6 Graphic Design Exercises to Keep Your Skills Sharp

The graphic design industry is a challenging and ever-developing domain. For many beginners, the resource for practicing designing skills might be difficult. Whether you wish to learn more about graphic design, improve your existing skills or overcome a creative block, Winnetka web design agency has created an article on how to exercise and sharpen your design skills. Mastering designing skill takes time, effort, and discipline, therefore, the more time you invest in practicing, the designing process will be easier and the results will be proficient.

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  Practice by designing for a fictional client

Many graphic design brief generators can create imitation briefs that resemble real clients’ briefs. Using these programs a couple of times a week can help you practice design and improve your speed in creating logos or other graphic design tasks. 

The downside of this approach is that imaginary clients can not provide you with a review of your work and rate your work or whatever you have satisfied the assigned task. 

However, setting yourself challenges and timeframes will prepare you for working with real demanding clients and you will get used to the designing process. Additionally, as time pass, you will have a lot of completed work to show your future clients and add to your portfolio.

• Redesign

This method is similar to creating an imaginary client. Redesigning considers an exciting brand or something related to a brand. Thus, you can try designing a brand app if a certain brand doesn`t have one. Redesigning an existing brand is challenging due to certain brand visual characteristics that you have to retain, and at the same time create something new and fresh. If, after you finish the work and think that you have completed a task, you can contact and offer your design to the brand. Many brands are happy and willing to cooperate with innovative designers, especially if they already have something new to show.

• Create your own brand

If you are a beginner in graphic design and don`t have an established brand, a good starting point is creating a brand for yourself before designing for others. Designing a logo, business card, website, and other brand-related features will be challenging as you have to think of various aspects that you have to meet in the final design. The factors that contribute to determining the way the design should look are brand mission, domain, target audience, market, and others. With clients, these factors are usually well and already determined, while when you work for yourself you have to research and think about them. The benefits of this method are that it will encourage you to learn more about customers’ preferences, current trends, and other topics, which will later help you design more easily when you are acknowledged of market affinities and how it works.

• Sketching and drawing

As sketching is the most important part of the designing process, constant sketching will bring you practice and refine this stage of design. By exercising drawing you will soon improve your style and tempo. You can exercise by drawing logos, icons, fonts, or other simple and prompt items. Encourage yourself to design something new every day, because practice is the best way to master.

• Learn design rules

Although the design is all about innovation and pushing the boundaries, before starting to break the rules be sure that you know basic design rules. Look for design magazines and books to get familiar with the principles of quality design.

Try observing the development of the design of a certain brand. Take one brand and its advertising and observe the moves the brand has made and how its ads changed over time. You will figure out the standards that have been and how they developed until the present day. Soon, you will understand the design course.

 You can also exercise by trying to predict the next design trend and creating something innovative. Experiment with design by implementing an unusual approach and see how it will show.

• Create different versions of the same design

Decide on the object of your design and create as many different versions of the same design. Create the design in flat, three-dimensional, or other styles. This approach challenges the designer to create authentic iterations of the same primer design.

Final Thoughts

Mentioned exercises can be both fun and useful to hone your skills. Additionally, you will explore new ways and perspectives on an existing design, revitalize your acquired knowledge, and find inspiration. If you prefer online challenges you can try some creative games such as Pixel Guesser, Font Quiz, Hex Guess, Kern type, The Bezier game, Munsell Hue Test, DEX, and others. Each of these sites is created to motivate your creativity in different aspects and regarding different designing skills. You can opt for the game that you find most stimulative and most useful for developing those competencies that you think need improvement.