How I Learned to Design: The Answer You Won’t Expect

Alex — Tue, 13 Apr 2010 04:00:36 +0000

Even with the conclusion of Design Versus Week, I still have something to say when it comes to designing a blog. With the latest redesign here, I have received many questions about the things I have done here. The question I have heard the most is “how did you learn to design?” And I thought I would dedicate an entire post to answering that question.

First of all, I just wanted to thank you for the great response about the new design. A lot of you love it, and that’s good because this is how I want Blogussion to look for a while. There are still some tweaks to be made, but this is how I want the blog to look for a while if you don’t mind!

I should just start off by making a few important points. I feel that most people who ask me how I learned to design don’t know much about designing and what it actually means.

It’s not as easy as pointing and clicking
Tools like Photoshop make it easy to literally just point, click and design, but there’s so much more to creating a functional design than placing elements wherever. You need to know your audience and what they like (and more importantly DON’T like), design with different screen resolutions/browsers in mind, code with file size in mind, and just so much more.
It’s f***ing frustrating
I can’t tell you how many times I just want to give up, or how many time’s I’ve sweared at my poor, innocent computer because something didn’t work. It’s amazing how frustrating designing can be, and no matter how much you love to do it – you will start hating it at some point (but love it again when things starts working).
You can’t please everyone
No matter what, there are people out there who either don’t like something about your design, or don’t like your design at all. If you spend all of your time trying to please the people who don’t like something, you’ll be forgetting about everyone else on your blog. Just do what’s best for your blog, and don’t worry when two people say they “hate this design and want the old one back.”
You can never stop designing
What I mean by this is that you can’t just come up with one design and then quit designing for your blog. In the one year and three months this blog has been around, I have updated the design four times. This just goes back to #1, and if you understand what your community wants and are always working to improve your blog, your design will need to be updated from time to time.

That’s just a little about what designing is. It’s not all fun and games, it’s something you actually have to practice and spend hours doing. I can still improve the way I do things, and I realize that. It’s important to know that.

If you can’t understand those four things I mentioned above, you’re probably not cut out to be much of a designer. Obviously there are more things you need to know (principles wise), but what I mentioned really ties into my answer for this question:

How did you learn to design?

People ask me this a lot, and when I really started to think about it – I haven’t been giving out the best answer I could. I have always given out the most cliché answers. “Check out tutorial blogs” or “Look through page source codes.” Yes, these are all things I suggest you do and are things I myself have done.

But when people ask me a question like that and I give them those answers, I’m not really helping them. Chances are, they have already heard that answer before, and maybe even tried those things already. I do actually like to help people, so once I figured out I wasn’t really helping anyone, I began to rethink my answer.

So how did I learn to design? It wasn’t from reading tutorials (which I didn’t read many of), it wasn’t from going to design galleries (which aren’t helpful nowadays as any site listed in one must have ridiculous illustrations which isn’t my field), and it certainly wasn’t a result of getting a teacher. I actually feel bad for the people who choose to hire an instructor to help them design, they miss out on an experience and often never find their own unique style.

The way I learned to design is by simply wanting to be able to learn.

Okay, I know that sounds lame, and maybe even less helpful than my usual answers. But I did warn you before you started reading this that I had an answer you wouldn’t expect. Let me clarify.

How do you discover your passion?

It would sound a bit snarky if I were to say “let me answer your question with a question of my own” but how do you discover your passion anyways? It doesn’t often just come from nowhere, usually you are willing to do research and spend time learning it.

Most designers would say that designing is actually their passion, and when someone is passionate about something – they go after it. Some people need more help than others, and some can just do it on their own. When it comes to my passion (designing, go figure), I like to think I did a lot of it myself. I won’t credit myself for everything of course, as I do/did need to do some reading and studying from various sources.

But designing is something that gets easier to pick up on as you progress. Once you figure out one thing, it creates more ideas in your brain and you just start learning how to do things better.

Now stop asking questions

I don’t mean to offend anyone, but it seems to me that anyone who has the need to ask somehow how they learned to design is completely missing the point. Sure, sharing some useful tutorials (if any) is always great. But for someone to ask me what I did to design is now ridiculous sounding to me.

Once you start designing without looking towards galleries, or looking at dozens of tutorials, you will find that answering the question “how did you learn to design?” will become harder to answer with anything other than “because I wanted to.” When you look back on the things you did, all of the cusses you shouted at your computer, you will realize that you learned to design because you actually wanted to.

So stop asking me what I, and other people did to learn how to design. You know the answer now, and it’s up to you whether or not you actually want to do it. The truth is, anyone can design. It’s just that not everyone wants to be able to enough.

5 WordPress.tv Videos Worth A Watch!

Janith — Mon, 01 Jun 2009 20:20:05 +0000

Wordpress TV was launched earlier this year, which was soon followed by Alex’s post on the new project. Personally, I thought it was a great idea because when I saw the videos for the first time; they were extremely high quality both visually and content-wise.

So, since their launch – what does WordPress TV have to offer? Countless number of useful tutorial videos. Everything from simple installation of themes to complex editing tutorials; it has the lot. However, I want to share with you – just five of these videos that I’ve found quite useful.

Getting Started With Google Analytics

Installation Google Analytics on a WordPress blog is relatively easy, but there are so many ways – that it can become a bit messy. This video will follow you through the step-by-step process of installing the coding successfully.

Introducing the P2 Theme: Blogging in Realtime

Want to post a quick message, while not having to run through the post editor? The P2 Theme introduces a “Twitter-like” blogging platform to WordPress. It’s a nice little idea to further enhance your WordPress blog.

The Twitter Friendly Links Plugin

No longer do we need to confine ourselves to ugly TinyURLs that are are from an external domain and a random string of characters after the slash. This plugin will allow you to create your own shortened URL under your own domain.

Speed up WordPress with Gears for Firefox

I’ve never used Gears (or Turbo, I think it’s called now) before for WordPress because quite frankly; I had no idea what it was. They promise a “faster” blogging experience, so it’s definitely worth a check.

Intense Debate Plugins : Taking Your Comments Even Further

Replying to comments, rating them and tracking them has never been the same since IntenseDebate came into the blogging field. The developer’s team “recently” joined the Automaticc (people behind WordPress) and they take the commenting system to a whole new level with every update.

Blogussion » tutorials