Are you a designer who looks at the work of others and thinks ‘Why doesn’t mine look that good?” Are you self-taught, or still early in your career? You may feel like there is a huge difference in quality between your work and those who inspire you. Its time to take you to the next level as a designer!

In this post, we’ll give you the steps you need to start competing with professionals. 

This post is aimed at all design fields. We can give you the advice you need to elevate your work and start taking on the professional, get more opportunities and get you to the next level. 

You Belong Here!

What you are experiencing is called ‘Imposter Syndrome’ and it’s easily remedied.

I’ve been in the Design Industry for over ten years, and I’ll share the secrets to get you and your design work to the next level. 

This post will give you some context as to what you are feeling, how to fix it and start getting the opportunities you want in the design world.

Not in with the crowd yet?

You have decided you want to be a Designer. Something about being creative makes you feel alive, and you want to work in an industry that lets you do that. I get it. I love Design too. 

But here’s the thing. Design is in some ways still an industry surrounded in mystery for outsiders and those new to the it. 

At the moment, it’s easy to be intimidated by the price of software, educational courses, and the work of others. These factors can make it feel like your work isn’t as good, or that your work lacks professionalism. 

The truth is there’s a high threshold to enter the design industry. You have to learn the software, you have to learn the rules of each design field, and you have to trust your work. That threshold before you start gaining opportunities is to ensure that your work stands out in a highly competitive field.

What I want to share with you is that although you still have to get over these barriers, there are multiple ways you can elevate your work to do so.

When I first started, I felt the same way as you. I would look at design portfolios online and think my work looked rubbish in comparison and thought I was stuck. I was focused on comparing myself to others rather than looking at my work itself. 

Now, I am a multi-disciplined Designer who is not only confident in my work but believes there’s so much that is being kept from new creatives, like you.

How You can get to Your Next Level

At Nollie, we want to help create the next community of versatile designers. Not just designers who are satisfied with their work but who can adapt to different design fields. 

As this blog grows, we’ll look back at other Polymath designers from history, learning from them, and applying them to a modern audience.

Take Scottish Designer, Charles Rennie MacKintosh as an example. His work included buildings, furniture, interiors, fonts, paintings, and then some. You can see his influence anywhere you turn in Glasgow. We want you to be one of those designers.

If you want to be one of those designers too, then please join our community.

For us to do our job, we have to get you over this hurdle so you can not only be satisfied with your work, but happy to apply it to another design specialty. You need to build up your process first.

The Power of Your Process

Why does your work look different from everyone else’s? 

The biggest difference between you and the designers who inspire you isn’t that they’ve practiced more, or that they have more talent than you. Its PROCESS. The most important element you have as a Designer, and chances are it’s your process that needs work.

When professionals start designing for a client, what do you think they start doing? It isn’t generating thousands of concepts… That’s Stage 3 in the Design Process!

A Design Process is something every good designer has. The process is what separates the great design from the mediocre. We’ve posted about its importance before.  

If you are self-taught or starting this is likely something that hasn’t come up before, or if it has, hasn’t been given the significance it deserves. Your design process is like an undercurrent that flows under the surface of your work, leading you to the final solution.

A Design Process is split up into multiple stages, Planning, Research, Concepts, Development, Detail, Pitching, and Promotion. If you don’t do any of these while working on a project you’re left with a half-baked idea.

The Design Process

A quick summary of each of these would be:

• Planning: Checking you understood the brief and setting up a plan to get a solution by the deadline.
• Research: Find out what is expected from your design idea.
• Concepts: The fun bit starts and you can start coming up with initial ideas
• Development: You and your clients’ favorite ideas are taken forward and prototyped
• Detail: Getting the design ready for the client.
• Pitching: Pitching your final idea to your client
• Promotion: Putting your work out there for all to see and admire.

Change your mindset about Design. It isn’t just bashing out ideas till something sticks. 

Design (the verb) is the same as any other creative outlet, like writing or cooking…

For example:

A good chef doesn’t just come up with a recipe out of thin air. They know their audience’s tastes, they know the type of restaurant their customers eat at, they check the quality of ingredients and they taste it as they go. 

Design is similar. Except you need to check the quality of your materials, know your user and what they require, and prototype your idea to make sure it works.

Having a solid knowledge of your Process is having a solid understanding of yourself as a designer.

