Why Research

In the design process, research is vital to understanding the content you are designing. When we work on projects, our clients or stakeholders often ask us to expand on the idea or come up with new ideas. The only way we can pull ideas from our mind and truly be creative is to fill our minds with creative material. In many cases, it’s during the research and incubation phase where the ingenuity and innovation starts to take form. As we investigate the problem in its deepest forms, the solutions become obvious and simple.

Digging Deep

Research for design problems is more than just scraping the bits and pieces off of the top of a google search. We have to really dive into all the aspects of the problem we are trying to solve. I usually begin this phase by writing out a series of specific, open-ended questions that I want answered. For example, if I were to be asked to design a new brochure for a senior living community, I would likely start with these questions:

1. What attributes do senior citizens feel are most important when deciding where to live?
2. What makes this particular community different from others?
3. What fears do senior citizens have about moving into a community like this?
4. What reputation does this senior citizen community already have?
5. Why do people join and leave this community?
6. How would my life be better by moving to this community?
7. Do people take and read the current brochure?

These questions cannot be answered with a simple “yes” or “no” statement. They have to be explored and the data reviewed to understand the impact this brochure needs to have and how to best approach your project. Perhaps in our research we discover that senior citizens care most about being able to have visitors and activities in which they can participate.

Gathering Information

Now that we have a bunch of questions and an idea of how we will apply the answers, it’s time to actually gather the information that we will need. Methods of research may vary depending on the types of questions you are asking, but in general, these are a few ways we could get our answers:

• Observe successful examples and note what they are doing right.
• Visit the senior community and record your impressions.
• Survey a collection of current and past members about the community.
• Spend some time researching senior communities on the internet.
• Read some current material (magaziens, etc) about senior living.
• Interview some senior citizens you know.

Sit On Your Egg

Once you’ve done your homework and gathered in lots of information about the idea, studied it a bit, and organized it into some simple notes, it’s time to incubate. Just like with baby chickens, we need to let the information and ideas lie still in our minds for a while and process. It seems a little counter-intuitive, but it works pretty well. Try taking a shower, reading something else, or even sleeping on it. More often than not, I get my ideas for solutions after I’ve had a bit of time to let my mind rest and sort out all the things I observed and read. As you get ideas based on your research, jot them down in a notebook or sketchpad, then let them go. Give yourself at least a day to think about everything. Once the concepts, details, and impressions are lodged in your mind, it’s time to start assembling the information into a design concept.

Intro to Design 101

If you’ve spent any time in a design-centered classroom, you’ve inevitably been asked “what is design?” Usually, the instructor asks this as a general question and gets responses along the lines of solving problems. If the course is related to visual design, something about graphics or visuals would also be thrown in there. In my experience, design is about the process, not the result. A good designer will be able to identify the problem, research it, conceptualize a solution, execute a plan, and evaluate the results. Design is the process of identifying and solving a problem.

Define the Problem

Naturally, the first step is to clearly identify the problem at hand. Sometimes, a client comes to you with a need for a specific product or service. Other times, you may be asked to look at something that is in place and identify the weaknesses without input from others. From time to time, I’ll have a client or co-worker from another department ask me why a web page isn’t performing as well as we have hoped. Other times, I may stumble across a problem on my own and start analyzing it.

Either way, the design process starts when you can identify what is causing the problem and give it a clear diagnosis. For example, you may be approached to redesign a web site that a business owner doesn’t like. It’s not enough to look at a bad website and say, “this is bad and should be fixed soon.” The process starts when the issue can be clearly defined to read “this site doesn’t provide enough information to potential customers to give them a reason to buy our product.” When looking at a task at the very beginning, it is essential to clearly define the problem.

Redefine the Problem

Now that you have a clear message about your problem, take some time and apply empathy. Look at the problem from multiple other perspectives and observe. In our example, we could look at the website from the perspective of the business owner and the potential customer. The business owner may look their site and feel that they have poured a bunch of money into a marketing tool that isn’t getting any sales. They may have developed a bad taste in their mouth about using the internet to sell products. From the potential customer point of view, the web site may not actually be organized in a way that is easy to navigate, making it frustrating to shop. They may also feel that the site is too pushy about selling the products and didn’t feel comfortable making a purchase.

