Robin (Li Yanhong) put it well-to do what you like and are good at, you must first make sure that you really like design.

Enthusiastic about discovering beauty, feeling beauty, creating beauty and finally explaining beauty.

Positive action and thinking are the source of progress.

As far as I know, excellent visual designers in the industry will do a lot of things related to visual design in their spare time. Photography, graffiti, manual creation, making movies ... interests and work can be combined.

Clear goal

What is the task of a visual designer?

1. Communicate information effectively. Communicate concisely and elegantly. Create a pleasant user experience through visual design.

Every time you make a design, it will be much clearer to measure it with the above three points.

Negative mentality

More than once, I heard "the company has too many restrictions, what can it design?" There is no room for play. ""It's no use spending so much time doing it. The boss doesn't want this. "

A misunderstanding that early designers are easy to walk into. He thinks that a good design is to make the icon very realistic and rich in texture. You must use every stroke and light projection function. I hope every button on the interface can fly a flower. If we don't let him do this, he will be very disappointed. When the design is rejected again and again, thinking and initiative are lost, and they are no longer willing to create breakthroughs. They think lazily and do whatever the boss says. I didn't talk about my inner dissatisfaction, and then I began to learn to live. 1 day things need to be ground for 3 days. The ultimate goal of his design has been unconsciously transformed into "the boss says OK is OK", and then unconsciously, he has become a real artist.

Can't say this is wrong. The boss's vision and attention are always more accurate than ordinary employees. But what I want to say is that if we want to make fundamental progress, we need an open mind and deep thinking first, and we don't want to be too educated, but it's true. Need to put "why doesn't the boss want this? What do you want with your boss? " Think clearly about these two questions. Designers need to be objective enough to face everyone's evaluation of design. It is illogical to say that "you don't understand design, I am a professional". Design itself serves the public, and everyone is qualified to evaluate it. Everyone has the right to appreciate beauty. Any design is also well-founded. Any excellent designer can not create brilliance just by making a draft, and the authentic good design can stand everyone's scrutiny. Where is the saying of "doing it for nothing"?

Independent consciousness

When a designer is "trampled" by his boss or director for a period of time, he will become uncertain about his own design. Cute is: "Director, do you think this texture is ok?" I made three effects, 1 is pure black, and 1 is slightly shallow and textured. Which one do you say to use?

At this point, the director is either laughing or annoyed. Please think about it. How much difference will three details with little color difference bring to the actual experience? Do you need to hold a seminar? You are a designer. With your professional vision and analysis, you can make a decision quickly.

First of all, pay tribute to his diligent and cautious attitude, but the point is that the job of the leader is to solve more difficult problems, not to answer too many small doubts for you.

Communicate with leaders, always bring solutions and tell them your recommended and other possible solutions, as well as theoretical basis. Then ask for evaluation. It is very important to dare to think independently and make decisions. Even if the decision is wrong, the impression will be more profound.

Revolutionary consciousness

There is a famous saying in the workplace-if you want to be excellent, you need to spend some time every day trying to lead the plan that you have saidno. Yes, design is emotional and users are emotional. The same content, expressed in different ways, has very different effects. Every scheme has its own reason, and there is no standard answer to the design. Perhaps leaders should always focus on the overall situation and remain conservative. He is just worried about whether you can control and come up with a tight enough plan to ensure safety in a limited time. It's easy to think of updating a cooler idea. The key is to test the designer's grasp in the process of transforming creativity into actual effect details. Grasping power requires enough time and quantity to hone. In this matter, the most important thing is to distinguish between perceptual factors and basic principles. If you blindly challenge the basic principles, you must weigh them clearly. The magic weapon of revolution is gradual progress.

Aesthetic cleanliness

Some visual designers have a strong personal taste tendency because of their personality. First of all, they have a very fixed aesthetic taste and love a certain design style, but they are too extreme to accept styles that are contrary to his aesthetics. Just like a child is picky about food. If you like food very much, you can't get enough. If you don't like it, you won't touch it at all. When designing, he always subjectively brings his personal taste into the company's product design. In the face of color and texture, if the company's cultural requirements do not match his aesthetic standards, it will be particularly painful, and I can't help but want to add personal hobbies to the detail design again and again. Then I was filmed again and again by the director or boss, and finally I was constantly entangled, and I was not sure about some subtle effects, which led to a waste of time, impatience and even self-doubt and depression.

It does not violate the designer's personality, but as a designer, it is the most basic ability and requirement to distinguish between brand demand and personal appetite. The key skill is to consciously taste different beauties, be rich, gorgeous, fresh and elegant ... rationally observe their differences and be able to complete the design by refining their characteristics, which is also the mentality that designers have in the advanced stage.

