The most important design skill I ever learned was the art of looking.
As a junior designer, I would launch right into a Figma file. I’d put together some references, scan the brief, then leap right into explorations.
My collaborator stopped me. No, wait. Look at the references you picked. What did you see in these?
I was like, what? I picked these images. I know what I saw. Bright colors, summery font, minimalist components. I was ready to start!
She responded: No, you’re not looking closely enough. What about each individual piece did you like? She made me go through the exercise of dissecting each image – pointing out which parts I liked and which parts I didn’t.
In one reference, I liked the way the serifs had roughly-hewn edges, but not the way the x-heights made the letters cartoonish. In Figure 2, I liked the yellow that brought feelings of speed and eccentricity, but the brighter reds probably didn’t work for our more mature project. In Figure 3, I liked the thin, editorial margins of the component library, but felt like for our work, we could thicken them just a tad.
On and on, I named what in each photo I was referencing, and which parts were neutral or actually not what I wanted. And as I went, I found myself searching and finding new vocabulary – discovering intuitions for the language of shapes, identifying the feelings of times and places and brands, scrutinizing whether a desired font should actually be more Gothic or Grotesque, and contemplating which animations feel the most “free”.
The art of looking
Looking is not seeing, and seeing is not identifying. Anyone who has worked on computer vision can tell you that there are a million ways to describe a picture, and all are imprecise and incomplete. A tree is “green”, but also possibly a “fir tree”, “100kg of lumber”, “Undecorated Christmas Tree”, “emerald needles on a dark mass of branches”, “indigenous flora”, and so on.
As a designer, your job is to identify sound from the noise and use it in your work. In an abundance of details, you must pay attention, hone in on which piece of the puzzle you need, and magnify its intention so that your work might reference it successfully.
The magic of a great designer is that their work does all the talking. It has something to say, and says it clearly, distinctly, and well. Whether that’s a visual hierarchy that soothes anxieties and makes next steps self-evident or a brand that instantly endears itself to its target audience, it doesn’t need justification. It succeeds eloquently at visual communication.
Designers get this instinct and ability from the world. They read, watch movies, learn from experts, walk down the street, and talk to people. It’s to develop an intuition for the fine-grained distinctions between things. Like an antiques dealer or an ornithologist, they’re gathering data and expertise in the visual language of the world.
At first, your vision will be blurry. Things will look alike, their differences as incomprehensible as comparing two leaves from a tree. Designers sound crazy when they pick out imperfections or insist that something’s not right.
But as you learn, your vision will sharpen to catch the smallest of details, the softest of intentions. You’ll start to notice design problems on a screen the same way musicians can pick out a discordant note. And slowly, your vision will get so sharp that it will be unbelievable that where you once looked, you did not see all of these data, decisions, and details.
So look. And try to see.
If you admire a designer, why? What does their work invoke? What specific opinions do they have, and how do those manifest in their process or product?
And if you’re making something, examine your references: what do they assume, believe, or interpret? Where do they come from, and who do they speak for?
Most of all, don’t jump the gun. Create, of course, and create often, but stop to see what you’re doing. What principles are being encoded in your work? Are they the ones you want? Don’t be so sure to assume the default.
If you get far enough in your field, you’ll face problems that no template or component library has encountered before: novel desires, new interfaces, never-before-tried recombinations of things. To really come up with the right solution, you’ll want to operate from principles, not practices – and to do that, you need to start seeing.