Looking at the website from these perspectives give you the missing key components to the equation. Not only is the site lacking enough information, we now know that the current messaging doesn’t help the customer make a purchase. We also know the structure needs to be revamped. We also learned that our client isn’t sure about the whole internet sales thing to begin with and may be sensitive about pouring funds into the project. With this information, we could redefine our problem to say “this site doesn’t provide engaging content in an understandable manner resulting in a low return on investment for our client.” Now we have a clear problem to start looking into.

How Might We?

I recently re-read a chapter in Tim Brown’s book, Change By Design about his company’s approach to design problems in a process he calls design thinking. When his teams begin brainstorming about an issue, they begin by asking questions that start with “How might we…?” In our project, we could ask questions like “How might we restructure the content so it’s easy to find what we want?” or, “How might we make the customer comfortable enough to purchase these products?” From here, we have a solid foundation to begin researching our problems and generating ideas for the solution.

Why would Adobe abandon disc copies?

We don’t know all the internal workings that led to this decision. The move to the cloud is tied directly to the new technology and the future of the design industry. There have been numerable complaints and posts by frustrated designers and creatives all over the world who have determined that the subscription service is a ploy by Adobe to take advantage of them and ruin their businesses. In almost every case, these accusations are emotional and poorly thought out. Adobe has made it very clear that they are doing this to provide a new platform for future development and features, while solving a wide array of problems that come with only using disc copies. Additionally, naysayers have forgotten that Adobe is a business and they must do what is in their best interest. The subscription move allows Adobe to turn their create-once-sell-once model into a create-lots-sell-always structure. Any business owner can tell you that steady residual income is far more desirable than the occasional lump sum.

What makes the Creative Cloud better than a disc version?

The creative cloud removes the barriers and hassles tied to the disc versions of the Creative Suite products. I’ve been reading and discussing these points on my LinkedIn forums recently and the benefits of moving to the Creative Cloud far outweigh the so-called “risks” people are claiming.

1. No more version problems. Anyone who has worked with InDesign for any extended amount of time can share with you the frustration of receiving an InDesign file from a previous CS version that isn’t on your machine. Rather than having to purchase another version or find another place to access the file, the Creative Cloud will now give access to all versions of each program moving forward. Just download the one you need and move on.
2. No more platform issues. Up until now, if you wanted to install the Creative Suite on two computers with different operating systems, you would have to own two copies. With the Creative Cloud, you can download either version from your account, so it doesn’t matter what platform you use.
3. Full access to all programs all the time. Forget ever having to upgrade to a Master Collection next time. You have access to everything in the cloud, including beta releases of new tools.
4. Rapid program development. Remember when you would hear about a cool new feature that would be available in the next version of Photoshop and then have to wait another year for its release? With the Creative Cloud system, Adobe can release software updates as soon as the feature is ready. You get more features and updates far quicker than before.
5. Better product integration. With the Creative Cloud as the foundation for future development, the programs will be able to talk to each other more easily and work better together than was ever possible before.
6. No more disc problems. I have scratched discs before just like everyone else. If you spend $1800 on a new version of the Creative Suite and your discs are damaged, you’re out of luck. Since the Creative Cloud is downloaded, you can get guaranteed program installs as long as your internet is working, and reinstall as many times as your need (on two machines, that is).
7. The Creative Cloud is affordable. You will no longer have to pay a huge chunk of cash with each update. The monthly fee is easily affordable, even for students. The argument is often made that if you can’t make the payment as a freelance designer, then you lose your ability to make income. My response is usually, “If you can’t make $50 profit in a month or have $50 saved up for future needs as a freelance designer, you should quit and get an in-house design job.”
8. It’s the future of technology. Like it or not, the entire technology industry is moving away from discs for software applications. Since the advent of the App Store by Apple, digital downloads have exploded, never to return to something you have to go buy in a retail store. Even the computers are changing. Did anyone else notice that the Macbook Air and the new Macbook Pro don’t even come with disc drives? What good would a disc hard-copy do for the tech-savvy designer in that case?

Which version should new designers purchase?

