10 Quick Tips From A Pro Designer | Lindsay Marsh | Skillshare
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Taught by industry leaders & working professionals
Topics include illustration, design, photography, and more

Watch this class and thousands more

Get unlimited access to every class
Taught by industry leaders & working professionals
Topics include illustration, design, photography, and more

Lessons in This Class

    • 1.

      Class Preview

      0:25

    • 2.

      10 Quick Tips

      5:53

    • 3.

      Bonus Tip - Infographics

      1:14

    • 4.

      Small Design Details Matter

      3:22

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About This Class

I have been a graphic designer for over 12 plus years and I have collected 10 tips and tricks that I feel every designer should know.  I hope you enjoy this quick fun class and pick up a new skill or tip that can help save you time and heighten your creativity.

Meet Your Teacher

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Lindsay Marsh

Over 500,000 Design Students & Counting!

Teacher

I have had many self-made titles over the years: Brand Manager, Digital Architect, Interactive Designer, Graphic Designer, Web Developer and Social Media Expert, to name a few. My name is Lindsay Marsh and I have been creating brand experiences for my clients for over 12 years. I have worked on a wide variety of projects both digital and print. During those 12 years, I have been a full-time freelancer who made many mistakes along the way, but also realized that there is nothing in the world like being your own boss.

I have had the wonderful opportunity to be able to take classes at some of the top design schools in the world, Parsons at The New School, The Pratt Institute and NYU. I am currently transitioning to coaching and teaching.

