April 27^th/ Design Exercises

The idea of a design exercise is nothing new, but I recently read a tweet from Cameron Moll that made me rethink about how I really work through the design process.

Design is a tricky thing. There’s no one right way to do something — it’s a mix of style, aesthetics, and culture. This means that you can solve any design problem a dozen different ways and still come up with something that is interpreted as a success by your client. It can be easy to fall into a design rut, always falling back to your same old tricks. People encourage you by complimenting the work, but deep down sometimes you might wonder if you could have done something better.

That’s why I think design exercises are an important factor of any designer’s career. Every now and then you need to force yourself to solve a problem differently — it’ll force you to branch out and look for new tools and techniques. It’ll force your brain into a new line of thinking and you might even find a new style of design that you prefer. When I look back on my personal projects’ designs, I find that I’ve almost always forced myself into a design exercise from the beginning. The rewards have been monumental personally, so I thought I might work through some of my past work and how I worked design exercises into them.

Examples from Warpspire’s past

Exercise: Work with texture to create an appearance of aging.

Solution: This site came out just before Cameron Moll’s Wicked Worn series (or at least, before I had read it). However, I wanted to design something that was notably non-digital-ly. Forcing myself into this style made me look for new approaches to designing, and two great things came of this: the discovery of the incredible diversity of free Photoshop brushes, and the use of photographs/scans in nonstandard ways.

What I mean by that last point is using a photograph for something other than a picture in the page. Creating the envelope in the upper left was incredibly challenging to me at the time, and the only way I was able to reliably recreate it was to use a photograph of an envelope as a stencil of sorts.

Exercise: Use color and create something notably non-bloggy.

Solution: This design of Warpspire marked the first design I had created that used any kind of bold or vivid colors; my past designs had always relied on muted or monochromatic color schemes. Forcing myself to work with color ended up in me throwing out nearly a dozen comps, but it was invaluable experience — by the end of it I felt infinitely more comfortable using color in my design.

Exercise: Highlight a diverse collection of content on the homepage while dividing opinion from tutorial-type content.

Solution: Forcing myself to let the content do the designing was really tricky. I strayed away from any unnecessary visual clutter, and couldn’t fall back to cheesy ornamentals throughout the site. I think the single largest benefit of this design style was learning to use stock images better. Even adding a mediocre stock image to a design can make the end result visually stunning.

Conclusion

I think the idea of assigning yourself design exercises is a great idea. If you just design with all the tools you have, your designs will soon get stale and you won’t be adding any new tools to your toolbox. By forcing yourself to solve a problem in a different way it forces you to break your normal thinking pattern and explore. It keeps your creative juices flowing and can force you to design in a style you usually wouldn’t turn to.

I actually do the same technique with my programming — every now and then I learn a new language. Pretty much any problem can be solved with the language of your choice, but it’s a good idea to force yourself into new uncomfortable languages just to broaden your knowledge base.

1. 

   Luke

   April 28^th | #

   You couldn’t have written this at a better time. I’ve been pulling my hair out try to redesign my site to a deadline and not liking anything I was doing because I had no fixed plan of attack. Hopefully taking away that deadline and using this technique will help me on my way. Good article mate :)

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