Go with the Creative Cloud. I’ve been using it at my full-time job for several months now and I love it. Hopefully the reasons listed above are enough to persuade you to adopt the new Creative Cloud, but if you still need convincing, watch the new Adobe Max opening keynote (http://max.adobe.com/sessions/online.html) presentation where the announcement was made. Adobe is changing their business model to support and provide useful tools for the future design industry, which I am greatly excited to start using. Nice work, Adobe.

Unfortunately, school can only do so much to help us build and share our work. In this post, I’ll share 5 tips to help new designers share their talents visually with potential employers.

1. Don’t waste anyone’s time

Fresh designers have a tendency to feel they need to put all of their school work into their portfolio. In the real world, time is money and every second that is spent reviewing your work is a second of time that could be spent elsewhere. It’s absolutely critical that you don’t waste the precious few seconds of attention your portfolio receives. Put only your very best and most telling work into your portfolio, starting with your three strongest pieces and finishing with your fourth. Keep your page count to around ten or twelve at most. The point of your portfolio, much like a résumé, is to land an interview. Ten pages gives enough content to decide if you are worth interviewing without wasting too much time.

2. Pay attention to every detail

The person who is reviewing your work has been charged with the task of making sure that you are capable of doing work with quality. They will look at every minute detail of your work, including: spelling, grammar, spacing, alignment, color consistency, readability, content relevance, image relevance, and typography. Having errors in your work in any one of those categories can jeopardize your chances at that interview. Always proofread and have someone else proofread your work.

3. Make it easy to access

People who are hiring designers today have to look through hundreds if not thousands of portfolios to find the right one. If your submission cannot be handled and accessed easily, it will likely be skipped over. Almost all employers in today’s market want to see a PDF portfolio with your application. Keep this portfolio no more than 10 pages long and under 4MB in file size. I’ve found that in most large businesses inboxes have a maximum file limit. If they haven’t emptied their inbox in a few weeks and you send in a 10MB file, it may never reach them and you won’t ever know. If you choose to use exotic fonts in your portfolio (not recommended, by the way), then be sure to embed them so their appearance looks correct on the receiving end.

4. Explain your role very clearly

A recent trend in higher education design courses is to work on collaborative projects. The result is some interesting work that can be misleading to an employer. Always explain very clearly the role you had in a project if you worked with other people to complete it. For example, if you designed a website for a fictional company while another student coded it, be sure to indicate that so no false expectations are made, damaging your relationship later on.

5. Don’t make cheap prints

Your portfolio may or may not require a printed version, but if it does, don’t go cheap. While $100 for high resolution, color-proofed prints may seem pricey, it could be the difference in getting hired or ignored. Taking the time and making the investment in good prints tells the employer that you care about getting it right, that you aren’t happy with sub-par quality, and that you are passionate about your work. The extra effort will be noticed.

There are plenty of other things you can do, but these should get you running in the right direction. Sending your work to others can be intimidating, but following these tips will help you have more confidence and should help you get more attention. What are some other ways to improve your portfolio? Have you had any success with these? Be sure to share your experience in the comments below.

How do I feel about this project after completing it?

After every project completion I have an opinion on it. Usually, I’m not satisfied. It feels good to say a project is done, but I rarely feel like I did everything I could have and that the solution is perfect. I don’t feel this is a sign of poor work or a bad project, rather, I think this is something I’ve taught myself to do. I am very critical of my own work. By asking how I feel about it, I can honestly tell myself what I dislike most about the project, which identifies things I can work on doing better on my next project.

Is the client or stakeholder satisfied with the work?

While some people will never be satisfied, there is usually a point where the client is happy with what they have requested of you. You can usually tell because they will stop asking for more changes, they will start telling their friends and co-workers about it, and spend personal time looking at the work. In my book, if the client isn’t doing these things by the time the project ends, you have failed at providing something that they were hoping to see.

What could I have done better?

This question always returns a long list for me. I like to look back on a project after completing it and look for areas in the project that I could improve upon next time around. This may be an area of your process that didn’t go smoothly, a design element that just doesn’t fit, or a tool you used that didn’t help the project the way you hoped it would. With my recently completed project, one thing I was able to learn is that I jumped the gun on visual design before completely understanding the content and how it best fit with the future goals of the business. With that knowledge, I can start to put in the time I know I need to understand the content before getting into the visuals.

What could my clients have done better?

