How To Become A Designer

So today we're going to talk about how to become a designer. Not necessarily how to get a job in design, but how to just become a designer. How to take an interest in it, how to make that your career path or your hobby path. So I suppose to start off with the type of person, the personality of a designer and what he takes because not everyone is cut out for it really, but it's not necessarily one of those things that you can't learn and you can't mold yourself into either.

It's not like you're born to be a designer, anyone can do it. It just takes a certain type of person either. Anyway, most important is someone who's creative in nature. So whether that's, you've just got an eye for it, you like experimenting, you like designing, you like drawing, you like painting, these sorts of things.

If you've got a general interest in that, then it's going to be the path for you. If you're not really bothered and you don't really care whether the entire house is painting white, red or green, then maybe you might need to work out a little bit more. What do you think? What's your personality would you say?

Yeah, I think, I personally think you need to be a natural. There's got to be some kind of artistic flavour. It's got to be there. And that could be in anything.

You could be artistic, whether it's with a pencil and drawing or it could be anything else. Having that creative touch about you is definitely going to help. I've been an artist all my life. I've come from GCCR, A-level art, studied design, principle design theory, all that kind of stuff.

I didn't even know anything about the theory behind it. I just knew how to draw. I knew colors and how they worked and shading and background foreground, all this kind of stuff. I just knew it by watching art programs on back in the day.

And so for me, being a creative person and loving art, I was a natural at it. But I think when it comes down to the design we're talking about, so design regards to where we know branding or wherever we get into that in a bit, I think having an understanding of the principles will definitely help. You don't necessarily have to have that artist clear. But if you have the understanding of the principles behind it, you can get started with it and start getting things together.

So you think that someone who's not created by major can learn? Yeah, I think if they're the principles behind it, they can definitely learn it. They can get started. But the thing is, it's a case of being repetitive with it and doing it every day.

You need to just be hands on with it. It's not, it's not. There's still you involved yet, but you need to be hands on with it. So you need to be drawing with your hands.

You need to be using the tools or software, et cetera. Yeah. But if you're a natural artistic person, you've got the bonus basically. You've got that bump on everyone else, I think.

Yeah, there are definitely some principles. But a lot of design is based around feeling as well. It feels good. It looks good.

You know, two to one person. It may not look good to another person, but that doesn't mean that it's all very subjective, isn't it? It's the same sort of thing, definitely. Yeah.

When we talk about principles, do you want to go through some of what these principles are? There's a list by Deetah Rams, which is a famous principles list. They write a book, I don't know, probably just wrote an article or something, the 10 principles of good design. I'm kind of reading those up actually.

They're actually really interesting. So they're not really about the technicalities of design. They're just like a mantra to live by really, aren't they? Yeah, and I think these principles apply to all kinds of design.

So this is world. You know, design could be architecture. It could be fashion. It could be interior.

It could be graphics. It could be anything. It's applicable to any part of design. Yeah.

So, like, one of his principles is that good design is innovative. And it's a simple thing. It's like sometimes you don't want to just be regurgitating the same thing over and over again. The world is constantly changing, so design needs to change with it as well.

And design can lead that as well. It can lead the changes and always have to follow changes. Yeah. Yeah.

We've got a good design mix of product useful. We've seen that everywhere. You see that in your mobile phone devices, how the mobile phones evolved over time. And the design changes.

There's a slight modifications over time. Makes the device even easier and better to use. Cars as well. Car design, constantly, innovation and useful design aspects are employed in car design.

Whether it's exterior or interior. It's something that's just used throughout. It doesn't matter what part of, it doesn't matter what sector you're working in. In the sector you're working in the right way.

It can be very, very useful. Yeah. And all kinds of products. There's so many different types of products coming out all the time.

People are jumping on them now because there's loads of products that which become really, really useful. For example, there's a two-face holder which you plug in your two-face and then you just turn at the bottom and it squeezes out two-face at the top. Design. Yeah.

Someone bought that. Yeah, of course. Yeah. Well, that's with anything, right?

Any product, you know? Yeah. You just don't think about it. The smallest thing you just don't think about sitting in your table right in front of you right now has been designed by someone.

Yeah. And it's just as good design is unobtrusive and it's basically what it is, right? It gets out of the way. Yeah.

