If you’re a creative person, working in the field of web designing, I believe it is quite ordinary to lose energy in the middle of cranking out design after design. Fear not! This one is made for you. There is awesomeness headed your way!
While working with designs, designers are prone to juggling expectations of many clients, hit obstacles, disapprovals, rejections, creative block, distractions, and a lot more. Usually, the designers are hooked up with two big screens, struggling to maintain the focus, making an eye-catching design, and managing everything that brings success. A designer has to be insightful and professional at every step. In this article, you’ll find ways that will look after all your steps from planning and execution to smart work and communication. Let’s start:
Optimize Your Brain
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Get Your Creative Space
Creativity block is common and happens with designers. Therefore, set your boundaries to make it convenient to work. Every office should be tailored to the specific needs of people working there. In case you’re a freelancer, get a creative space for yourself. 72 percent of workers believe their future success in a company relies on their ability to be creative. As a creativity expert, it is important to have a space that is dedicated to creativity where you can brainstorm. Get along with organizing your space, keeping it bright, or finding a private space in a stressful environment for productive work.
Keep Clients Happy
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Don’t Lose Your Mind
Making clients happy is hard. The real problem is when designers have no idea how to manage clients. A strong foundation of mutual respect and trust is what builds a good client relationship. Somehow, keeping clients happy is also tied to communication. It’s all about talking to your clients regularly, managing expectations, and tackling the foreseeable problems but don’t sacrifice your happiness to satisfy a client’s unjustified anger. For example, with the website design of a construction company. You have to build visual interactive images with customers like the project image that the company has taken on…
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Use Pinterest for Mood Boards
We all have a vision ㄧ so do your clients. The idea is to keep a collection of your photos and items to convey design ideas to clients. Mood boards are a great way to communicate ideas, moods, and pitch creativity. It’s a great way to keep clients on your side and involve them in the initial design process. The clients love mood boards. For example, create a shared board on Pinterest, find a theme, get started, and invite your client to pin away.
Smart Work Approach
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Proofing Tool
Reviewing, proofing, and approval process of designs by clients is pretty hard. As a web designer, your mission is to design a website that will bring business to your clients. And the biggest challenge that comes up on the way is proofing. Your designs will have to go through corrections, suggestions, and more till they get the final approval. In the process of repetitive emails, you may happen to miss some important emails. A proofing tool, for this matter, becomes a designer’s best friend making the design approval easier than ever. For all those looking for right proofing tool to use, ProofHub may fit the bill. Such tools make the reviewing process free of pain, pulling you out from the messy feedback process.
Keyboard Shortcuts
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Web Page Designer Keyboard Shortcuts
Learning keyboard shortcuts can make your work million times easier. Save your time and efforts with these must-know shortcuts for web page design:
- CTRL+B Switch the selected text between bold and normal
- CTRL+U Switch the font style of the selected text between underline and roman
- CTRL+SHIFT+L Display the Bookmark dialog box
- CTRL+ALT+DOWN ARROW Insert one row below the selected row in the table
- CTRL+PAGE DOWN CTRL+PAGE UP Switch from Design view to Source view and vice versa
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Don’t Put it Off: Procrastination
According to research by Joseph Ferrari, about 20 percent of us fall into the category of “chronic procrastinators.” We all procrastinate. We put our work off because of laziness, but that’s a great chaos. Procrastination is about “putting off something and feeling bad about it later”. Designers struggle with guilt, fear, and laziness. Simply set goals for yourself for each day, write your to-do list, and make a plan for your future self. Set your priorities and go about your day as usual. Treat procrastination as a reminder to do your stuff even more remarkably.
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Don’t Forget Web Design Soft Skills
What do you really need to know? What tools should you have? Sure, the experienced designers will be able to do more than you and you cannot have a substitute for experience, but you can definitely get yourself come strong by developing the right skills. Push yourself beyond the limits of a comfort zone to actually have clients come to find you.
The field of web designing keeps updating with a new technique being introduced every now and then. Apart from core design skills, have a good hold on subjects like high-quality CSS, the most modern HTML coding, Javascript UI techniques, have a finer point of creating a killer copy, and build a foundational site where you can add more pages. These skills will always get you going.
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Use High-Quality Visuals
It is common for a designer to run after a design that is good enough to attract your visitors’ attention. Of course, the human brain retains more information when it is in a visual format. As such, if you want to increase the time visitors spent on interacting with your website, use images and videos as part of your design. But remember, quality matters more than quantity. Ask yourself if the image is of quality that is good enough to attract your visitors’ attention.
What Next?
These are the hacks that will make your web design look well. Now that you have learned some great web design hacks that will skyrocket your progress, brace yourself for taking action. It’s all about a web designer becoming well-rounded. And most important, keep feeding your creativity, nurture it, and you’ll be there!
Are you super-efficient with your designs? Share your best suggestions and experiences in the comments below!