Tips for combining visual design with technical design – words Al Woods
For the hundreds of thousands of artists, graphic designers, web designers, coders, and illustrators out there, money can be made from the right combination of creative and technical talent.
- Creative, in the sense that what you design has to look good.
- Technical, because whatever looks good also has to work fluidly without any friction.
If you feel that your skill sets are too heavily weighted in one of these camps and that the other camp, therefore, needs some work, this article will help you with tips to brush up on your technical and creative design combinations.
Play with Tools
With web design and graphic design so central to the internet world of trade and marketing, it’s unsurprising that there are a wealth of tools out there to help you learn new skills, visualize different ways of presenting media, and augment your coding and technical abilities.
For instance, if you’re hoping to get work not only coding websites but helping with the branding of a product or company, then you should consider creating logos and other marketing and branding material with the tools available on the web. If you’d like to take your graphic design skills and combine them with an ability to code websites, use tutorial tools online to do just that.
Run a Prototype
If you ever have a dry spell in your routine, with little work coming in, it’s the perfect time to design a prototype brand – with the branding, the visual design, and the web design all covered and added to your portfolio. Not only will this help you train the various skills you’ll need to move into this line of combined work, but it’ll be something you can show prospective clients to exhibit your talents.
Any problems you run into on this ‘dry run’ will help you in the future. As you find solutions, you’ll be training new skills that’ll help you avoid similar roadblocks on actual paid projects. The more you practice practically, the more confident you’ll become when those deadlines are looming, and you’ve got the visual and the technical to grapple with.
Boost Your Creativity
Creativity is a vast arena, encompassing such pursuits as creative writing, painting, sketching, sculpting, singing and all other activities that require you to use your creative energies. You may not see yourself as an especially creative person, more into the technical, coding side of things, but that would be to ignore the creative side of problem-solving in coding itself. Try out different creative pursuits to boost your creativity, and take that new energy into your technical work.
Boost Your Technical Capabilities
You may well be a hot-shot designer with creative energy flowing through all of your work, but without the technical acumen you’ll never be the whole package. Take a step back from your creative work and focus on technical problems, like how to seamlessly incorporate graphics into a webpage. By slowing gaining these skills, you’ll be a more valuable asset to the clients you work with in the future.
Creativity and coding are certainly not mutually exclusive, and by having buckets of both, you’ll be a most valuable freelancer or employee, credited with exciting creativity and smart and logical technical abilities, all rolled into one.