It doesn't hinder you. It doesn't, uh, do the blocker and it just becomes normal. It's like, it's always been like this. But obviously in that, whatever you just look at, you look at a pencil, you look at your keyboard, you look at your phone, your screen in front of you, the camera, your headphones that you're wearing right now, the steering wheel, you might be holding while you're driving.

All of that has come from someone's mind and maybe going on to a piece of paper and then going through that product cycle. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

One of the things that always fascinates me is like how do they design the machines? They build the machines. But you know, one of those kind of programs. Yeah.

So it's like you're watching a machine create like a, whatever, it's like a widget. But then you're like, there's a machine that created the parts of the machine that created that widget. Yeah. Right.

So it's crazy. It's absolutely crazy. But there's, you know, that's what it is, right? It's all like design can be, it can touch any of those points along the way.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

It's, it's principles are really interesting. It's worth reading. There'll be a link in the show and it's won't go over all 10 of them out because, um, yeah, it's just a bit read. Yeah.

So there's a lot of things like color, typography, grid systems. We've got like negative space and how to use that and not make your designs too cluttered. And also there's lots of different styles of design as well which have changed over the years and, you know, trends that've come and gone as well. And it's, it's good to just sort of know about those as well.

Keep your eye on the ball. Follow the trends. Maybe trying, trying to make your own trends. You know, you don't have to necessarily just follow them and try and modify them and remix them.

But understand why they're there and where they've come from. I think the point you just picked out there was the different trends that I read. I think the styles, different designs are different styles, right? It's like the artists from back in the day, even modern art.

I think it's important to find a style and kind of go with it and try and make it your way of working, rather than using someone else's style, create your own mind if you can, try and be unique. Yeah, there's nothing wrong with obviously looking at what's happened before you and taking inspiration. Definitely not. Inspiration is key, yeah.

But yeah, like colour theory, it's good to know what types of colours go well together, why do certain colours go well together? Why are colours arranged in a wheel generally? And how does colour work differently in print and how do they work differently on the screen? How do colours mix together, deform different colours and things like that?

And it's just generally a good idea to understand that. Because you can quite easily have colours which are clashing and they may not necessarily look clashing while you're doing a design, but once you put them onto a screen or blow them up to a certain size, like having a bright red, bright blue, you can create this like a halo effect in between where the two colours join, which can be quite jarring to your eyes. So no, it's not a jump at you. Yeah, no, things like that.

But then you can also lean into that as well depending on the type of design you're doing to make it work. But it's knowing those boundaries is all a known way to make that work and where not to. Yeah. What type of degree we thought?

Type of, yeah. I mean, I was never a huge, I wasn't a big on topography, but it really has grown on me. And I think it's important having the right type of on-site typefaces. Some designers like to call it or type of what I call it.

You know, you've got pairings as well, which is very important. You know, newspapers and you're reading newspapers, they always use a certain pairing as well. On the web, all across the web, different websites. It's very clever.

It's a very clever way of drawing a user and keep them glued onto screen and reading through what you want them to read. I think it's very important now. Especially now, because in the early parts of the web, it was the concept of website fonts. So websites had maybe a choice of 15 or 20 fonts at the most.

Some of them were very nice. So everyone tends to stick to the same one. You had Ariel, Evadina, you had Time's in your room. Talking about Garamond, you know, Trebuchet, those are the few that I think you've been.

They were used everywhere, right? And now that you've got things like Google Fonts and Web Fonts and all sorts, you can pretty much, you know, take your pick really. And now it's more than ever. It's important to understand typography and how certain fonts sit next to each other and how things look at different sizes and how they scale and how capital letters and lowcase letters work with each other, ligatures and all sorts.

Yeah, it's actually crazy now. And there's some really nice examples that we could probably put in the notes. I've got a list down. That's a really cool site.

It's that use classic kind of serif fonts and the way they make use of it is just really for a modern type of business as well. A lot of these are modern startups using serifs that are very classic. But yeah, it's really cool. We could probably just share them in the notes and stuff.

Yeah. It's understanding things like letter spacing, line spacing and line height and how that can impact the overall look of a design. Not just the overall look, sorry, but also how easy it is to read as well. Having a text that is too close together, what impact that has on certain people, having lines out too long.

What impact that has when you're reading large prose, large blocks of boxes. There's a reason that newspapers have thin columns and why certain news blogs have a certain width of their text because it just makes it easier to read. And there's principles about how long a line should be before it wraps. How many words should be in a paragraph and things like that as well.

