Bring Out Your Inner Designer

Whether you are looking into a career as a professional designer, you just have to pick up some design skills for work, or you simply want your home to look more put-together, there are plenty of reasons why you might want to embrace and bring out your inner creative. It can be hard to know how, though. How does one even start to embrace creativity and find that inner spark of inspiration, that inner eye for balance and beautiful design? Here are a few ideas for where you can start.

Find Balance

First of all, despite whatever you've heard about suffering artists and the creative drive coming from pain, creativity is much easier to indulge when you have balance in your life. Good design is all about balance, so it only makes sense that you would have to start inside yourself. Meditation, exercise, and other healthy habits like maintaining a good diet through the use of supplements like the thrive patch can help build the foundation of balance and health that lets you really indulge your creativity.

Educate Yourself

They say you have to know the rules before you can break them, but it isn't just about breaking rules. Educating yourself about the basic principles of design gives you a framework to build upon and that fosters creativity the same way that a trellis helps a vine grow better and faster. In addition to basic principles, it's important to know your medium. Whether that medium is oil paint on canvas or upholstery and paint chips, you need to know what that medium can and cannot do. This is almost more important for digital design, as you may need to learn coding in order to even begin on a digital design project.

Seek Inspiration

Creativity doesn't just happen; it demands inspiration. That's exactly why so many artists complain about the fickleness of muses. However, if you're not feeling inspired, you can always seek inspiration. A painter, for example, may find inspiration in the work of other painters, but they may also find inspiration from architecture, or writing, or even from the simple act of walking outside. Nature and travel are excellent sources of reliable inspiration.

Experiment and Explore

Just thinking about design isn't enough. The work must be done, and no one is going to do it for you. If the task looks too daunting, find a way to do it anyway. That may mean reducing the scope of a project, or lowering the standards you have set for yourself, or telling yourself that this project is just an experiment to hone your skills. You can always improve a project later, but you cannot perfect a design that doesn't exist yet.

Embrace Critique

Perfecting a design yourself will only get you so far. At some point, you will need outside eyes to improve, and those eyes will come with their own opinions and ideas about what you've done well and what you could do better. Getting critiques and feedback is one of the best ways to improve your skills as a designer. It's also one of the hardest skills to develop. You've poured your heart and soul into this project. It's going to be hard not to take each critique as a personal attack, but you need to be able to see something as objectively as possible. It's also important to factor in where the critique is coming from. Not all feedback is helpful and not all critics know what they're talking about. The ability to judge whether a critique is useful depends very much on what you're trying to achieve, and that comes right back around to the business of finding balance and knowing yourself.

Everyone has that creative drive to some degree; if you have it then you can hone it and improve it. Developing a designer's eye is just like developing muscles; it takes work, self-discipline, and support more than natural talent. You want to develop your inner designer, so what's stopping you?