BaseKit

20th May 2010

For the newbie web designer the online community is a great thing. There is an abundance of tutorial sites and blogs that can help you build your skills as a designer. There are hundreds if not thousands of showcases of the best web designs and lists of designers you should follow on Twitter. You can learn a hell of a lot from these resources, however some of these sites can be crippling to the confidence of the newbie web designer.

I started my career in web design just under 2 years ago. I had been teaching myself web design as a hobby prior to this and had never designed or built a site for anybody other than myself. I landed a job in a small IT team providing desktop support and the day came when my company needed a new website. This was when design became much more than a hobby for me; that first web site led to many more and I was officially the web designer within the company, which then led to my freelancing.

It was at this point I began to notice the negative effect that the multitude of design related websites can have on a newbie designer. Between the day job and my freelance projects I was spending 18 hours a day as a designer, I’d spend hours every day scouring the web for inspiration and reading articles.

The problem I encountered was that I found myself comparing my own designs to those designs that featured in the “Best Of” type galleries. I would look through these lists of really great designs that had beautiful typography, great layouts, and fantastic graphics; they just had that “wow” factor about them. I felt massively inferior as a designer and began to look at my previous designs in a whole different light. The projects that I had once been so proud of now appeared “amateurish” to me and I began to question my own ability as a designer.

I became so obsessed with the notion that my previous designs were not as good as those designers who featured in these types of showcases and my future work suffered as a result. Every time I opened Photoshop to start a new layout design, a little voice in the back of my mind would tell me to give it up and that my designs suck. I would spend hours designing a PSD layout only to decide that I hated the design and start over from scratch which would ultimately lead to me hating the new design and the vicious circle would start again. I became my own biggest critic, but not in a good way. My self-criticism wasn’t constructive or useful; it was becoming destructive. I love everything about web design and what I do but at this point I didn’t enjoy my work at all, mostly because of this ill conceived idea that I was no good at it and that I would never be as good as some of the awesome designers featured on the web.

The turning point came when I was asked by my company to design a full page print advertisement for the magazine of a local business networking event they were attending and that the deadline for the submission of the artwork was that afternoon. I had no time to research, no time to search for ideas or inspiration. I opened up Illustrator, got to work and we submitted the artwork before the deadline. The next day I learned from our Company Director that the magazine publisher had asked if we had used a professional marketing agency to design our full page advert as it looked as though it had been professionally done. This was when I realised that I wasn’t as bad at this design gig as I thought I was. I had done no research or visited my usual web haunts for inspiration before starting this project – I designed what I thought would be best for the job in hand and it turns out that it was good.

I had the missed the point of these online sources of inspiration – these showcases of best designs. They weren’t telling me how good design should be, they were telling me how good design could be. I opened up my folder of past projects and began looking though my old designs. This time instead of seeing all of my previous hard work as design failures, I noticed progression. Each design was “better” in some way than the previous; I was improving as a designer and my work was getting better with each design. I had only been in the web design industry a very short time, I was still learning and it was foolish of me to compare my own designs with those of designers who had been in the job a very long time.

I guess the point of this post is a word of caution to newbie designers. There are many many great designers out there, some have really amazing portfolios of work and it can be too easy to feel intimidated by how good their work is and how your own work will never be as good. This was the mistake that I made and it could have very easily ended my design career before it even began. I am still my own biggest critic and I think that’s important, I won’t tell myself that my designs look great if I don’t truly believe it, but I also won’t beat myself up about it. I guess it all comes down to your own confidence in your work along with the desire to continue learning and improving to become the type of designer that you want to be.

This post was written by Lee Harding of Lee Harding Web Design – creating modern beautiful and usable websites. Want to write for the BaseKit Blog – get in touch!