Yeah, I'm using that a lot in websites recently with one client in particular. He's got a page template with himself from it's 100% width. I mean, the width's about 1200 pixels and he was writing paragraphs the full length of that. And the font size was like 14, 15 pixels or something like that.

And it was just way too much. You can imagine looking at this screen and thinking, oh, hell, we're going to get to the bottom of this paragraph. So there's a bit of an education there for him. So just letting him know, look, you're better off breaking that up using two columns, you know, split it all up, make it easy to digest for the user.

He's going to be reading it. And then he understood it. And now he's creating blogs which are just following the principles that are given in terms of using topography. Even he wants to use black for the text and you shouldn't really use pure black like 0, 0, 0, 0, 0 as your typeface color on a white background.

It should be off black. And there is this to do with your eyes, it's to do with perception and your ones and cones and work on stuff. And so it's better to go off black and go, you know, a dark grey color. And it's not as harsh as true black on a white background.

It's things I like to consider as well. Yeah, yeah, this is where sort of feeling comes into it, isn't it? Mm-hmm. Sometimes you might see black, pure black on white.

And you can just be a bit of a strain on your eyes if you've been looking too long and just dropping it down to like a 85, 90% black. It just takes that pressure off your eyes and you'll be able to read for a lot longer. Most of the text heavy sites like Medium and like most blogs, you tend to notice that it's not pure black. Yeah, you get that screen burn, you get it imprinted in your eyes and you blink.

Yeah, yeah, definitely. What about grid systems? What do you think? Yeah, I remember back in the day when there weren't really, it wasn't, you know, the obvious, especially in web design.

You know, when I got into web design, I was just kind of creating pages with some kind of, there was a strategy behind it in the way things were set up. But I never thought of it being like there's a grid system behind it. I was just putting down everything on the page and organizing it in a certain way. And then later on, you know, I sat down and said, alright, okay, so you've got, this is grid system, you can have three columns, four columns, six columns, two columns, one column, one column, one column, one column.

And you can arrange them how you like. And yeah, so it started to make more sense to me when I started using, I think it was called the 960 grid or something. I can't remember, it was a framework. Yeah.

Huge help days. And I think getting a grid down or working on a grid canvas, like if you're, you know, where the design tools are, if you've got a grid canvas set up and it'll make your life so much easier to arrange your content on a page. Yeah. We know it could be a website, it could be designing a business card or a leaflet or something.

Having a grid in place definitely makes life easier. Yeah, exactly. It doesn't just apply to like columns on a website. It could be, you know, a pixel grid which you design an icon against.

Yeah. It could be guides that you put up on your page to set up your margins for your page layout and things like that. And it's just a case of making sure that things line up both horizontally and vertically. Vertical grid is very important as well.

The spacing between elements vertically as well. And yeah, there's quite a few different grid systems out there. Like you said, there's a 961, there's obviously bootstrap. Yeah.

And then there's another theory called eight point grid system, which is basically just some multiples of eight instead of 10. Most grid systems tend to stick with multiple of 10. So like margins and gutters are 10s, 20s, 30s and so on. But this one article is on the spec network, the podcast network, they had a blog as well.

I'll eat it again. The article, but one of their designers, Bryn Jackson, I believe it was, they wrote it. He wrote this article about the eight point grid system and it was just multiples of eight and said, and the reason for it was that eight has a lot more factors and multiples than 10 does because eight you can divide it in half and in quarters and in eight. Whereas with a 10, once you've once you go half size, you're at five and then once you need to go half again, then you're sitting in like half pixels and it's a really good article and it makes a lot of sense.

So I do tend to use an eight point system where I can now on the web is quite easy because you could set up variables for your margins and your paddings and sizes and then you can have multiples of those variables. So you only to say once in your design tools, things like Figmo sketch, you can adjust your nudge size. So the nudge size is like when you hold a shift and one of the arrow keys, how far an element moves by default is normally 10, but you can change that to eight as well. So it is something that you can adopt quite easily, but it's just you've got to change your way of thinking a little bit.

You're learning eight times table size. Yeah, I was going to say. Yeah, but just to say grid systems, they come in all sorts of shapes and sizes and they don't necessarily have to be like in neat grid. It could be a range of different columns and rows, but they're there for a reason and they're there just to help you align your elements, whether they are on the print, whether they're for print for the web or just small icon.

