Developing a design practice habit that can survive your busiest days doesn’t mean finding the perfect block of time, nor does it mean waiting until you’re feeling particularly inspired. Instead, it’s about setting your practice up to be small enough to be repeatable, and specific enough to be meaningful. Often, when we think about improving our design skills, we think about the occasional big, long creative sessions where we’ll have a great “Aha!” moment. But for many, this approach results in long lapses, a feeling of frustration, and ultimately a lack of progress. The best way to improve your craft is to incorporate short bursts of practice into your daily routine. Spending twenty minutes tweaking a few elements or experimenting with different layouts can be more beneficial than a rare few hours of aimless doodling.
The first thing to do is to stop thinking of design practice as one single thing. Sometimes you’re practicing by studying examples, sometimes you’re practicing by mimicking designs, other times you’re practicing by creating a new thing, and sometimes you’re practicing by going back through the work you’ve already done. If you’re expecting yourself to produce something fully original and polished every time you sit down, you probably won’t do it when you’re tired. Instead, try giving your practice sessions a more specific goal. One session might be recreating a poster you find in order to understand how the designer aligned things. Another session could be just playing around with pairing typefaces and determining whether the two fonts you’re pairing look comfortable or uncomfortable to read. Sometimes your practice could mean nothing more than going through a piece you’ve created and simply improving the spacing between elements. By categorizing practice this way, you’ll be less likely to put it off, as you don’t need inspiration to accomplish those tasks.
A short, regular routine can be very effective if structured. Spend the first couple of minutes carefully observing a single design element and identifying whether it’s clear or confusing, striking or dull. Then, move into a specific task, such as rebuilding a particular text hierarchy, experimenting with three different options for a paragraph of text, or testing out two different palettes on an existing layout. Finish by writing down something that works about that layout, and something that doesn’t. These moments of reflection make the act of practicing meaningful. Without reflection, two days of practice might feel identical; with reflection, you might notice that you have a tendency to leave too little space on the sides of your layouts, or that you always want to center things when it might make more sense for them to be flush left.
A typical error is creating a practice routine that’s too intense right out of the gate. Too often, beginners write up a rigorous plan, then abandon it within a week because it’s too much. A better option is to build a practice routine that still works on busy days. Even if you only have fifteen minutes, don’t skip the practice session just because you’re busy that day. Reduce the scope of your practice. Analyze why one layout works better than another layout, or just sketch a few rough thumbnail compositions on a piece of paper. Or take a previous design of yours and focus solely on the spacing between elements. It’s all still valuable. It’s even important, because regular, small improvements will get your eyes dialed into what’s important faster than a once-weekly, two-hour session will.
Another mistake often occurs when practice sessions seem unconnected with one another. To counter that, simply link your practice sessions together in some way. For example, decide what you’re going to work on the next time you practice before you end the current session. Maybe you’ll write down something like, “Tomorrow I will see what a really big size heading will do,” or maybe you’ll write down, “Next time I’ll try removing a color from the palette.” This way, you’ll remove some of the difficulty that comes with sitting down and having to choose what to work on. It’ll also give you some continuity, which will really help your skills stick. Vary the routine slightly each time you practice; this can really help. Try redesigning a simple card layout each day using different typefaces, spacing, visual emphasis, and you’ll really begin to understand what each individual choice means for the design as a whole.
Some days are going to suck. It’ll seem like everything is clumsy and ugly and you don’t have the skills to improve things. This usually means that your eye has outpaced your skill, and it can be disheartening. If this happens, make your practice simple. Go back to working on one thing, and just practice that. Practice has to feel possible, and it has to feel honest and specific, and it has to feel worthwhile in order to be useful. Design habits work best when they’re short and regular, not just when we’re in the mood to work.