You’ve probably making websites and web layouts for a couple of years now, and perhaps you’re almost a pro. You’re probably right, and maybe you’ve got all the right design essentials down. With your knowledge and experience, you’re pretty confident that you will never make a shabby-looking design again, that you’ll always churn out ones that are good enough and pleasing to the eye. That’s the keyword there-”good enough.” There will always be room for improvement, and here are a few tips on how you can work to make your design not only better, but also the best.
Look at other designs. It never hurt to see what others are doing, and what innovations they’ve come up with. Observe the different design elements, the subtle effects, the color scheme, the font set used, and study them diligently. Learn from the design of the web masters, but remember never ever to plagiarize them. That’s just low. Be inspired, be motivated, but never be a copy-cat.
Try different styles. If you’ve always been doing layouts for blog-type sites, maybe you should try working on corporate ones, even if they’re just imaginary. Or maybe you always make your designs look scrapbookish, try going for the sleek, streamlined look once in a while. Doing different things will expand your repertoire of skills.
Use radical color combinations. Websites in brown and other neutral colors are nice to look at, but they may become boring and repetitive. Sometimes, it’s not always the images that create a great visual flow for the website-a good choice of colors will make a brilliant effect too! I once even saw a site that relied mostly on color, it almost had no images, but the design was very beautiful. Stray away from the usual, tried-and-tested safe colors, and experiment with different schemes and combinations.
Work within a box. Everybody already knows that popular “thinking out of the box” quote, but why not try reversing it? Sometimes, putting limitations on what kind of design you will do inspires sudden creative ideas. For example, you could try limiting your use of colors to only three types. Or allowing yourself to use only a limited number of black and white photographs.
Try using different tools, or plug-ins. There are a lot of tools that’s been developed for web designing purposes in recent years. If you use Photoshop, there’s SiteGrinder, which allows for easy conversion of images into HTML and CSS documents. Having this kind of tool will definitely give you more freedom to play with the design, since you won’t have to worry about the coding later on.
Practice. Of course, honing your craft continuously is the one sure way to being a step closer to perfecting it. Even if you don’t have a reason or a site to use it for, create layouts when you feel the need to, or when you come across a particularly striking and inspiring image. You could be generous and create a site where people can download it for free-hey, at least you’re sharing what you’ve got.
You can even combine the tips above to better explore your capabilities as a web designer-whether it’s using neon colors, to breaking boundaries together with SiteGrinder, or just giving yourself certain limitations to work with, you can definitely use these techniques next time you design another layout. Remember that designing is a never-ending process of learning and improving.