5 Things Visual Designers Should Learn in 2019

From animation to SVGs and beyond

I like to have my hands in a lot of different pots at once. I’m just too curious and interested in life to have one title, one role, or one creative outlet at a time. My grandma says my brain is just always going and that’s why I can’t sit still :) Whether it’s my busy brain or my creative heart that’s to blame, I am incredibly inspired by different software, art traditions, mediums, and platforms to learn from before going out to make my own stuff. The variety keeps me interested and I love to take what I’ve learned from one area and apply it to projects in another area.

Being a visual designer doesn’t mean that’s the only thing we can do — our skills and training make up the foundation upon which we can then build up and out and dabble in a variety of other areas. And that’s fun!

Based on this idea, here are 5 tools, techniques, and software I think visual designers should get into these last 6 months of 2019. Learning and adopting these skills can create more responsibilities in our current positions, open the path for new jobs, and all-around contribute to our creative growth.

The other side of this is learning basic engineering vocabulary and dev limit to inform your design work, particularly in the areas of product or UI design. I think developing this skill in our careers would allow us to speak about and defend our designs with conviction as well as design with empathy for those who will go on to actually build them.

Circling back to number 3, learning how to create or at least becoming familiar with CSS animations, is a worthwhile use of time for visual designers. Using the above button hover state gif as an example, designing for different states or actions adds dimension, thoughtfulness, and beauty to the experience of users. One fun analog way to think about this could be designing the inside cover of a chocolate wrapper in a way that furthers brand loyalty rather than just leaving it paper white. Keeping this in mind when designing for web adds just one more layer of finesse and thoughtfulness to our work and the way the brands or designs we create live in a variety of contexts.

I am personally tackling numbers 1, 4, and 5 over these next few months of the year as I work on my portfolio and apply for jobs. I want to always be learning and expanding my abilities as a designer/developer hybrid and think this list is a great starting place. I hope one or two of these suggestions is inspiring to you and that you’ll get a busy brain imagining all of the possibilities!

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