Yeah, one thing I found was a lot of websites that was designing a lot of the page layouts were very symmetrical. And when you're like doing a website and scrolling down, you're not kind of, you're not allowed to put this, but when it's all symmetrical, you're kind of just accepting what's there and you're not kind of pushed to kind of go into it and read. What I have found is by using Hotjar, which is a tool that allows you to kind of view people's web usage. It's really interesting.

I started to introduce asymmetrical layouts. So, you know, a lot of the side design, so left side is a bit bigger than the right side, overlapping a bit of using negative space, etc. And really starts to pull people into the page and get them to actually start reading stuff. Okay.

And I noticed it's really strange. I did some A.B. testing and just watched a couple of people via Hotjar and noticed their reactions to the two pages, two landing pages. And the asymmetric one was getting a lot more time being spent on it and a lot more interaction going on.

So, clicking through the gallery, you know, looking at the images, highlighting text, you know, kind of you can see the mouse pointer as well, kind of where they're placing it and what they're doing with it. Whereas the symmetrical one, it was not about going on, it was like browsing through it. I guess it's like a pull quote, you know, that you get on an article, the whole reason that that quote is there is to draw your eye to something. And it's normally a bigger font, maybe different color, normally like slightly offset or sticking out of the grid out of the box.

Yeah, just like throws people off guard. Like, you know, you're here reading all this block of text, but here's something that's just off to the side and it'll just catch your attention and just break your flow a little bit. Yeah, because a lot of times you think about designing, you think about how you think about neat and perfect and symmetrical and nice and isn't always away, especially with layouts like this, that people are going to be looking at reading, et cetera. Yeah.

Well, there is a star for that. There is like the minimalist style where everything's very neat and straight and, you know, small and compact and petite and regular, all those sorts of words. But then you've got like brutalist design, which is there to throw you off and it's like a big big fonts and maybe throws in weird italics and overlapping images and things that just don't quite sit together, but they also do sit together because that's, you know, they're running with it. So there's quite a lot of design styles and these styles have like evolved over the years, aren't they?

They're not the only way they just sort of come about again, again, again, again in different formats. Yeah, I guess there's quite a lot of principles. It's good to know them, good to understand what they are and why they're there. So we move on to like the specifics of certain types of designs as well that you might need to know.

So you've got print, you've got the web, you've got product design, you've got maybe app design or the types of design, industrial design. No, no too much of an industrial design, but you've got, I think, you know, you can put interiors in there, you can put, you know, garden design, which was something I was interested in. So you can get models in college, interesting, you've got to get into your architecture and understand like your bird's eye view, orthographic projection. Yeah, really kind of crazy kind of stuff.

You sort of get your head around 3D, which is a whole different ball game when it comes to design because web, et cetera, is all 2D. But, you know, that side of it, you can understand the third dimension and how that works. So for the purpose of like, for this podcast and the type of audience we probably have, so we're probably looking at web print, possibly in mainly app design, I would say. Illustration, which is blown up on the web recently.

A lot of people just getting into illustration, creating really nice illustrations for websites. Yeah, definitely. So what I'm going to get is, whatever your style of design or your chosen field is, if you want to be a good designer in that field, you need to know what's possible and what the limitations and what the possibilities are of that field as well. So for print, you know, understanding how how color works differently and print and how it works on screen and how to how you may be designing your artwork on a screen, but then when you need to send it to a printer, you need to make some adjustments and make sure that the color space is correct.

So on a screen, you're going to be viewing things in RGB color space and then when you want to send it to printer, you're going to be working with the CMYK color space and how that separation works. You might also need to know how different paperwork and how much color certain paper stock can take and things like that. Learn your pantomones as well, pantom on references and what they are. We used it a lot of print design when we first started way before we got into the web.

Both of us, I think we were well-interpreting design designers, flyers, brochures and booklets, business cards. And it's one of those things where if you get it wrong, you get your work back from the printer and you're like, well, this looks like nothing like what I sent you. And then, again, the printer tells you, well, you sent me an RGB file and out printer and it freaks out differently and all of a sudden your blue looks like a yellow. You get a negative basically.

I remember that I had to do you once, when I first got into it. And RGB worked to them. They didn't even tell me, they didn't correct it or anything. They just printed it all off, send it back to me.

