Creating graphics have been a journey worthwhile. Open mind to learn and re-learn, coupled with consistency, were the key factors I embraced that improved my skills to this point.

11 Important Tips that helped me in my Graphic Design Journey; arranged in progressive manner

Tip 1

 Keep designing even if you keep creating designs that made no sense.

Tip 2

Copy other awesome graphics till you begin to narrow down on the differences between yours and theirs.

Tip 3

Get involved in graphic tasks that solve real-world problems; there you will learn how to plan better.

Tip 4

Never be afraid of criticism. Share your works in groups and ask for feedback. Work on those pointers that are relevant to your growth.

Tip 5

With more practice over time, you will begin to naturally observe design principles and easily see them in your work, leading to lesser design errors and blunders.

Tip 6

You will notice that creating designs with standard dimensions will give better result either for display or print. A design created in smaller dimension will need a scaling up. Those included raster images will lose some quality in appearance. You begin to wonder if same design is what you have in your Graphic Design app workspace.

Tip 7

When you begin to pay attention to details that will make your work standout, more than any other thing else, you have grown to professional level.

Tip 8

At this point, you are more bothered about crafting ways to make your design process less stressful and yet effective. You create your unique naming styles and patterns for your layers and elements.

Tip 9

You begin to create more of the elements you need rather than spending hours surfing the internet. The power to create new shapes and manipulate existing ones comes naturally to you.

Tip 10

Time duration to complete a task becomes smaller as you can handle more tasks within a given timeline.

Tip 11

Each task gives you its own requirements by your mere observing them. Since you are able to read design expectations correctly, your final product will always be unique wearing your personalized style that makes you a pro.

In those days, completing a task to design wallpaper for 37 PCs will take days. All I asked myself was, "What single factor will make this work to stand out? It took me few minutes to figure it out, and I brought in other supporting elements. This approach ensures that the final product doesn't differ from the expected result.

Attached files Explained

There are 4 basic layers I create in CorelDraw at the beginning of every design: Bg (background), Body, Exported & Trimmer. I create a shape with the expected standard dimensions in the Bg layer, then, duplicate same in the Body & Trimmer layers.

# Master Mockup

I thought about a way to introduce my Book Mockup and show how vast in content it is. The flow of parent folders to their sub folders and content flashed as an idea. I quickly took snapshots and compiled them into a single image.

# dataMan Niches

I needed an image to tell about what I do. There are 10 niches and each got sub o. I have to use priority placement to arrange them in an understandable manner. Here, I did something for the very first time. I created custom grid lines (horizontal only), which ran along default double grid line apart of the workspace. I have difficulty using the existing grid lines, which fall behind my design. Set it to transparency is out of the option. In Photoshop, positioning & alignment are much easier.

[the Image: see the cover image on this page]

If you have a better way to use grid lines or similar methods for positioning & alignments, say so in the comments.

Also, let me know how this article helped you in any way in the comments. I will be glad to join a follow up.