Level up your Workflow

Another factor that can hold back new designers is the entry requirements to becoming a professional. 

It is now getting easier than ever to start getting into design, thanks to open-source (free) software like Blender or Gimp. We have new tools like Canva that offer free and paid versions of graphic design software. It’s great at introducing people to design and developing basic design skills, but it doesn’t have the same power under the hood as other design software. It’s seen differently among the professional design community.

Open-source software is constantly getting better, so discovering ways to begin your design journey is getting easier and easier. But it doesn’t make you skilled at a professional level. That’s like saying because everyone has a camera on their smartphone, everyone is now a professional photographer. That’s not how it works.

While having access to this software means you can increase your skills, it is one of the factors that separates you from the professionals. Canva is great, it’s free, and it’s great for beginners. 

If you want to be seen as a professional, you have to work like one. You should make the switch from Canva to an industry leader like Adobe or Figma. If you want to see a full software breakdown, leave a comment.

If you want to get hired as a designer, your employer will likely expect you to have an understanding of Adobe Creative Cloud. They have been the industry standard for 30 years and show no signs of stopping.

How Do Your Designs Compare?

So what are the differences between your work and the work of others? 

Does their work look clean, elegant, and well-balanced when compared to yours? If so, it means your throwing too many elements into your work. There’s a VERY famous phrase in design…

“FORM FOLLOWS FUNCTION”

Louis H. Sullivan, 1896

What that means is that your work should be as simple as it can be, while still solving the problem it was designed to solve. 

Going back to the chef analogy, imagine you are in a restaurant. You ask the chef for a burger. You expect some meat between a bun, maybe some cheese and salad. But if the chef recently learned how to make a fish paste and put that in your burger too, you’d be fuming.

That is what it feels like when you put extra stuff in your design because you think it looks cool. You should go in with the approach that less is more. Spend time to refine and edit your design, removing the extra elements that add nothing.

Design should be so simple that you wish you thought of it first, but this time, you did.

Where You can Find Your Audience

Another factor that is a big difference between you and the other designers is where you got your education. Many people who are working as industry professionals, will have a formal education. 

If you are self-taught, you can still enter the design industry. Not all design courses are created equal. Some are heavily theory based and you have to write essays about design vs practical skills-based learning. We go more into Design Education in this post.

If you want to compete against people with formal training, you need to prioritize practical skills. That’s what will give you a competitive edge. 

To get yourself noticed you need to put yourself out there and get your work noticed. Upload your portfolio to Behance or create a portfolio website. Ask for feedback any chance you can get.

If you want to give yourself a an edge over those with formal training, the fastest way to get an audience using your practical skills is to set up an exhibition. Look at local collectives, galleries and online to find open calls for you to submit your work.

Plan your Projects Like the Pros

Another way you can make a change to your design work is to plan your project better. As I mentioned earlier, most designers plan their projects thoroughly. 

The first stage of the project should be reserved for taking time to plan your time until the deadline, making sure you understand what is required, and having a base idea of what the customer wants.

This process might sound like a lot of extra work, but it doesn’t take long. A few days maximum.

If you want to plan your project easily, you can download our Project Planning Workbook, available here.

Ways to Improve your Process

In these blogs, we break down the larger issue but give you tools to leave with.

• Think and write about your Process
• Know your way around industry software
• Remove unnecessary design elements
• Build Practical Skills
• Plan your Project
• Take time to plan your projects

We have more practical tips you can use to better yourself as a designer.

Let us Help You Get to the Next Level

The fast way to develop your process is to use our Brief Interpretation & Planning Workbook, available here. The workbook will get you quickly through the initial stages of a design project. 

The book contains templates you can use to easily plan for deadlines, understand the intended user of your work and what you want out of the project. This is used by professional designers when dealing with clients, and now you can do it too.

We’ve made it easier to start your project on the right path. The worksheet will give you the tools to quickly go through the Design process. 

We’re Here to Help

Now you should have some steps you can take so that you can bring your work to the next level. It is important to remember design is a creative skill and it takes time to master, especially if you’re doing it on your own back.

This blog is intended to bring you to the next stage in your design work. At Nollie, we want to increase design literacy and we share transferable skills within the design industry.

How can we help you level up your Design Skills? Comment Below!