Assessing your craft skills as a product designer

Evaluating your knowledge in interaction design, visual design, tools, platforms, research and psychology

When we think about design skills, craft skills easily come to mind. This the raw ability to take inputs and transform them into something meaningful based on your technical knowledge of tools and concepts. In this article we’ll do a deep dive on the craft but I would also encourage you to to learn about how to evaluate your collaboration skills and your mindset.

Design craft and high quality work output is a key skill for designers (but not the only skill). Sketch by the multi-talented Catherine Shen

Craft is your knowledge of the tools, methods, techniques to get the work done. A good designer has a solid grasp of the fundamentals that are usually studied in school but not everything will be or is expected to be mastered at an academic setting. The most important skill to learn there is how to effectively learn afterwards so that you keep renewing and updating your skills as the field of product design rapidly changes.

Today, product designers draw their expertise from many domains

We’ll break down the definition of craft into sub-fields (e.g. Visual Design) and then break those down even further into individual skills (e.g Typography).

1. Visual Design — basics of communication
2. Interaction Design — guiding the user through flows
3. Platform knowledge — native, web, emerging platforms
4. Research methods — usability, cognitive and behavioral psychology
5. Design tools — Sketch, Framer, Figma, Abstract, whiteboards…

Take these lists and others that follow as a starting point to get you thinking about skills you have or might want to develop in the future. Use this leveling framework to grade yourself on the individual skills.

1. Visual Design

Visual design plays a vital role in the digital experience. At a visceral level it gives the user clues on what they’re about to see. Is this experience serious or playful? An expert visual designer is able to come up with a pleasing composition of elements on a screen.

Today visual designers have more power as they play an active role in creating design systems that embed visual design and interaction rules in them which span multiple platforms.

Some of the core visual design skills include,

1. Typography — choosing type for function and emotion, creating typographic scales that work across multiple platforms and contexts, creating your own typefaces.
2. Grid — creating grids that guide the eye but knowing when to intentionally break the grid, working with baseline and vertical grids, considering the macro and micro grid interactions.
3. Layout — creating pleasing layouts that come together through a combination of typography, image, illustration and so on.
4. Color — choosing colors that are functional and emotional, colors that are pleasing and accessibility compliant, understanding cultural contexts of color and trends.
5. Iconography — choosing icons, doing minor vector work, creating an icon family that scales across different platforms and contexts.
6. Illustration — using illustration in proper contexts, understanding the nuances of colors and shapes to make changes to existing illustrations, creating your own from a sketch.
7. Image — using images to evoke a certain aesthetic, image manipulation and editing, creating and shooting your own photos, coming up with image and photo guidelines.
8. Motion — animation between screens, micro-interactions, making the customer experience feel polished and using motion design to inform, guide and delight.

The best way to learn visual design is to practice. Better yet, try practicing and critiquing design with other senior visual designers. Pick up on their good habits and pick their brains on how they think through a visual design problem. You’ll save yourself a ton of time and acquire shortcuts faster.

Outside of that, make time to replicate and copy work of others to understand how they’ve made it. See if you can uncover not just the individual design elements but common patterns and think through the problem they were trying to solve.

2. Interaction Design

Interaction design is about understanding true user intent and developing proper workflows to get the job done. It’s the art and science of communicating… to the customer in a way that makes sense for them while pushing back on technology constraints meaningfully.

1. Sketching — exploring many ideas quickly on whiteboards and paper. Storyboarding to communicate key interactions. Showing rough ideas via UI thumbnails or drafts of complex multi-platforms flows.
2. Storytelling — creating a compelling narrative of your work, “sketching” out your user’s world via succinct scenarios, writing a story that stakeholders can relate to and thus take action to make it a reality.
3. Wireframes — moving quickly from low-fidelity sketches, utilizing whiteboards, paper, or digital low-fidelity diagrams.
4. Flows — distilling complex information into abstract flows, mapping existing flows of apps, knowing how to balance comprehensiveness with complexity, mapping out flows for multiple platforms and services
5. Diagrams — synthesizing complex data and communicating abstract concepts to yourself, to other designers and stakeholders.

Interested in learning more? You can continue reading an updated and refreshed version of this article on Holloway—Craft Skills for Product Designers.

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