Ask HN: How do I become a better web designer? - heyimwill
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Someone1234
Good artists steal. I know most things I have worked on we've taken different
visual concepts from various sites and then incorporate them. The key is to
steal IDEAS not actual content, and ideally merging different good ideas to
create an original feel. After that you just utilise the feedback loop to
polish what you have into something that the majority of your users like.

After you've done the above a handful of times you start to get a gut feeling
for things which you should listen to as it will often be more right than more
wrong.

TL;DR: Light theft and practice.

~~~
JeffreyKaine
Haha! Literally posted the same advice at the same time. I guess we're onto
something ;)

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Someone1234
Or maybe you're just an idea theft! ;P

I suspect a lot of people have a similar-ish work pattern. I'm certain there
are a few visionaries that legitimately create new ideas, but the majority of
us are just recycling old ideas in a new way.

~~~
JeffreyKaine
I've been doing this for almost 15 years now. I definitely create new things,
but I didn't start that way. And really, you should use conventional things
for most problems that you come across. It takes a pretty unconventional
problem to justify an unconventional solution.

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JeffreyKaine
This is going to seem overly simplistic, but... Practice!

1) Find designs that you love, copy them pixel for pixel

2) Start mixing and matching elements from different interfaces that you find.

3) You'll start to see repeated patterns, get good at connecting these
patterns together into new interfaces.

4) After a while of this, you'll see that you don't need to do as much
research and direct copying anymore.

5) Congrats! You are a junior designer, keep practicing :)

~~~
liampronan
This is the same advice I was going to give and is how I've been working on my
design skills.

One addition: you should look through Dribbble [0] or similar sites for
inspiration, and you can use pre-existing resources for Sketch or Photoshop
[1] to build mock-ups. I find it better to improve on design by iterating a
bunch on mock-ups before working in HTML/CSS/iOS (since I'm much more familiar
with going from design mockup -> front-end).

0 -
[https://dribbble.com/search?q=website](https://dribbble.com/search?q=website)
1 - e.g., [http://www.sketchappsources.com/](http://www.sketchappsources.com/)