Design work is rarely a singular task and almost always involves bringing variables into your project that you can’t control. How did your client do on their side of things? Were they prepared and was it easy to work with them? Did you receive everything you needed to from them in a timely fashion, or did you have to push them every step of the way? Knowing how your client performed can be a great indicator of whether or not you communicated effectively. It can also help you decide if you wish to work with them later. If you are an in-house designer, it’s likely that you cannot control the people with whom you work. Use this information as a means to help them help you in the future. Be sure to give them tactful, but candid feedback so future projects work better. In my experience, they will be more willing to help you if they can the benefits.

There are plenty of other questions you could ask yourself to better understand how well you performed on a given task and what you can improve upon for next time. Taking a few minutes to ask these questions after each project will help you identify areas of weakness, strength, and success. If you learn from your mistakes, your work will improve over time, thus allowing you to be more effective and successful. What questions do you ask yourself when your project is over? What helps you learn from your mistakes and move forward?

Early Beginnings

Corny? Yes, but also very true. Design and creativity has always been important to me. I still have notebooks from before elementary school and before that where I would draw and design new trucks, create new characters, and spend time on little details. In fact, when I look at the school projects I enjoyed most it’s pretty obvious to see that I spent far more time on presentation and document design that I did on actually researching and writing things. I was curious and observational, which started me down the path of looking at the world ways other people generally didn’t.

Standing Out

In junior high and high school, I started to see that while I was fascinated by art and design, most of my classmates weren’t. Eventually, I became one of few among my classmates that was able to come up with visual concepts for projects, choose fonts and colors that were interesting, and organize the information from research into easy-to-read documents and layouts. I enjoyed filling my mind with new ideas and imaginative fiction. Combining my interest in art and my imagination, I decided to start college in illustration.

Changing Majors…Twice

After my associates degree, I started to question my ability to earn a healthy income with illustration alone. I enjoyed the time I spent drawing and painting, but it was pretty apparent to me that illustration wasn’t where I was going to end up. During my first few foundational courses, I was required to take a class called “Graphic Computer Applications”, which covered the very basics of Photoshop, Illustrator, and InDesign. I was hooked. At that time, I bought a macbook laptop and Adobe CS2, and decided I was going to be a graphic designer.

Shortly after that, I had a series of life events that completely changed my outlook on higher education and typical society in general. I had developed a slight resentment for what was accepted in the design community and the creeping doubts that I could be a successful designer entered my mind once again. To change my direction completely, I decided to change schools and start studying landscape architecture. Only two weeks into that major, I realized I had grossly misjudged that line of work. Architecture is for creative people who enjoy math, following rules, and coloring inside the lines—none of which applied to me.

A Full Time Job

I switched the very next semester to a BFA major in Graphic Design and it stuck. I was able to find full-time work in design (and some illustration) that helped me fall in love with the design industry. I worked at Herff Jones Yearbooks designing yearbook covers and pages for high schools all over the country. I was making decent money for a college student and enjoyed that the majority of my job was spent being creative. After a couple years there, I had essentially maxed out on my pay and ran out of growing opportunities. Right about that time, my wife and I embarked on a one-month study abroad trip to Switzerland, which changed my life again.

Design Thinking and Thinking About Design

Up until Switzerland, design was a way to express myself and make boring things more interesting. It wasn’t until I read Change By Design that discovered that design and business were tightly integrated and the synergistic effects of blending right-brain creativity with left-brain practicality. Design could serve a purpose and play an essential role in the way we live our lives each day. I was hooked. Design had become a deeply integrated attribute of who I was and the goals I had. At this point, I knew with certainty that I was going to stay a designer indefinitely.

Picking an Area of Expertise

When I returned from Switzerland, I started to decide where I was headed next. While I enjoyed working as a print designer, the web revolution had planted seeds deep inside me. I loved the cool new technologies being developed each day, and the ever increasing popularity of being active on the web and social media sparked my interest. I had worked on a several web based projects before, but I considered it an area of weakness for me. After much personal reflection and discussion with my lovely wife, I decided that web design was the future of business communication and the area where I could find the most profitable jobs, so I left Herff Jones and started a new job as a jr. web designers on a very large e-commerce site. In the last year and half, my skill and knowledge of online media, web programming, interface design, and content strategy has grown immensely. I love designing for the web and seeing the immediate results and successes that come from my work.