Here you go mate. Look at it. It was literally a negative version of what I designed. It was like, this is a right thing.

It's surprising how wrong it can go, isn't it? Yeah. But even like I was saying with the paper stock and how much ink you can have on it, there is such a thing as having too much color. It may not look like too much color on screen, but once you start printing, you're putting layers and layers of ink onto this paper and it can go to the point where the ink just bleeds through.

So it's about choosing the right thickness of paper to match the amount of color that you've got on the page. So print design is a whole world in itself. Yeah. I think some point is that if you want to get to print design, look up some links that we can put in the notes regarding what values to use, especially for like any of your black tones and blues, et cetera.

Because there's special kind of combinational values you can use to get the right kind of black when you're printing. Sometimes when you do it, if you do what you think is probably black, when it's printed, it's not. Yeah. Because on screen you might do 100% black RGB, which is like 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 6, 0, and then you then convert that to CMYK and it comes out like a washed grey color.

Yeah. Okay. So you've got CMYK. So cyan, magenta, yellow, and K4.

What's the case then for? Geez. Black, isn't it? Why is it K?

I don't know. I didn't know. We haven't done print in a while. But anyway, K is black.

And you think, all right, let me put the K value to 100%. That's going to be pure black, isn't it? No. It doesn't work quite.

It's going to look horrible. It's going to use too much ink and it's going to bleed through paper. So then you need to find the right balance. Yeah.

I can't know what I used to use. It was 64, I can't remember. But it's the wrong version of it. Definitely.

And you can see that if you've got a laser printer at home or even just an ink check printer with just four separate colors, if all you ever do is print in black and white, you'll notice that all your colors are getting used up as all because that's the printer. It's not enough to mix the colors to give you a good looking black without putting too much ink on the paper. It's pretty clever. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. Bleed as well. Another massive thing with print design.

No, you'll bleed. Yeah. Now just say you're going to send your artwork to a printer and it's going to cut the corners off. Yeah.

It's going to chop it all off and you're like, what? You need a whole shell up into it. You should. Because it is as I've played it because it sounds like I used to do a lot of print design, like magazines, leaflets, business cards, posters.

And it's really complicated. Like a two kind of print process. You use process colors and you need to give them the value of the ink still using from Photoshop. We're using your pen tone, a swatch.

Yeah. Yeah. And things get really, really hairy when you're messing around with a two color, a three color process. We're going to get into that now.

Yeah. All you sketch users out there, all you figure me users don't even bother trying to print your work professionally because you're not going to get the right colors out of those two apps. You're going to have to go to InDesign or more in a good little bit. This episode of Inspect is sponsored by portbund.com where you can get a free dot design domain name for one whole year.

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So to get your hands on a free dot design domain name for one year, head to portbund.com forward slash TLD forward slash design and enter the code, inspect podcast at checkout. Thank you to portbund for sponsoring our show. So on the web, you've got to know things like, well, you've got to know about your devices. What devices are you building the web for?

Different browsers, what capabilities are. It's very easy to design the hell out of a website, but you might not be able to build it if you need to support an older browser, like an Internet Explorer. How does it work across different device sizes, mobile tablet and very large screens. A lot of the time you see designers make the mistake of designing to a laptop screen because they're using a MacBook, for example, and maybe build a website to scale 100% only if you're on a laptop screen and then later on down the line, it's on 32 inch one or something.

I'll read it. It just looks like it's low enough proportion, right? It happens a lot. So it's knowing things like that, knowing your media, knowing where your design is going to end up is important.

Go anything else, don't do that? I've covered it there, response to design is huge now, mobile first. Don't get hung up on how a website is looking on a laptop desktop when chances are over 78% of the users will be on a mobile. Design for mobile, anything snap-to-toting each other on a mobile, right?

Let's start with looking at it. But how can you make them more interesting for the user? Take an image instead of displaying the center of the screen, push it off the right a little bit, nudge it out the way, use your negatives or margins, et cetera. just making things interesting for mobile where you can.

But definitely, you know, mobile first trying to get into the habit, it's something I've found even to this day harder to kind of get into. Yeah. But yeah, trying to get into the habit of designing for mobile first. Yeah, it does because it makes you limit yourself, right?

Well, you don't have to limit yourself. That's not the right way to think of it. It puts you into a smaller box. Right.

