Straight Flexin'

How do I flex my design muscles?

The idea of designing badly on purpose is intriguing. Since I identify more as a writer than a designer, I can draw a correlation using writing as an example. When I’m faced with a bout of writer’s block, facing a blank page or the insertion point on an unbesmirched document, sometimes the solution is to start spewing words onto the page, being fully aware of how badly they’re coming together. Sometimes it takes a few paragraphs to even figure out what I actually want to say, but I’ll at least have found a direction. Once I find my topic, the writing usually gathers a little panache and I can use that momentum to get most of my ideas down. Then I circle back and cut the fat. Usually whatever occurred before I located my muse gets snipped away, or worked into the body of my argument. 

That’s how I flex my writer’s muscles, but how do I flex my designer’s muscles? I’m not a strong designer yet, but to perpetuate the exercise analogy, I feel a good burn when I learn a new skill, or get better at working with a certain tool or program. Working in the lab, I’m confronted with questions from lab users struggling with things that I once struggled with, but now am able to teach. I often don't know the answers to their questions, and that’s when I get to flex. I’ll search for the solution and try to work through the problem with the student. The assignment gets completed, and we both add that arrow to our respective quivers. Just a few days ago I had three separate Photoshop dilemmas, all of which I was able to figure out with minimal effort. Photoshop is my weakest of the Creative Suite programs, but I don’t plan on being able to say that for too much longer. 

Another way to flex my design muscles is to seek out design work. At my job, we work with a lot of vendors who do the bulk of our art related tasks. I let my supervisors know early on that I was interested in working on design tasks and becoming a go-to in-house resource for those types of jobs. I still spend the majority of my time in Word and Excel, but I was able to work on the design templates for two different textbooks that will be published next year. On a side note, I’m the only person at the office with a Creative Cloud membership, and sometimes I’m asked to simply open files and backside them as idml files for the Production team, who still uses CS6. A simple task, but I think it can go toward building an argument that my membership costs should be covered by the company.

Finally, a good way to flex is to learn the keyboard shortcuts. These are invaluable tools not just with Design programs, but also with Microsoft Office. I can work a lot more efficiently by unlearning bad habits and retraining myself to do things more succinctly. This website is a helpful visual tool to show the keyboard shortcuts for the Creative Suite programs.