What About You?

My hope in sharing this information is that you can take a good look at your own life and identify the key moments in time that led you to choose design as a profession as well. I feel it’s really important to understand why we get up each day and go to work. It helps us get through those really hard times when we hate our jobs. It helps us to feel motivated to learn new skills and improve our work. Collectively, knowing where we came from will help us decide where we will move the industry to in the future.

How did you know you wanted to be a designer? Why did you choose this as a profession? Are you happy because of your decision? Share your thoughts in a comment for others to benefit from.

I really feel it’s important for designers to add new skills and knowledge of their tools on a regular basis. A designer’s toolbox is essentially that—a collection of tools, skills, resources, and experiences that help him or her do their work with their full potential. Each designer will have a different set of tools in their toolbox, but they will likely include a few common tools. In this post, I’ll share the foundations of my designer toolbox.

Carry Your Tangible Tools

At nearly all times during my working day, I keep a few things handy should I need to pull them out quickly. I always keep a #2 pencil (here’s why) nearby for sketching, communicating, and writing notes. Along with the pencil, I keep a sketchbook. In the past I used it to capture small illustration ideas, thumbnails, brief notes, and to let my thoughts spill out somewhere so I could recall them easily. Recently, my sketchbook has become a tool to communicate with clients and stakeholders and generate quick wireframes and thumbnails for my web projects. You should always have a pencil and pad nearby.

I also keep a camera of some sort at the ready. You don’t need to have a DSLR laying around on your table with a wide array of lenses and filters, though. I’m talking about a simple point-and-shoot or the camera on your phone or tablet. Taking quick snapshots is a fantastic way to start recording inspirations and ideas for review at a later time.

Start a Scrap Collection

As a designer, you will need to constantly look for new ideas. You will also be required to start keeping up on the design trends in your area of expertise. I recommend starting a scrap collection. I use mine to essentially organize samples of different design techniques and trends that I may want to use later. While a good file structure on your computer will work just fine, I prefer to use Pinterest. One great reason for this is that not only is it accessible from anywhere that has internet connection, I can easily share the reference with other people and find it at a later date. Regardless of what system you want to use, it’s important to start building your inspiration library to feed your mind when you get stuck or can’t recall the details of something you once saw.

Find Digital Tools

With the explosion in the last few years online, there are a plethora of time-saving and low-cost solutions to help you in design work. I have found such tools especially useful in my web design projects. One of my favorite is tinypng.org, which indexes and compresses PNG files to drastically reduce their file size, which I use on every web project with images. Another great tool I use is Evernote, which is a fantastic tool for sharing notes across all my devices and workstations. There are too many for me to list right now, but I would suggest taking time to see if there are useful online tools for your projects.

Fill Your Brain

This is probably the strongest area of my designer toolbox right now. I love reading blog posts, researching interesting topics, and putting new things into my brain. As designers, we are often called on to generate new and interesting ideas on the fly. How can we combine and create new ideas without first putting the pieces into our head? To fill my brain, I read blogs, listen to podcasts, watch screen-casts and demo videos, listen to new music genres, drive different routes to work, and ask a lot of questions.

Gain Experience

Nothing adds to your abilities and skill set faster than actually working on projects. In theory, we can read all we want about the new tools in Photoshop, but until we sit down and actually use them to do something, we lack the in-depth knowledge we need. You begin to build experience by learning what not to do and repeatedly becoming more efficient. After a while, that tool will become second nature to you. Adding tools to your toolbox through useful experience is a fantastic way of showing your clients you are passionate and dedicated to the work you do.

Make Some Connections

Last of all, your designer toolbox needs connections to other people. Let’s face it—there are too many things that need to happen in modern design projects for one person to do alone. Having a variety of connections gives you the ability to take on projects that interest you while allowing you focus on what you do best. An example of this would be the print designer and the printer. Each has a different set of experiences and skills. If you have a strong connection with a good printer, you can sell yourself as a designer who can deliver the final product. Also, you are able to develop a working relationship to optimize your time and efforts to be most profitable and satisfying.

There are just a few of the things that I carry with me all the time. I have been able to use a variety of these tools to accomplish difficult projects and help me grow rapidly as an entry level designer. What tools do you keep in your toolbox? What tools should I add to my list?