Designers are always sensitive and emotional. Maybe today's task is to their liking, and they will be happy to do it one day. Tomorrow's task is particularly boring, yawning while working. When they are confused by these contradictions, they don't want to go out first, take a deep breath and go out for a walk. My experience is that walking will be smoother than sitting in front of a computer. Think about what the goal of the design is, and whether your entanglement is related to or conflicts with the goal. O's visual effect is not good, which is actually the first feeling. Sometimes you will lose your way if you look at it for a long time, so try to observe it with your first feeling, so that you can really find the problem and find a colleague to see it. Don't work alone.

Team resources

Most designers have a "problem" and don't want anyone standing behind them when designing. I am always so insecure. I feel this way sometimes. But after careful observation, it is not difficult to find that this kind of psychology generally only exists when designers have no confidence in their current work. At this time, it is easy to enter a misunderstanding of thinking inertia, that is, fall into the whirlpool of efforts. The root cause may be the deep defects of personality-the shortcomings of unwilling to expose and unwilling to be said no.

For example: Xiao Liu receives the demand for advertising pictures, and the demander gives the basic copy and content elements. Xiao Liu began to design. 1 hour, he swayed from side to side on the screen, or he felt that things were put in the wrong place, the color and the effect were wrong ... A few hours passed, and he showed the unconfident photo to the director in frustration. The director told him: this idea is wrong ... why communicate with him when you are not sure about the initial direction? Or you can think of several design directions, quickly draw a hand-drawn sketch, communicate with the key figures of the team or other designers to determine whether the idea is reasonable, and then do the design on the computer. I've been grinding all morning, pestering myself and wasting my time.

In fact, my experience is that designers need a high degree of communication and an active atmosphere to grow faster. Because excellent ideas are rarely easily thought out by a person with a stuffy head, more often, you sentence by sentence, penetrate into each other's ideas, and the feeling will come soon. Much faster than sitting there alone. First of all, I am willing to take the first step, create a positive communication atmosphere, dare to accept opinions and be able to think according to other people's logic. Designers are saplings, teams are fertile soil, and comprehensive and interchangeable nutrients are very important.

comprehensive ability

Familiar with interactive design, accumulating product experience, understanding user research and mastering animation design are hard indicators for senior designers in all companies. The significance of advanced lies in broader knowledge and higher vision. Only in this way can your design be more authoritative.

Always keep a heart of learning and a sense of accepting new things. There is no "pure" occupation in today's society.

off hours

I often hear a complaint that "the products are limited and I can't play what I am good at", which is undoubtedly pinning my design professional growth on the products. Think that your design can't grow unless the product is successful. This is actually an excuse.

In fact, facing this problem, the best way is to divide the design into two lines:

1. project line: the company's actual product project, understand and follow the actual situation, meet the product design requirements and meet the company's requirements.

2. Professional line: The significance of this matter lies in consciously discovering and summarizing the deficiencies of current design capabilities, formulating targeted topics, and arranging spare time for improvement. For example, drawing practice of graphics system, mastering animation technology, interactive design ... taking private work is an excellent topic with multiple objectives.

How fast you can grow depends on what you do in your spare time. Eight hours of work in the company has been bought out by the company's salary. If you want to have an extra improvement, think about how to use your spare time.

Systematic thinking

The whole seemingly watery content is actually authentic dry goods. This is a reflection and a more professional problem for all designers to develop to a higher level. If you break through, you will find a way out. If you can't get through, it's just a hurdle.

When I first started to talk about systematic thinking, I thought this topic was too big. I'm afraid it's not good enough, but I dare say it. The reason for the length is only a summary, and the details of the design level can be written in another article.

Under the product design system, each module is independent, but it circulates with each other, which finally determines the display form of the product.

The picture below shows my understanding of the product visual design system, and I hope to point out the unreasonable places ↓

Brand vision: the soul of a company and a product is the direct impression of users on the product. For example, when people talk about Xiao Liu, his appearance, behavior or language will always come to mind, which is very direct and does not need much thinking. Therefore, the requirements of brand building for visual design are to establish characteristics, maintain characteristics, enhance characteristics and beautify characteristics. In view of these requirements of the brand, it is necessary to provide a complete and matching visual design scheme.

Operation design: the purpose of operation design is to let users feel good products; Through design and packaging, give full play to the characteristics of products and push them to users. What needs to be considered in this process is: is the advertising creativity enough to attract users? Is the visual impact of the picture enough? Is the copy attractive enough? Is it clear and understandable? Does the operation angle match the brand positioning?

The standard for an ordinary designer to do exercises and drawings is: do the drawings well.

Senior designer's standard: whether the user has enough interest and goodwill after seeing the picture, and is willing to click to experience the product.

User interface: the most frequent and intuitive part for users to contact with products. His task is to let users know the appearance and temperament of the product. Brand positioning determines the display temperament and experience of the interface. Interface design needs to pay attention to the strength of visual level, information division structure, user browsing trajectory, color, texture use, rationality and comfort, and visual persistence. The ultimate design goal-wow, this interface looks really cool, so I just want to see more if I have nothing to do.