So it puts some restrictions onto you and you have to get creative. It's not necessarily a limitation. But it makes you think about what's the most important information. Because you need to get that into your mobile design first.

And then as you expand to become screen sizes, you can maybe start introducing a bit more flair, just for visual sake. But the information that you need to get across in your design needs to be there on the mobile first, right? Yeah. Yeah.

What about App Design? You think? Oh, yeah. You know, I mean, I haven't done many.

But there's a lot to think about there. You're looking at your devices, you know, is it going to be native? And you go think about that using what users developing, what they're using for developing, what tools are in place. You know, you can get very, very creative design, but is that all going to be possible in terms of the build side of things, right?

You know, I'm very new to it. You know, similar to mobile, web design, mobile web design, very similar to that. Yeah. But one important thing with you doing app design for iOS or Android is they both those platforms have got some guidelines that you need to follow.

You know, your apps will get rejected if they don't meet certain guidelines. So you can't do whatever you want. Is that taking the design into account as well then? Yeah.

Yeah. To an extent. Yeah. Obviously, there's some there's some leeway for certain things.

Like if you're designing a game, for example, then you've got a bit more freedom, right? Yeah. If you're designing like a functional app, let's say you're designing an email client, there's going to be an expectation for it to be designed in a way where you can navigate in a certain style. Got you.

You know, your actions need to be clear how to have to go in your email have things like gestures, which people are going to be used to does your app include those gestures, have your account for those swiping and stuff like that. So basically, get to know the guidelines of the device that you're designing for, get to know the specs of the device. You know, what is the screen size? What is the resolution?

How does that impact your design? How does it work when it's in landscape and portrait and stuff like that? So just getting to know your medium as well as you can. Yeah.

In a display, all of that, you know, you don't want your graphics coming out with blurry and stuff. So yeah, definitely. It's surprising how many websites and have still have blurry graphics today. Mm.

So many. Yeah. So many. But it's not obvious to everyone, right?

And this is where you can learn. Definitely. What else have we got? What about being a bit more specialist in certain fields?

Yeah. I think, you know, it's all good learning about design, but you know, you might want to get into a specific sort of area. The way I did it was, you know, I was just a graphic designer to design everything. Logos, branding, all kinds of, you know, large format, small format.

Luflet's suppose you name it. But then I went across to web design. Design some apps, designed motion graphics, and some 3D work. Pretty much touched everything on that sort of spectrum and kind of became a kind of all-rounder.

And it's probably good to know a bit of everything, I think. But trying not to be a jack of all trades, trying to find that one area where you can kind of master it and be a specialist at. But then if anything else comes along, you can easily kind of tackle it. Yeah, that's what I think is good to know all of them.

But kind of, yeah, specialized one aspect of it, definitely. I thought you were going to go somewhere else with that, too, honestly. It's been a long day. It's been a long day.

I think we have covered everything. We're just coming to MIBIT and MIBIT is very similar to what you mentioned. Software we haven't really mentioned, ever. Software, yeah.

Invest in design tools. Okay. So what about software then? You can get started for free.

You can pick up Figma, which is free. If you're going to be doing UI design, then you want to reach for a tool which is vector-based, like Figma, like Sketch, like Adobe XD. They're all good. They're all very similar.

Find one that's comfortable for you. They will definitely reach the same end goal when it comes to maybe, why would you pick Photoshop over? Like Sketch or Figma? What do you think?

Today? Yeah. It's a difficult one. I grew up using, well, I started using Core Raw.

I started using Core Raw back in the day and Photopaint and all these sort of classics. I don't have to sit around, but then Photoshop was the tool to have because everybody was using its industry standard. So that's the only reason why I started using Photoshop. But then it was lagging behind when all of these other tools came out.

The likes of Sketch and Figma, Photoshop were still behind and they jumped on the whole, you know, responsive web design setup. And it just made sense to jump away from Photoshop and, you know, although Photoshop now supports all of that, it does. It supports all of that kind of stuff. But, you know, I've left it permanently and I'm perfectly a bit of a bit of a bit of a bit of a bit of a compliment to be honest with you when it comes to it.

Can you reckon? Do you think anyone who is designing for the web uses Photoshop to design for web design? I've had files sent over to me, PST fonts from designers, web designers. Yeah.

