How to Become a Design Master Chef

• Learn and Understand Color Combinations: Colors make up everything, a good UI is useless with the wrong colors. There are plenty resources that will help you with this try any of these really cool tools to get the best combinations. But before you jump on to these sites a word of advice, trust your gut and look & learn.
  • Adobe Kuler
  • Sphere
  • DesignInspiration
  • Paletton

• Practice: I guess this is the time when we pull out a fancy quote to convey this – “Practice makes Progress” and its so true in this context. The more you do the better you get at everything. Starting from color combinations to design selections, even your knowledge of tools will get better overtime giving faster turn around times and greater efficiencies.

• Understand your Client: In the end you need to remember who you’re designing for. Customer is king and this holds true in all walks of business. If your design doesn’t appeal to the customer it’s pointless debating how good you are. Take time to understand your clients requirements, tastes and preferences and build on that. You’re free to add your expert touch but your design needs to appeal to your customer. If the customer is happy, he’ll go spread the good word for you which means more money for you!
• Method to Madness: A great designer is precise. If a certain element doesn’t have a purpose on the page then it probably shouldn’t be there. Every element on your canvas has to serve a purpose, add value to your vision.
• Keep Looking: Look around for inspiration, there are some really great sites that help to this effect. Now, we’re not asking you to plagiarize someone else’s design, but learn from it, see how the colors are used, different design elements that form the design and start thinking on those lines to improve yourself over a period of time. Here are a few of the best ones we know:
  • Dribbble.com
  • Behance.net
  • Httpster.net
  • Designspiration.net
  • Niice.co
• Plan Ahead: Before starting any project, make design sketches on how your want to go about the work. It’ll save you a lot of valuable time when actual designing.
• Know thy Typography: Design is 95% typography. Before starting any project make sure you’ve selected the right fonts and sizes. Make sure you’ve selected fonts according to project i.e print or web based project. Make sure the font has enough Kerning and Tracking for better readability. Don’t use too many types of fonts per project, it looks very unprofessional. Instead use fonts weight and size for distinguishing content.
• White Noise: Let there be enough white space between text and images, creating enough breathing room to absorb the features. It helps by keeping viewers focused on the necessary content and flow of the page.

• Keep it light: Reduce image sizes while keeping best quality, reduces website load time big time. Make simpler but effective web elements for the website project.