Graphic design beginner: How do you get to the point where a design is in your head?

Question

I know this question might sound stupid but I'm a programmer and I want to learn graphic design. Well, from what I see you have to learn stuff like color theory, composition, spacing, etc. I get that but how do I get problem and just solve it. I say this because as a programmer when I get a problem I'm able to come up with a solution in my head, whereas in graphic design I have to constantly try things to get something palatable.

Other than that I'm pretty decent at drawing so I haven't really faced any problem there.

Answer 1

The secret is: Your brain lies. If you were to draw what your brain says it would be wrong in so many ways that it would hurt. Your brain can get an awful idea thats missing 90% of everything cool and it could still seem perfect. You can't draw it because its not real, its just an illusion that stops you from second guessing yourself. If there would be no such mechanism in you brain you couldn't get anything done.

The real secret is that even the best of artists keep making many revisions, thumbnails sketches and so on. They do most often not get it right on one go. Unless they are copying what they allready see in real life in front of them. The work refines what you have.

In this process your brain does get better and you will eventually recognize what is truly there and what is not. But by then it will never be the same again. You still need to do revisions since you can not keep it in your brain in one go.

Answer 2

Creativity

Creativity isn't a set-in-stone skill that you can read up on and learn to the letter. To a certain extent some people have it and some don't. That being said it is something you can become better at.

Immerse yourself in the field you want to learn and in design in general. Find and follow designers you like, read design blogs and books, pay attention to the design of everything around you and read up on the history of design.

Practical skills

As you said, learning about things like color theory, composition and typography is all very important. Learning to use the correct tools is also important. For example, Adobe Illustrator for vector graphics, Photoshop for photo manipulation and InDesign for layout. The specific tools or software you use doesn't matter, there are a lot of alternatives to Adobe products, what is important is using the correct tools for what you are doing and learning to use them proficiently enough so that you can concentrate on designing and not trying to figure out how to do X with Y piece of software.

Practice

Learning the skills and theory needed to implement your ideas is obviously important, but getting to a point where you know what to do just takes - like anything else - practice.

When you started programming I'm sure you were in a similar situation. You try one thing, get it wrong, try something else, get it wrong, then you try something else and get it right. The more you do something the more you will understand what works. Especially with anything creative, there's no shortcut to learning what works and what doesn't.

In short, learn the skills and theory, immerse yourself in design and practice. The rest will follow.

Answer 3

I think with design, you never just come up with the perfect design in your head. What I find is that I get an OK concept in my head, I then draw sketches until I've honed my idea and it becomes a good design. I use this to essentially shake the tree and see if any other thoughts pop out. Then I like to do as many of the following as possible:

• Leave the design until the next day and take a look at it (self review)
• Get another designer to take a look at it and ask for honest feedback (peer review)
• Show the client and ask for feedback (client review)
• Get possible users / the intended audience to take a look and if applicable use it (user testing)

Now if it solves the visual problem, it's a better design. But given time (and in some cases money), I can further hone the design, but lets face it, in the real world, time is a luxury.

So, in conclusion, you can get a design in your head and as an experienced designer, but it's very rare that you will find the best possible solution to your problem with out the help of others.

Answer 4

You need a visual library

What is a "visual library" and how to work on it?

Practice like others have said and looking at a lot of design, art, the world really is how you get there.

Composition, Spacing and Color Theory are all parts of this visual library that needs to eventually exist at least in part in your head. All of us have some references, art, inspiration that we keep handy - but that's only to supplement that vast number of images that a designer already knows in their head.

Learning the tools WILL NOT get you there. Take a good book that you like and know really well. Close your eyes and visualize a character or a scene. Look - you just solved a design problem without any photoshop, illustrator, gimp, pen, pencil or anything else. Now you know what it should look like --- now you use the required tools to build it.

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To put it into more of a metaphor let's say you're going to build a wall. Well you know what walls look like so you have a visual library of some options. Now you think okay I want this wall to be this high and because its for this purpose I'll need this material. Let's say you visualize a nice stone mason wall. Only once you're at that point do you think, okay so I'm going to need to learn to dig a trench, and lay mortar, and understand the foundation, and the vertical joints. And to do these things I'm going to need to learn this tool, and that tool.

But see, you didn't need to know any of those tools or techniques to visualize a wall. You visualized that all from your experience with the world.

Answer 5

I sort of take issue with your assertion that you just come up with a complete solution to a problem. As someone who has been doing intermediate programming since the 70s, and being familiar with the iterative release-and-patch cycles for even the seemingly most simple tasks, I think that you may have oversimplified a little!