See full profile

Related Skills

Design Graphic Design
Level: Beginner

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Transcripts

1. Class Preview: I've been a graphic designer pro for 12 plus years. I've collected 10 tips and tricks that I feel every designer should know. Help you enjoy this quick fund class and pick up a new Spiller tips that save time and heightened your creativity. 2. 10 Quick Tips: at angles to your texture. Layout elements. Angles are great ways to make a dull design interesting again and could be as simple as taking the box layout and turning those boxes into an angle. Notice how the entire globe design changes. We could do this with typography a same year. Changing the Line of Sight Interviewer forces them to take notice of the peace and view. The design is a whole. Instead of them, bits and pieces take your design and flip everything horizontal. When you look at a design for too long, your eyes and brain adjusts to the set up. By flipping it, you reset your brain and trick it into thinking you're looking at the design for the very first time. I spot many mistakes in local designs and layouts this way mostly things that I would never notice If I didn't flip the designer like balance issues, I will notice that maybe a design was too heavy on one side versus another great several different layouts. This one seems obvious but very helpful. If I come up with the perfect design layout, I love to try a second version doing completely different things, and it's surprising how many times the client chooses my second layout over my first. I could be more crazy and experimental with my second layout, since I usually have a safer option already done for my first design. When I create a logo, creating in a black and white helps make sure the logo hasn't a contrast to work in a multitude of environments, both digital and print and very small. It also eliminates color as a distraction. Well, we create logos and symbols for branded materials, having less distractions of P and honing in on a solid design option. Plus, you never want a logo to be totally color dependent. You have to think about those who could be colored realized, black and white, newspaper ass and then office communications. That may only be a black white and when color is not an option when displaying, reviewing your logo learn keyboard shortcuts, thes air customizable. But there's some default keyboard shortcuts. You just have to know to increase your productivity. I don't care who you are. These 1st 3 basic shortcuts save so much time as a designer. We cut copy and paste object like nobody's business the quickest way to duplicate an object illustrating voter shop is to hold down the ault or option key and simply drag across. If you press command Z or Old Z, you'll be able to go back one step in history, and you could do this and Photoshopped, illustrator and in design. But a trick and illustrator is You can actually hold down the Z and go back hundreds of steps in your history by holding the shift key and dragging the object in photo shop illustrator and design, you could make objects larger or smaller that keep the same dimensions. This is my most used keyboard trick. Being able to scale by keeping the same dimensions is critical. Take advantage of Adobe Illustrator's Art Board system. I have what you doing this for a long time but couldn't save you from having too many separated files for one type of project. I could have one file that contains many different versions on different art boards, so only need one file for 20 different icon designs. For example, the great thing about using our proteins this If I wanted to export all of this as separate J pegs, I could simply go to Fire Island export and I have 20 separate Jay Peak files, much easier than having 20 separate illustrator files and having to export each one separately. Have you ever had a large project? And the client wanted you to change the color throughout the entire thing, and there'll be hundreds of little objects that you needed to select to change the colors. Instead of selecting each individual object and changing it one by one, select the color that you want to switch out and they go to select fill color. You can change all of the elements with that same stolid feel. Color and snap. So many times have ignored this handy tip and really lost productivity in time. Adobe Illustrator has a more advanced option for swapping out colors called re color. Artwork. Simply select all and go to edit edit colors and select the re color artwork. It gives you all of the color. Swatch is used in the selected area, and you can change them all on the fly. Use and master of the shape builder tool the shape of the tools, one of the best new tools and your illustrated to a belt, and you're able to subtract and add different objects together is a great way to build and the complex objects symmetrical, and I also use it to easily trend certain objects. You can mainly adjust spacing between your characters to provide a nice polish. Look to your typography. Default. Turning should always be tweaked in main headlines and logos. You can accomplish this by holding down the option or the old key of your windows and use the left and right arrow keys to adjust the current closer or further apart. This is a key trick. You wanna look professional and lay out. Design grids are your friend. Using grids to balance your layout is a great idea. Simply go to view show grid and adobe illustrator. So there you have it. 10 quick tips from a pro designer. I hope you learn something new today. 3. Bonus Tip - Infographics : use infographics and your designs whenever possible. Your job is a designer is to make texts and info heavy information palatable and interesting. Clients will overload you with numbers, stats, quotes and copy. And being able to take a simple black of fax and turn it into a visual treat will help you in your journey to create compelling layouts. It could be a simple is creating custom icons and symbols to displace the full facts and stats. Would you be more excited to read a long list of bullet points? I thought so. Neither would your viewer. These icons air just more fun and playful infographics do not need to take up a big space or be overly involved in the design piece. It could be simply arranging a header for a page in a way that highlights an important number. Quote. Shaking up How you display your infographics is imperative and studying others work. It's a great way to source ideas of how to visualize the data. Sets are blocks of stats. I started a website called free pick dot com. I've been known to take four or five infographic sets there and combine them with my own custom drawn icons to create NEEK and colorful uncle brackets. 4. Small Design Details Matter: small details matter. It's what separates the professional from the amateur the way we treat Drop shadows with 70 and grace. How use layers to create depth and dimension and how we cultivate textures. Add realism and richness toward designs Are all small details that add up to a Polish looking design drop. Shadows used incorrectly can look plain awful, or they can look realistic, being able to mess with the distance. Amount of blur. The opacity of drop shadows can make them look more professional and sleek. Drop shadows are a great way to add more dimension and layers to an otherwise flat design, but you have to be careful using drop shadows. Text. There are a few simple rules to follow. Never use a drop shadow with a similar color text on background. It just looks obvious. The less drop shadows are noticeable, the better make sure you increase the blur effect on text. Drop shadows. So the drop shadow blends nicely into the background and does not pop out manually created Drop shadows could have different bends and curves to them to create a shadow that looks more three dimensional. Take, for instance, is photographs I'm using the pin tool in adobe illustrator toe hand draw a shadow underneath textures could be a designer's best friend. The best use of the texture is to fill the void of a solid colored space. If you feel the space just needs a little something on screen back a texture by changing a blending mode or opacity that you could make the texture feel like it belongs there. Textures can be tricky. Like most of these small design details, subtlety is the name of the game. Make sure your texture does not overpower a design piece. Being too strong or the wrong color could make a once clean design very busy. Make sure you reduce the opacity enough or play around with your different blending modes to find the right combination. Another trick is to take a flat texture and add dimension to the edges. By using the burn tool in Adobe Photo Shop, you could make the edges darker to make the texture feel like it has highlights and shadows . You could do some pretty cool things with typography by adding a texture over top of it, it could help the topography only designed stand on its own patterns conspires up that plane background as well, creating your own patterns this fun and adobe illustrator Geometric shapes work well with modern, clean flat design. Tried to use only one style of pattern for design. If you decide to use two different kinds of patterns, make sure one is more prominent to avoid competing of the two different patterns at layers to your design. One way to do this is the ad drop shadow. Two different over loving elements are took one side of an element under another while leaving another element of top. This type of layering adds complexity to your design. Paying attention to all these small design details ends up making a big impact on the quality of your design.