Designers are unique creatures with a different set of needs. Unlike most professions, we tend to prefer working in non-traditional settings and playing by less-than-orthodox rules. It’s hard for most employers to understand the nature of designers and how to best leverage their talents and abilities in a business setting. As a new designer in the field, the responsibility will lie upon you to adapt the way you work to fit their needs, as well as the way you live to meet your own.

Start by doing some serious internal investigation and start observing those moments when you feel satisfied as a designer. Especially pay attention to those rare instances where you aren’t just happy, but thrilled to work on a project. As a designer, I have three distinct needs that I must fulfill in order to feel like I’m successful.

1. I must find interest in my tasks.
2. I must receive honest critique.
3. I must learn something new.

I must find interest in my tasks

Fact is, if I’m bored my mind will find something else to do. Staying focused on disinteresting tasks is incredibly hard for me, mostly because I know that there is a big world out there with plenty of better opportunities to grab. I struggled with this as a junior designer for a while and it about drove me crazy. The important thing to remember is that even if you are working on seemingly menial tasks, you are creating habits and processes that you will use the rest of your career. Also, think about the impact your small piece of work may have. You are still doing something that someone else doesn’t know how to do and hasn’t been trained to do.

To find interest in boring tasks, I challenge myself to do it the best I can. I ask, “How could I do this better than anyone else who has done this before?” Then I do it by completing the work faster, smarter, or with better quality than other people. I often try to look at the finished application of my work. If you are doing cutouts of products or photos to use in a catalog, look at the catalog once it’s printed and take a moment to admire your work (just don’t get cocky). Keeping yourself interested in your tasks is a tough job. If you find that you are simply unable to find any interest whatsoever in the work you do day-to-day, it’s probably time to start looking for another opportunity.

I must receive honest critique

At first, it hurts to have someone honestly give their feedback about your work. It will take some time getting used to people giving their feedback. Design is often subjective and most clients or stakeholders know what they like, but that doesn’t mean they know what is going to work best. I learn the most about my designs when someone else looks at them and points out areas that they don’t understand. Creative directors and senior designers are notorious for giving hard critique in a team setting. If you find yourself in that sort of setting, you will need to learn right off the bat that they aren’t judging you as a person, rather, they are judging the effectiveness of the design with the intention of making it better.

I must learn something new

Hands down, this is usually the deciding factor of whether or not I enjoyed a project. I love learning new skills and discovering new ways of doing things in my projects. Oftentimes these tidbits of growth are just as rewarding as the paycheck that comes at the end. I love learning new things because that makes me more valuable, more efficient, more effective, and more unique. To me, curiosity and desire to learn are sure signs of a good designer.

I would encourage you to stop for a second and consider your design needs. Are you fulfilling them? What can you do to get more out of the work you are doing? What has to happen for you to feel successful as a designer?

Coming From Print

As a professional web designer coming from a print background, I need to make it clear from the beginning that I don’t believe every web designer should build their own finished projects, as that is best left to a front-end developer who can pour their passion into doing it right. There are a few special creatures out there that can actually do both design and build-out well, but those are the exceptions.

Consider this: would you want to hire a print designer for your next big catalog who states, “I’m a print designer, but I’ve never actually printed anything?” I didn’t think so. If you are going to create a design for a digital medium, you absolutely must know how your work needs to be prepared for viewing. On the web, you can’t do things the same way as print, which is a fundamental flaw with Adobe’s new software, Muse.

What About Muse?

Muse claims to let designers do what they do best. Unless I’m mistaken, that is a daring assumption. Adobe makes it sound like the job of the web designer is to make it pretty, usable, and adaptive from the visual side only. In reality, their job is to act as the translator between the client’s message and the visitor, however they may be viewing the content. While aesthetic appearance is a nice feature, it’s very obvious when you visit a site created by someone who doesn’t understand the fundamentals of user experience, web typography, and browser behaviors. It feels confusing, limited, and generally less interesting. Even worse, it encourages you to find the information somewhere else.

That being said, I do feel Muse has a place in modern design. It is a highly useful tool for hobbyists and amateurs to make simple sites that meet basic needs, but not much beyond that. Highly complicated and large sites become near impossible to muster up and could easily become nightmares should clients desire features that Muse cannot support. I’ve yet to find a Muse site that impresses me (granted, I’m sort of picky), or a need for me to use it for a project, but that may change in the future.

