How to become good at visual design?

eejit

How can I gain the skills to make my own amazing and creative visual designs??

I know how to use GIMP and Photoshop but just lack that creativity. I can code and I can take someone's photoshop designs and transfer them perfectly to html and css.

This quote makes a lot of sense:

p wrote: »

Design is not art. Good design is about visual problem solving. Of course you can teach good design and aesthetics to someone. There's always some people who are naturally good at design, but a huge portion of it can be taught, practised and developed.

The main reason that many people advocate self-teaching is not because being taught is bad, but because there's a complete dearth of good courses in Ireland.

But there is still the element of being artistic and creative in design. How can you gain these skills?

Or should people like me stick to templates and give up trying to be real designers?

pixeldesign

I spend lots of hours searching for inspiration. Just go to google type "website inspiration" and you can start from there. You can find many color schemes, header designs, even fonts you can use in your webdesign. Select 4-5 websites you like and start to create something in photoshop.

Feathers

Have you considered subscribing to magazines like Computer Arts or .net? (Or flicking through them in a bookshop!) They should showcase a lot of what is considered good design within industry.

That said, good design isn't just about web more about design in general. Will try to dig out some good resources I've seen. (The other side of that coin is that good web design isn't just visual, it's experiential, which is now a whole other discipline in itself.)

Cianos

There is a strong cross over between art and design. I'd wager that almost all designers grew up doing a lot of arts and crafts, painting, drawing etc and then at a later stage grew towards the design side of things.

If you have a good eye for visual aesthetics, you're half way there, unfortunately it sounds like you don't. This isn't something that can really be taught imo. You can learn the rules I guess, and keep on top of what is fashionable and trending, but in the same way anyone can technically learn to play the piano, someone who has a natural inclination towards music is going to be streets ahead of someone who doesn't. For the former, a lot of it just 'makes sense' and an error is blatantly obvious. For the latter, all this would have to learned in a literal, cumbersome way.

Good design is about visual problem solving.

I have issue with this because it implies there is only one solution, when this is never the case. There are probably a whole range of solutions to any visual problem, and along that you can also set a range of what looks the best, to what looks the worst. Someone with a strong eye for aesthetic is going to produce stuff that looks the best way more often than someone who doesn't. While someone might learn how to solve a designy problem, it doesn't necessarily mean they're going to do it with style and impact for it to actually look nice.

Dave!

I'm after the same thing OP... Thread I started asking the same question!
http://www.boards.ie/vbulletin/showthread.php?t=2056620457

JD RoX

pixeldesigns suggestion is good, but in most cases, blogs contain the same designs. I find DeviantArt to be the best source for inspiration