The thinking standpoint and creative attitude of excellent designers

"Editor's note": This article is reproduced from the game state, originally from Livio De La Cruz's personal gaming blog, the author himself was a game designer who, based on his personal experience, shared with readers the universal but important skill of "How to think from a designer's perspective", hoping for a broad readership, Especially designers are inspired!

As a class task, that is to create a http://www.aliyun.com/zixun/aggregation/9762.html "> Two-dimensional code ads, I produced a few posters below, and contributed to my game developers Club.

Making these posters always reminds me of the 3 years of high school image design learning process. At that time, the school arranged for us 4 years of image design elective courses, and are taught by the same teacher. But since I was transferred to this school in the second grade, I only had 3 years of study time.

In Class I have mastered one of the most important and most common skills: how to stand in the designer's perspective to think. This skill will not only help me with my website, but also improve my speech, photography, writing and game design skills.

And I'm going through this article to analyze how this lesson teaches me this skill, and helps you learn to think in terms of a designer.

Teaching Style

I find that my favorite and most outstanding teachers are some kind, understanding and good at encouraging students, but my image design teacher is the exact opposite type.

She's always ruthless when it comes to providing project feedback, especially when you have a big design flaw in your homework. This style of teaching is really effective, and it always allows us to learn some important lessons from our class.

Listen to your own design

Sometimes we get very severe reviews, and then we need to find a way to get the design out of ourselves instead of waiting for the teacher to "slaughter" his own homework. As our understanding of image design continues to rise, we can think about our designs on a deeper level.

And this is the ability to "listen to your own design." That's when you'll look at the design from multiple angles and find out all the pros and cons. When you gain experience and understand your specific design areas, you will be more aware of what you should listen to. You will also need to listen to subtle methods such as how you feel and find out why.

The designer solves the problem

When designers discuss design issues with non-designers (usually their clients), non-designers tend to be obsessive about what some designers think are undesirable. For example, a web designer would spend half an hour setting the most appropriate space for the page navigation element, but a designer would think that the user was not at all spaced out.

But the fact that users care about the problem is that they fail to realize how these small details will affect their own page experience. The spacing setting will affect how the page feels to the user (whether it will clutter) and ultimately affect the openness and user-friendliness of the Web page.

Changing these small details will also cause other problems, such as a large screen space for navigation based on a certain display resolution. The complexity of the problem suggests that we need to devote more time to solving it, while also explaining the true nature of the designer's work. Designers don't just come up with creative ideas all the way, they also need to find and solve design problems to better optimize the relationship between products and end users.

Management issues

It is impossible for us to solve all the design problems. And designers are always stuck in a design dilemma where all the solutions to a problem can lead to more problems.

Designers always spend a lot of time solving these problems and trying to overcome the design dilemma. And because every project has time and resource constraints, designers must properly manage and differentiate between what flaws to perfect. But in fact it's a lot more complicated than it sounds, because designers are probably just using their precious time to solve a problem that isn't very important.

All criticism is effective.

For many students, the most depressing aspect of the image design course is to get a negative rating. And we can not argue with the teacher, because it is a stupid performance. Many students will think that the teacher is very arrogant, but in fact her purpose is to let the students accept and believe her evaluation.

In the world of image design, it is one of the most shameful ways for designers to disagree or ignore critical opinions. If you can't accept and analyze critical opinions like a modest adult, then you're not fit to design the job.

Designers should be brave enough to accept criticism

Considering the importance of listening to your own design, we should not overlook the help of asking others for feedback. But actually seeking feedback is not that simple. After trying to solve a complex design problem, the last thing a designer needs to do is ask someone to help themselves find out what is missing from the design. Of course they can also opt out of feedback (which may be unconscious), but their own "listening" skills are biased and eventually ignore new problems.

As a designer we also need to gain some courage. As Jesse Schell explained:

When we listen to other people's opinions in depth, we also put ourselves in a risk area. We always think that any opinion we hear is negative and will contradict all our assumptions. But fundamentally this is an open mind and the only way we can know the truth. You have to look at anything like a child, without making assumptions and looking at everything carefully.

Designers don't design for themselves.

Another reason why students don't like to receive feedback from graphic design teachers is that they feel that teachers are always pushing their ideas above the student's design. And a lot of professional designers are trying to avoid criticism because they think they can get more control and decide the end result.

But this is a wrong and selfish understanding of design. Design is not just a designer conveying their ideas or satisfying their desires. It should be about how to meet the needs of end users and optimize the user experience in the best way.

Of course, there are also spaces in the design process that allow designers to make personal decisions and determine the overall direction of design, but these elements never exceed the user's needs.

Designers shouldn't be making excuses.

When there are flaws in your design, you will always explain to the critics the various "uncertainties" of these flaws. But all you do is make excuses for yourself, just to refute the criticism.

A really good designer will agree to all kinds of criticism and accept the fact that they are not able to solve particular problems.

Get full recognition

Personally, I prefer to take "listening" skills as a cognitive state, which is to try to master all the elements of design, good or bad. As a game designer, I've been trying to expand my cognitive status--beyond personal projects and into everyday life.

Because the job of a game designer is to design all kinds of experiences. People always have a variety of experiences, whether it's as simple as having a family dinner or a marathon training complex. And game designers should develop a habit of learning to analyze and judge each day's experiences. This strengthens their understanding of the experience and the elements that are capable of perfecting or destroying experiences.

This summer, for example, the Mexican Restaurant at the University of Arizona (game State Note: The United States Arizona, State first comprehensive university) had a major renovation. They threw away most of the old equipment and introduced a variety of modern and brightly colored new equipment. And it wasn't until we were redecorating that we really realized how bad the earlier design was. The restaurant was not only dark and narrow, but the tables and chairs were very messy, but we rarely noticed them before they were refurbished.

How can a game designer find a problem in a game if they can't notice some obvious problems in their daily lives? In other words, we need to try to get the truth from practice.

Via Gamerboom

Source: http://www.leiphone.com/0714-danice-designer-think.html