Developing an eye for design
Change the way you look at things to become a better designer.
When you want to prepare a dish for the first time, you most probably follow a recipe. You don’t just read the ingredients and smash them all together randomly, right? You probably want to also look at photos of such dish, to have an idea of how it’s supposed to look.
When you just eat the dish, instead, what matters to you the most is its taste, and how it looks. But you don’t spend much time reflecting on how each single ingredient has been added to the mix, how it was cooked, at what temperature, how things were sliced or diced, etc.
Similarly, when you use an app, you care about the experience and how easy it is to get what you need from it. But you don’t really pay too much attention to details such as the size of components (you notice it when it’s wrong, like you notice if your food is too salty or overcooked), the use of white space, the roundness of buttons, the use of shadows, etc.
You can surely get an opinion like “I like this design” or “I hate how this app works”, but you don’t really invest too much time in understanding what is that you like or not.
When you design a product you are the chef and all those details become very important.
In Japanese culture, an apprentice of any craft spends years copying his/her master’s work. Often just looking at it, not even trying, for the first period of its training. If you watched the documentary “Jiro dreams of sushi”, you maybe remember how his apprentices were tasked with just cooking the rice, or other tasks like that, for years, before actually being allowed to cut fish and make sushi.
I’m not saying you should follow the same slow process, but there’s an important lesson here:
Learn by observing the work of people with more experience than you.
Now, I understand the urge of trying doing your things. And, after all, western culture has a different approach on learning (and I’m not saying it’s better or worse). But before writing your own songs, you listen to a lot of music and you start from the basics, right?
So this is one of the first things I teach to young and aspiring product designers: before jumping straight into designing your thing, look at other products in the market. Look carefully how they size components, how they use colors, how interactions work, how transitions and animations work, how they pick typefaces and how they style text, and so on.
You’re not a simple user anymore
When you go from being a user to being a designer, there’s a switch in your brain you need to turn on. You won’t be a user anymore, ever, you’re now a designer. This means you will always need to use products with a more analytical eye.
You used Spotify, Youtube, Airbnb, Google passively. Now you’ll use the same products (and more) but with a different mindset. Pay attention to how the product works, how it makes you feel, what is great and what doesn’t feel so great and ask yourself why. Don’t just mindlessly tap on things, but do it with intention and awareness. God, I sound like some sort of pretentious guru! But seriously, look at other designers’ work and learn from it.
It seems so obvious, but it’s not. I lost the count of the young designers I had to remind this. They work, for example, on a login screen, which is something that, as users, they had in front of them countless times, and all of a sudden it’s like they are the first ones in the world to ever design anything like that. They have no idea where to start and what to do. They go blank and start throwing the ingredients together hoping they’ll nail down that lasagna without looking at the recipe or even knowing how lasagna is supposed to look like.
Input fields too small or too close to one another, they forget the “forgot your password?” or some other critical component, social icons that are 15dp wide, and who knows what else they might come up with the next time. And it’s mind-blowing, because designers or not, we use login screens A LOT. But we do it passively as users, we don’t really notice things unless something happens like we forget our password and we can’t find the link to reset it. Then we notice.
As designers, we need to think differently. And this works for interactions, flows, visual design, and the whole package.
Master the craft before trying to innovate
“Ok Rubens, cool stuff, but does this mean we’ll never innovate? We’ll just need to copy over and over the same patterns?!”. No, not at all. What I’m saying is that before trying to jump 10 school buses on fire with your skateboard, you need to learn how to ollie, at least.
Master the basics, then think about innovating. And sometimes that is not even needed. Sometimes it doesn’t make sense to re-invent the wheel just for the sake of being original, ok? But once you got the foundations right, it’s gonna be easier to spot opportunities and exploit them. So invest time in looking at experts’ work and start from there, before thinking about changing the status quo. There’s no shame in looking at other designers’ work and follow along (not saying copying blatantly. There is shame in that!).
Here’s my advice to young and aspiring designers
- Try to turn on that “designer’s switch” in your brain. Use product with that mindset, notice things, take notes, take screenshots.
- Don’t jump straight into designing without making some research first. Think about similar products you use, or similar flows, similar components. Look for more example if needed.
- Do some copy work exercise. Just for yourself, don’t copy Uber, call it Super and then pass it as your work on Dribbble please! This is an activity that helps you understand, learn and cement some of those basics you’ll then use when you’ll work on YOUR designs.
My new book “Designing Digital Products for Kids”!