User guidance: In order to enable users to learn some functional operations of products more quickly, such as some advanced or hidden operations, users are usually informed through guidance diagrams, product introductions, reminders, etc. Its design principle is concise, intuitive and easy to understand; Secondly, it is necessary to conform to the sequence of user operations and arrange guidance at the right time; Then, the design should be friendly and interesting enough, so that the user has enough interest to pay attention to the guidance and will not be disgusted by interrupting his operation task. User-oriented design is also a part of interface design, and its visual experience sometimes needs to be distinguished from introverted interface texture to achieve attention through visual contrast. User guidance is actually like telling a story to the user, so the design should be light enough.

To put it bluntly, systematic thinking on this matter is to establish a complete and clear design system for designers. If this system can be used to measure every decision, the design scheme will be considered more comprehensively.

Its function is to help designers logically and model all problems and solutions. Get out of chaos and design rationally.

I still remember before I left Baidu, the director told me, "The biggest challenge you are facing now is system-level thinking, which is also the ability you lack now. How much you know about this matter determines your grades. " When he said this, I felt a tremor in my heartstrings. In fact, he didn't know that I had secretly used my spare time to think and sort out this problem a few months before that. Until now, the collateral thread of systematic design thinking has become clearer and clearer in my mind. I sincerely thank him for his guidance in the past two years, which has benefited me for life.

Design communication and work communication

First of all, you should have enough communication awareness and willingness, which is a direct proof of your work efficiency and not rework.

The second is to tell anyone about your design, but also to be able to clearly and concisely explain what you think, how to start designing, and what problems have you solved through design? How to verify the design? There are many processes and ways.

Before you tell the team about this design. You should think about what opinions and objections you may encounter in the process. And prepare the answer in advance.

Be sure to communicate and prepare in advance before the meeting, communicate efficiently at the meeting, only do core discussions, and make minutes in time. You know, the scheme you mentioned, this thing itself is design.

Facing the design revision opinions

When you hear the following comments and suggestions on design, be sure to distinguish their nature. People's visual experience of the same thing is subjective. But good design must be recognized by most people at a glance.

1. It feels a little strange: guide him to say what is strange? Is it a monster? Or a graphic freak? Or is the typesetting uncomfortable? If he can't say anything strange, just tell him and find out the reason before making a decision.

2. Can you change the color? I don't like this color ... this personal taste requires that you explain your ideas through design knowledge and guide him to realize that this suggestion does not conflict with the design experience. Can be completely unchanged.

3. If the product has questions about visual typesetting and information display. We should follow his thinking and see if there is really room for optimization. This suggestion is very important, because designers often lack to measure the design from the perspective of products, and it is very important to listen carefully to opinions.

4. In the face of the boss's amendment, convey your thinking angle euphemistically and clearly. If he still insists that you modify it, then, change it! Sometimes, trial and error is the only way. The awareness of verifying the design results afterwards is very important.

5. Avoid arguing about small details, and try to accept small changes that do not affect the experience. After all, everyone's work is also about feelings. You can give others extra personal taste and win others' recognition.

Deadline concept

Draw two strokes, see Weibo, draw two more strokes, and chat twice on QQ ... After all, the task idea has been constantly interrupted and restarted. I don't know how much time I wasted ... if the task is completed in three days, I will have nothing to do and suddenly finish it ahead of schedule, so I will spend a lot of time and then try my best to catch up with the work. Hasty confusion ...

When you receive the demand, read it first. After communication is confirmed, ask yourself how long it will take. Whether there are parallel events, it is best to limit your time before drawing an icon accurately. This mode of thinking will definitely be an advanced magic weapon.

Everything takes longer than expected, so there is always room. Tightening before loosening is always the best rule. There is always a buffer before the deadline.

Work management

This is the consciousness that every profession needs, how to sort out the messy and parallel work list, how to distinguish between priorities and time, when to do what, and to what extent ... The same is true for design, after all, time determines everything.

Design appreciation

The purpose of doing this, 1 is to build a richer resource base in your mind, and 2) to observe and analyze excellent design cases faster in the process, and the color is particularly comfortable? The composition is particularly eye-catching Brilliant idea? Clever copy? Or other beauty. Over time, you will get ideas faster and faster.

Bad writing is better than good memory.

This sentence seems to have nothing to do with design, but it is my biggest gain in Baidu before.

First, make sure that the light in your head will not be forgotten; Second, sketch first, then go to the machine. This is definitely the most efficient and the easiest to sort out the logic. Try it and see how much time you will waste on the computer if you don't sketch.

Just like I wrote this article, it is clearer to write it.

The genius of design

Someone said, "I have no visual talent."

This is another weak fallacy. Science shows that your IQ is normal as long as you are not color blind and weak. Then you are no different from other excellent designers.

Again, design is not creating art, but solving problems. The two are not contradictory.