Learning the basic skills of design without resorting to random trial and error can start off feeling very strange when you are a beginner. You start excited about the prospect of making something, and then you’re moving boxes and playing around with fonts and colors and have no idea why you’re doing any of it. That’s one of the early struggles of design practice: practicing becomes random, not deliberate. But as you might already imagine, the key to getting better at something is deliberate practice, and in design, this looks less like “make something” and more like, “make a composition,” or “try different font pairings,” or “practice visual hierarchy,” or “learn to use spacing to show what’s important,” and so on. When you focus on one design skill at a time in your practice, you’ll find yourself noticing these elements better and you’ll start making fewer (and better) decisions.
The easiest way to start doing this is by choosing an existing design to copy: some poster or landing page or social image or magazine spread. Before you get the tools out to do your work, just look at what you’ve picked and spend a minute or two asking yourself some questions about it: what do you see first, what feels the least interesting, where do you look second, and how does the piece create a sense of order. And then take that time and copy that design as closely as you can! Now, I mean this as practice, not something for a portfolio; your goal is simply to copy it because this kind of deliberate observation helps your eye learn what looks good. If this still seems like too much, then start copying just a section of the design: headlines, maybe, or just the image and text together. Repeating small parts is more useful for learning design skills than trying to tackle a whole piece all at once.
If all you have is 15 minutes, spend the first three looking at that design and deciding what seems to be working in terms of organization, the next eight copying a bit of it or creating a similar piece that uses the same structure, and the last four minutes to look at how yours stacks up against the original piece and make one note about what looks off. Maybe your space is a little too tight, or your headline a little weak, or your contrast not sharp enough. These kinds of moments are important. Without these kinds of checks, your practice sessions can easily become nothing more than clicking and undoing and guessing. With them, they become a chance to improve for the next session.
One of the most common mistakes when designing is to try and save an ugly design by adding more. When a design just doesn’t look right, people often add more colors, more shapes, more shadows or decorative elements, or more expressive typography, but this usually just muddles an already confusing design. If a design starts to look bad, try stripping it away: reduce the color palette to something neutral or basic, limit your type to just one font pairing, and start aligning everything to simple vertical guides. Once you’ve got a piece of that, look at your spacing and alignment. If the piece looks good in that state, you can start adding more colors and decorative elements and it’ll make it stronger. If the piece looks bad in that state, adding those other elements will only make it hard to find.
And finally, it’s easier to get feedback on your designs if you frame your questions around specific parts. If you just ask someone, “does my design look good?” it’s unlikely they’ll give you anything concrete. Instead, ask questions about your hierarchy: what did they see first in the design? Or about readability: was the text easy to read, or did they feel squished? You’ll start getting much more meaningful, descriptive answers with those kinds of questions than with just a generic question of “is this good?” The same can be said for feedback in practice; leave your design for an hour or so, and come back to it to look at it, then answer those same questions again to see if they’re the same. A similar exercise is squinting at your design; it lets you step back and just look at it at a glance for your hierarchy. If the design still looks cluttered or hard to make out, you may want to rethink your use of contrast.
This kind of noticing and reflection is how we improve as designers. The point of it isn’t that every single session has to end up as a finished, polished piece, it just means every session should have a goal of making at least one good design choice. Sometimes that means looking at the size of your type choices to see if a header is too big, or that one button is too close to the title, or something else entirely. As long as you’re practicing deliberately and keeping notes and reflecting on what needs to improve, this all should start to become easy as you get started, and soon enough all those design elements are going to feel a little more obvious and your work will just start to look better.