Ever since starting my design journey, I have been so focused and passionate about UX and identifying and solving users' problems. I have come to love the creativity, problem-solving, and discovery that come with UX design as well as the work I am doing.
As I continue growing as a designer, I know that my visual design skills are the weakest in my design arsenal. I wanted to find a way to grow these skills while not overwhelming myself with a ton of new information, so I decided to do a short beginner-friendly tutorial challenge for 30 days straight.
For 30 days, I followed a different visual design tutorial that not only grew my visual skills but taught me so many tips and tricks within my design tool (I used Sketch for this challenge). Here are my top insights from this challenge:
It's okay to mess up. I learned the power of trial and error and learning on the fly has become a new strength of mine!
Share your work! Show your work to your design community and gather insights from more seasoned designers. I shared my designs on LinkedIn throughout my challenge and not only did I make some valuable connections, but I am now working on a project for a new application to provide illustrations to their video because the Product Lead saw my designs from this challenge!
Even if you aren't using the design tool in the tutorial, you can still try to translate those instructions to what you have access to. All of these tutorials in this challenge were made for Adobe Illustrator, but I only had access to Sketch so I had to learn to translate these instructions to the Sketch platform. A new example of adaptability and problem solving to add to the resume!
The mask tool in Sketch became my new best friend.
While I was doing this challenge and sharing my work on LinkedIn, I received a lot of messages from my design community asking what guide I was following. Since I was finding the tutorials myself, I wasn't following any specific guidelines.
To provide a resource for those who were interested in taking on a challenge like this, I decided to compile my tutorials and work to create my own guide for beginners looking to improve their visual design skills.
If you would like to check out the challenge, you can find it here!
For those who decide to take on this challenge, feel free to share your work and tag me! I would love to see what you come up with and how you feel about the challenge.
- Kaity
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