There is a need for it as well. There is always going to be a need for graphics in design, you know, rockets to graphics rather than just vectors all the time. And the manipulation of those images as well creating textures, creating, you know, brush effects. These sorts of things are very hard to do in Figma and Sketch.

Obviously you can import graphics into those so you may do the final layout in in sketch stigma but in creating the actual artwork you'll probably still reach Photoshop now and then as well I haven't been in Photoshop in a long time I've got Affinity Designer which is okay yeah as an alternative but I did love Photoshop. Yeah I was brilliant but I moved to Affinity Designer and I use Affinity Photo so anything Photoshop oriented I'll use Affinity Photo for it. Yeah I meant Affinity Photo actually. Yeah and Affinity Design is your vector baseline as well.

I'll use that for anything else and illustrate it using it. So I think Affinity Designer kind of replaces that. Do you like Affinity? Yeah Affinity also have Affinity Publisher which I haven't used but that's like their Adobe InDesign alternative yeah so if you're going to print design magazine layouts then it's worth checking out Affinity Publisher.

I'm just saying it's not that expensive. It's not that expensive you just pay a one off fee for it. 23 pounds for a one off fee that's pretty good. Go to InDesign which is going to be a monthly around 10 pounds a month.

Yeah quite a big saving. I think they're good alternatives and then recently I came across a vector nator on the Mac which is really nice to vector tool but I'd say if you're going into illustration or you know typeface you're going to create typeface and once vector nator is going to be the tool for it doesn't it? Yeah definitely. Yeah okay good stuff.

Well based on our notes I think we've sort of covered the gamut there. That's another word you need to learn if you're going into design. Yeah but it's really a sign year. Learn what gamut means.

Let us know on Twitter if you know what it means. So yeah personality wise someone who's creative got an eye for detail you know it got an interest in the way things look and the way things work. Not everyone has but it's something that you know can be learned and can be appreciated. It's good if you've already got that.

Learn your design principles. Have a look at D-terams principles especially for your product design. Because I think they are definitely a bit more product design focus but they do apply to learn about color typography grids and then yeah know the medium know what sort of design you're planning on doing and just get to know that platform. Get to know what's possible what limitations you have how you might need to change your your way of working what tools are correct for that medium and just basically take a deep dive into it.

And I think most importantly is like there's no bad design really. There's just you know it's very subjective there's definitely a good design but I wouldn't say that there's definitely a bad design. It's just it's just tastes isn't it? But tastes yeah tastes is something they can also develop as well and change it as well over time.

So it's one of those things designed is just a funny old thing isn't it? It's it's a good job to be in industry. Yeah I think so I mean I love it to be honest you know constantly looking at different websites out there and bookmarking them and thinking oh you know a bit of inspiration to use that someone. Where's some good places to get inspiration?

Well some of them are. You know I used to use those CSS ZEN and those kind of websites back in the day. Now it's a case of I just browse the web I literally just look at what other websites are looking like these things. For example e-commerce kind of trends I'll go to the guys who are really pushing it so like ASOS and people like that.

Amazon are constantly changing small things and always introducing something different on their checkout process and stuff. So that's heavily design oriented it really does. Yeah definitely. You know need a lot of work to make that you know.

Imagine it just proves that design is never done. Exactly yeah that's another thing I was going to say anything you design is never set in stone. Like for example when I design a build a website with another client just remember it's never set in stone this is space one it's not evolved your site is constantly evolving. It's improved so just keep that in mind as well.

Yeah but just going back to inspiration yeah good places BHUNTS. Yeah BHUNTS. Brilliant place for inspiration. Drivel of course.

Even just looking at like stock photography, stock vectors things like that. Just get an idea of what's trending. Watch style people are designing in these days and watch the photography people are doing and using. All these sorts of things will really help.

Keeping our blogs keeping our news you know following companies who are passionate about design. It'll all just add to your overall arsenal of tools to choose from right when you're next designing your next project. Definitely you'll only be getting that record all the time so yeah inspiration. I always look at other in the big agencies the big boys out there whether they're content creators or web developers or whatever.

Yeah. I'm always looking at what they're doing and what's in their portfolio for inspiration. Yeah definitely. Good stuff.

All right well that's a wrap for today. Hope you like that. Hope you got some good information on how to become a designer if you are considering joining this field. If you are a designer already good to hear your thoughts on what it takes and how you go into the industry is off.

But otherwise yeah we'll catch you in the next show. See you then. Bye.