First and foremost, any program is going to solve several problems. The hardest problem is always reducing user freedom to the point that you can predict their inputs. Design is very similar to this.

The algorithms you develop are not the only possible solution to that particular problem and, in most cases, there are a very many possible routes to take: programming is an expressive medium with many dialects and languages, and programmers have styles.

If you peruse the math stackexchange(s) you will find people who post a mathematical solution that exactly captures the problem and expresses it in a way that people instantly grock because it comports well with their personal experience, and then they reduce it to the more standard simplified form that is in the crib sheets and is taught. This is a good example of variable presentations of a solution to a problem and how the simplest, most elegant is not always the first form.

So, how do you start?

Yes, some knowledge of color theory is helpful, but you don't need to know very much of it. In fact it has very little value outside of defending your ideas from a hostile audience (read: critique). The most important thing to know is: how will these colors work in black and white (kind of zen)? Am I dooming my client over 80% CMYK flood rate on all their jobs? Will they be able to afford the printing if I call for a foil stamped emboss/deboss with UV and 100% CMYK flood on plastic stock?

Technical knowledge of type is important, but you do not need to be a font creator to make use of them. The most important thing to be aware of is space. For type, this is leading (line spacing) and tracking/kerning (inter-word and inter-letter spacing respectively).

To be sure, to be the number one designer in the world, you probably need to have a deep knowledge, but to be above average? You need a basic cursory knowledge of the form and a desire to do better.

The best designs typically have no more than 2 of anything, communicate exactly and only what needs to be communicated, and do not crowd the space. Most of what good design is comes from the basic idea that space is luxury, and density is desperation.

Two font faces, two colors (white paper? pick black and one more), two halves. Two. You want more? Justify it to yourself, but make you do it.

After that, the only question you need to ask yourself is "am I embarrassed to submit this?" If yes, iterate.

The best place to start with learning design on the side is to go find some "designer's design books" or magazines about top-end design. By doing it, you can learn the technical aspects without need for a problem to solve. Then you get out a ruler and notebook, take notes, and then reproduce everything in it that you can. Then you will know space and composition and restraint.

Answer 6

Graphic design, like any other skill, is a mix of theory (the why) and practice (the how) but it is also an iterative process as one tries to identify an optimal design solution to a problem. You identify the constraints of the problem (the graphic must fit x pixels by y pixels and have two colors that work well against background) and from there start to put together possible solutions utilizing design theory and design practice. You iterate on these ideas until you find an appropriate solution. As your knowledge of design theory and your actual practice increases, you can more readily identify possible solutions to design problems, allowing you to more quickly identify optimal design approaches. This is similar to how one might re-use code from one project in another project but obviously tweaked to suit the second project's needs.

For further reading on design and creativity I suggest the following books: How Designers Think and Art and Fear

Answer 7

This is an incomplete answer but it is too long for a comment. I just wanted to be annoying and pick on the word "palatable".

I also was first a programmer. Graphic design is my second career. I remember that when I had no training as a designer whatsoever I thought of design more like art. I, as a programmer, solved problems. When my solution was ugly there was a design team that was able to make it pretty.

There is an element of art in design, of course, and in particular of "fine arts" because it uses common grounds with arts such as colour theory, composition, etc. But graphic design is as much as a problem solving discipline as programming is. The final task is most of the time to communicate a message effectively, not to embellish it. What you might be seeing as an "unpalatable" message might be a message that will not make it to its destination (e.g. an interface that will confuse the user, a poster that will get ignored or a text that will become unreadable). In that sense the task was not solved even if the programming (or print making, or bookbinding) is done exquisitely because the final objective was to communicate with a human audience.

You could think as graphic design (from a programmer's point of view) as the discipline that concerns itself with creating interfaces with human beings.

I found that making that mindset change helped me a lot to develop more objective workflows. I started to focus on the why and the how. The design tasks depended less on "inspiration" and more on sets of rules, laws and scripts that helped to build a better "interface" based on a set of specs.

You will find that sometimes you even build something that you would call "unpalatable" in the sense that its aesthetics might not be your personal cup of tea but that it was, nevertheless, a valid solution for the problem you were asked to solve.

As an example, take a look at Google's "Material Design" guidelines. Notice how must of the explanations are about "why this makes the message more clear to the user" than "why this makes the interface more aesthetically pleasing". Notice how the recognizable aesthetics of this style are the consecuence (as opossed to being the cause) of solving a problem on human perception and usability. https://www.google.com/design/spec/resources/color-palettes.html