9 Tips for Becoming a GREAT UI Designer

hey everybody what's up Gary Simon here so today we're gonna be talking about 9 tips my 9 of my personal tips that's gonna help you become a better UI designer now why am i doing this particular topic well today the same day Brad Travis II released a video where I'm introduced basically coders to UI design and so there's gonna be a lot of new subscribers here and so I wanted to facilitate you know these new subscribers and kind of provide more of an introduction about things you should do if you're interested in UI design so this is my list of 9 things make sure to subscribe if yet you haven't and let's get started before we begin this video sponsored by Dylan oat now as a front-end developer or a designer you know that you need a personal portfolio and if you use a website builder like wicks or Squarespace they lack total customization and they lock you into using their platform but to be a pro you need to use the tools that the pros actually use so level up start building your own projects and your own portfolio on an enterprise level content management system like WordPress there's Drupal now real web development sometimes requires knowledge of spinning up servers managing domain names and setting up an occasional staging environment and there's no better or simpler way to learn the ins and outs of hosting your website then with Lenovo out hosting the node cloud hosting makes it as easy as possible for you to deploy a WordPress or Drupal website in seconds with a Freeland owed one-click app marketplace so click on the very top link here in the YouTube description to get your free M'Lynn owed account along with $20 of free hosting and all the tools that you need to build enterprise class websites alright so the very first fundamental I'm going to give you is to absolutely know your UI design fundamentals all right so I've talked about this a lot and I'll sound like a broken record if you've already know about my channel but you absolutely have to know your fundamentals I would say before you even begin or even begin to try otherwise I know most of you who have tried to design you know a UI from scratch for the first time or whatever you probably didn't know what visual hierarchy is and that's why when you start off your designs just look like garbage because you're not aware of all of these things and so these UI design fundamentals are visual hierarchy white space color and contrast alignment topography scale all right so those are mainly all of the UI design fundamentals you need to know you need to familiarize yourself with now having said that if you don't know what these are which I'm not going to go over them because I've already done it you can check out my let me close that my very free learn UI design fundamentals bootcamp course or whatever you want to call it at scramble comm which is a really cool way to learn and it's free all right and it's an hour long and it is also a taste of my full UI design bootcamp which is also at scramble calm eye which is around nine hours I believe I so definitely take that and also watch my other content on YouTube I talk about this stuff a lot so definitely check oh and also Brad Traverse ease YouTube channel today I released I a 50 minute I basically an introduction to code I'm going to design for coders where I talk about these fundamentals as well I'll try to remember to link that in the description so know your fundamentals for sure alright so next up copy others for practice yes I have to put for practice and parenthesis but why would you why would you copy others if you're trying to design your own stuff well because it helps you build muscle memory so you try to find really good designs I that you personally feel are great designs or you would be able to like say hey I would love to be able to design that and just as a matter of practice go into your design application whether that's Adobe XD figma sketch whatever and simply try to replicate the design exactly as you see it doing so is going to help build that muscle memory as much as possible also there's a lot of articles and studies that show that copying other people's art can boost creativity so for instance if you thought this is a really cool-looking design you would love to be able to design something like this on your own free will from scratch I go ahead and just copy it you know go don't put it in portfolio don't do that for a client it's just a matter for practice definitely do that all right next up start a personal project so when you start off to learn something usually you're copying other people's work maybe if you're watching tutorials or courses you're gonna be following along with somebody or someone other example well the next step once you have a little bit of you know once you have the UI design knowledge under your belt and once you actually I you know done a little bit of work by copying other through courses tutorials or you know like my previous example said just copying good work try to start a personal project I in the reason I say that is because it it it's gonna be something that you're coming up with on scratch for the first time and it's also gonna give you an incentive to really do it well if this is a side project maybe it's a little side Internet paste business or something maybe it's it's a it's a website for like a business that your family owns or a friend own so anything like that I that way it's gonna get your feet wet with a real Kate real world scenario rather than just doing you know a fake website or something like that I've served for some fake product so it's just going to really help you try to do as best as you possibly can at that point in time next up Oh before I get to that I'll talk about a personal project that I did which is fret tastic recently so every you know six months maybe sometimes 12 months I'll come up with a new idea for an app or something and this is the one