Practice makes better

September 19, 2003 | View Comments (0) | Category: Design

Summary: You can only get better by practicing. However, just do not expect perfection.

There is an old adage that practice makes perfect. As most of you know this is completely wrong. No matter how long we practice something or how hard we work at it, perfection is never achieved. Hopefully, we get to the stage where things are just good enough. This applies to everything in life, especially web design.

There are many great designers on the web and even more bad designers. The one thing in common is that they are all designers. Some people seem to have a natural ability to pump out beautiful designs that others can only hope to make. I think I know their secret though. When you are good at something, you usually enjoy more so because you are good at it. If you can draw really well, more than likely you enjoy drawing. Because you enjoy drawing you do it more often than others. Therefore, you are practicing something that you enjoy and getting better at it with every drawing. Your next drawing may not be as good as your last, but there is definitely something that improved.

The drawing metaphor also applies to web design. To be great in this medium you have to love it. Design can be such a difficult concept to master that you have to put much work into it to even get something small out of it. I say you have to enjoy it because if you put a lot of work into your designs without enjoying them, the only thing that you will learn from your designs is that you still don't like designing.

It is very tempting to believe you can create great websites instantly because websites are easy to create thanks to HTML and minimal sites look as though almost no thought was put into them. However, well designed and beautiful minimalist type sites I believe have the most thought put into them. It is much harder to take things away from a website then it is to add things to it.

This site is not the greatest piece of design out there, but believe me it is way better than something I could have come up with a couple of years ago. As you can see I am a minimalist designer. I value both form and function and to achieve equality with these on sites takes both practice and refining.

If given enough time, each new site that you do should improve on the previous one. Maybe the text is more readable, or you implemented whitespace more efficiently. The key is to retain what you learned from previous skills so that you may apply what you learned to future designs.

So practice your art by creating. Create websites because you love to, not because you have to. Feel blessed that you are doing something that you love because not many people are given that opportunity. Enjoy the fact that you are the creator and not the follower. Revel in the fact that your work when published on the web automatically gets an international audience. Since there is not such thing as a perfect design there is always room to improve. Of course that takes practice.

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