Becoming a Better Designer

How Can I Become a Better Designer

Recently I created a website titled, "the black orchid group", as a catalog of many of the different projects I have worked on and am in the process of working on. I by no means consider myself a designer, however, I enjoy creating and the learning process inherit to the design field. With this lens I hope to bring you some useful information, a few websites and tutorials for reference and hopefully some decent design work. This lens will directly corelate to "The Black Orchid Group" site and blog, journaling the steps I take to become more skilled designer. I welcome any ideas, critiques or suggestions with open ears. Otherwise sit back and enjoy my struggle as I try to perfect my vector skills, develop my CSS knowledge and create some cool stuff.

Design: A Definition

Design is defined differently by many in the field - this section will change regularly.

Found on the web, this definition of design is offered by Carnegie Mellon University School of Design professor Dick Buchanan.

""Design is the human power to conceive, plan, and realize products that serve human beings in the accomplishment of any individual or collective purpose."

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Announcements and Updates

I just finished posting a list, yes another list, entitle "10 Useful Starting Points for an Aspiring Designer". Basically I wanted to start compiling a list of sites around the net that inspire, inform and teach the art of good design. I have only added ten to this list as I would like it to remain an open ended invitation for you to add any and all links you see as helpful to the aspiring designer.

Developer Toolbar

I wanted to take the time to praise a tool or toolbar that I recently downloaded. The Web Developer extension from chrispederick.com has been an essential tool over the past few days as I try to shape a better web page out of CSS. I highly reccomend checking it out if you are self teaching yourself as it allows you to easily view, edit and validate code right from your web browser. Of course these changes are not permanent however you are able to save right from this tool replacing your old CSS file and uploading it to your server. Makes life easier because I know I have spent countless hours modifying and replacing code trying to figure out what I was doing wrong. If there are any others out there like this please let me know as I would love to give them a trial run, but for now I am sticking with firefox and the developer toolbar.

The Power of Observation

This tip is something quite obvious and quite often recommended, but I am not sure that everyone really takes advantage of it like they should. It is the power of observation, taking the time to really absorb the design of the world around you. Look around the room you are in it's everywhere, from the carpet on the floor to the chair you sit in. I bring this us because I realized that I am guilty of not paying attention. After reading "A Whole New Mind" I was enlightened to really pay attention. So now as I travel the US spending time in various cities, hotels and airports I pay close attention to everything from the architecture to the billboards on the side of the freeway. There are so many inspirational design elements out there that I could build a portfolio in my mind in a matter of minutes. So I leave you with this take a minute and take it all in you never know when the design of that ad for the local city hospital may carry over into your next web project.

Screen Shots and What Nots

From time to time I will add some flickr photos for your enjoyment and laughter. The first one we have here is a screenshot of my webpage (which has already changed slightly).