that I did this year in terms of design I had a friend could help code it I but basically it was really challenging because this is not your average sort sort of app there's a lot happening here and it was really fun to be able to work on this and we actually have close to thirteen thousand users at this point in time very fun stuff I'm so for the next tip seek feedback all right so it's important to get feedback from your peers right not just from other designers but everybody else as well I just that way it's gonna help you grow and as long as it's constructive criticism you know you should take it you know and it doesn't mean you have to listen to everybody but certainly it makes sense to do so so for instance discord discord is a free chat application probably most of you know about it a lot of gamers use it but I have a discord server to my YouTube description you can join there and they we have a actual let me find it here in a second a design feedback channel alright so people are always posting here I asking for feedback and people will help you and give you their two cents you know I mean you take it with a grain of salt because sometimes there's people who aren't very good but sometimes need a moat more often not people will help in spot and identify problems and it's just it's just really gonna help you out in stein the song also just discord you can go to Facebook groups for UI design UI UX design Twitter reddit I you there's many ways to seek feedback so definitely do that as well next up get on dribble and Behance alright so dribble calm is I one of the leading design sites where it's a social design site where you have your own little portfolio you post your work people can like it and comment and all that good stuff if you're really good you can get featured on the home page same thing with Behance I basically their competitors Adobe owns Behance now so this is dribble comm of course you can sort things by animation branding illustration or you could search for things I and generally really solid design ends up on the homepage sigh so definitely check that out as a source for inspiration it's gonna make you a better designer to really familiarize yourself with current trends and just good design in general alright Behance same thing same concept I'm not gonna go ahead and spend too much time there and then my next tip follow other great designers so icon dribble if you for instance see I a design that you really like you click on your user name and just click follow alright so now you're gonna see all their work of course this extends to be hands as well it also extends to Twitter I it extends to you know Facebook any other social network Instagram where those designers that are you know really just posting work all the time and being exposed to that work is really gonna help you grow as a designer for sure bookmark UI design resource sites alright so like I said dribble and be hands though that would that would you know put it in a bookmarks folder and also there's along a cool UI design galleries outside of dribble like UI movement collect UI which is daily inspiration there's even UI inspiration on Pinterest design notes just us so many just create a bookmark folder specifically for those sites and when you're about to design a given site go ahead and open those all up in a bunch of tabs and just go through and something might catch your eye and you making inspiration for a direction that you might want to take and then also follow tutorials and courses I feel stupid for even add in this is if you're on YouTube you know this already but seriously it's it's something that you really should do especially when you're starting out trying to learn software if you don't know your software very well you definitely want to follow it like Adobe XD is pretty simple but every feature they add it's getting a little bit more complex so understanding the workflow definitely helps for tools but also it helps I when it comes to just creating designs and getting an idea for how other people basically approach UI design and UI UX design so definitely do that and then finally last but not least test your designs so this is probably a little bit strange for some of you but this kind of falls into UX as well your design ultimately should have a purpose and that purpose there should be a goal and the goal is it could be to get somebody to fill out an email it could be get somebody to click on to a next page it could be just get somebody to scroll down to a certain area it could be to get somebody to buy something or sign up for your sass eye service so the way you really determine the effective effectiveness of a design or one of the ways at least is through testing like a be split testing there's multivariate testing and there's a lot of services that offer this that you can check out so like a B split testing there's Optimizely instapage i there's a lot of sources here that are basically just going to help you get to a point where you know how to optimize your designs as much as possible this is a topic I really haven't touched much on my channel but I definitely plan on doing that soon because that's definitely gonna help you really grow as a designer but I would say initially when you're trying to learn if you're a beginner you don't have to worry about this up so much try to understand the fundamentals first before you get to that point in time all right so hopefully you enjoyed that that's my list of 9 things if you think there's things that I should have add that didn't go ahead and leave your response in the comments subscribe as always and I'll see you soon goodbye [Music]

Channel: DesignCourse

Views: 57,696

Rating: 4.9113336 out of 5

Keywords: ui design, ui design tips, user interface design, ui design beginner, ui ux design, ux design, ui design tutorial, gary simon, designcourse

Id: _J1Le-4aXhE

Length: 11min 53sec (713 seconds)

Published: Tue Jul 14 2020