It’s Easy! Or is it?

Learning to code HTML and CSS is not difficult, and can be very rewarding. Before college, I bought a thick, vicious book on HTML and CSS. I started with the basics of learning to put text into a format the browser could read, then moved up to assigning that text a color through CSS. After a very short amount of time, it began to make sense to me how this whole web thing worked. After that, it was simply learning all the possibilities and practicing. Two or three websites later, I was hooked.

Being a web designer is a weird place to be right now. As a print designer, I understood perfectly where my job started and ended and what it entailed, but as a web designer, it gets shady and I frequently cross the border into user experience designer and front-end developer. Knowing enough about the code to easily shift roles has made me a valuable asset to my team and it gave me the foundation I need to make this a career for the rest of my life.

If you are in design school or just starting in the design field and have any interest in the web, I strongly encourage you to learn the basics of HTML and CSS. Again, this doesn’t mean your job from now on will be to spend half of each day in a code editor, it just means that you know enough about the process to design effectively and appropriately. I promise you won’t regret it.

Stop and state the question out loud

Oftentimes this can solve the issue without any extra effort. It’s a weird phenomenon, but it really does work. Take a second or two and say your question out loud, loud enough for you to hear yourself say it. Hearing the question through your auditory senses allows your mind to process the information in a different context, making it possible to connect your experiences to the question in ways you were unable to before.

Reframe the question

Perhaps the difficulty isn’t in the problem itself, but in the way you are looking at it. Try and find an alternative way to ask the question. For example, I could say:

Why isn’t my mouse cursor moving in Photoshop?

It would be really easy to just lean over to a senior designer and ask them to look at your screen and give you the answer. While it’s tempting, you effectively interrupt their concentration and impress no one. All designers have to deal with hardware issues and it would be best for you to learn to solve the problem on your own. Try asking yourself this, instead:

What could cause my mouse cursor to stop moving?

All of the sudden, there are several possible solutions even an inexpienced designer can investigate. Is the mouse wireless and is it losing signal? Is there something blocking the optical sensor? Did Photoshop freeze? Is you Wacom stylus resting on your tablet causing an override? You get the picture. Before going to others for these kinds of problems, try reframing your question.

Do the research

I get asked a lot of things and I would safely estimate that around 75% of them are answered by the first search result in a google search. I struggled a bit with this in college. I had a professor who would allow us to ask him questions about the software and tools we were learning. When asked, he would then proceed to type the question word for word into google. Lo and behold, we easily found our answers.

Sometimes the questions are not that simple. For more difficult or complicated problems, you may need to perform multiple searches, browse through threads in forums, or even read articles. It’s definitely worth the extra effort you will spend finding your answer. It shows you are passionate enough about your work to put in the effort needed to learn something new and it shows you take initiative when something gets difficult-both are valuable traits for an entry level designer.

Sleep on it

Again, I can’t explain this except that when you sleep, your mind is free to break down problems and analyze them without your consciousness getting in the way. I have gone to bed asking handfuls of questions abut my tasks at work only to awake and find I knew the answer all along.

Change the subject

As designers we spend a lot of mental energy analyzing problems and brainstorming solutions. We work on projects for hours on end and occasionally get stuck. When I get stuck, I switch my train of thought to a different track. I work on something else for a few minutes or even just get up and move around. By doing that, I can step away from the problem and let it settle in my mind. Then, I’ll return to the task with renewed interest and patience. The result is a fresh perspective that leads me to the solution.

Try Sketching It Out

Sometimes it helps me to try and display my problem visually using simple shapes and diagrams. I literally break my problem into smaller bits by drawing little maps and linking them together with a process called mind-mapping. There are plenty of resources out there, including this formal process by iMindMap. The advantage to this process is that it matches the way your brain already processes information. When you put it down on paper you have a second way of seeing the problem so you can find connections and possible solutions you haven’t seen before.

Not all problems can be solved with these techniques. If the problem is of critical importance, then you really should ask for help. If the problem is something as simple as a software question or small design decision, try figuring it out on your own first. What methods do you use to help solve your questions?