and be able to explain thoroughly why you make the decisions you make.
BONUS TIP
We know designing can be a hair-pulling, table-flipping experience. To help you cope with the creative madness, follow @designhumor on Instagram. You’ll thank me later. 🙂
