While designers try to keep a unique style and an authentic image, they are also finding it hard to improve their visibility and put themselves out there.

I’ve been looking closely at many designers’ behavior lately, and based on some discussions I had with several, I tried to list the major things that I’ve found them do that make them stand out and be more noticeable.

These tips I list below are based on my personal outcome of watching and following designers making progress in their career, trying to stand out and improve their discoverability. I combined that with my own experience as a designer and tried to define the most valuable ways for designers to stand out nowadays.

1. Invest in your social media appearance

You have to be out there. You have to invest time on optimizing your Instagram profile, Dribbble, Twitter, Behance, or any other social network that you like. If you want to stand out, you need to be visible for people to discover you so they’ll see how good you are. I’ve seen many designers use social media as the main way to stand out, get exposure, be accessible, and let potential clients find them easier.

How? By sharing your work, publishing your thoughts and creating content for social media, you get exposure and make people remember you better. While doing so, you also grow your audience, get your work to reach new eye balls, and create engagement around your designs by letting people comment and give feedback.

When someone sees your name, with your face next to it, alongside a piece of content that you posted which is related to design somehow, their brain automatically associates you with design and that’ll position you as a designer in his mind.

2. Publish your work regularly

To be discoverable, you need to publish content. Good content is a very important thing if you want to stand out. The internet is a giant river of fast-floating stuff, and if your work doesn’t float to the top, you won’t be noticeable.

Keeping a high-quality design posts is important, but the frequency of posting is important as well.

By creating design stuff and publishing at least two times a week, you can gain a steady amount of exposure. People remember you better if you publish stuff regularly and they find you more attractive to follow since we tend to trust consistency.

A good tip for publishing better and richer content is to add a small paragraph or a story for every piece of design work we upload. When you write a few sentences about the process of your creation and the goals of it, your work gets to be much more interesting and your audience will appreciate it more.

You can write why you chose the colors you’ve used, where did the idea come from, who is the client, what was the challenge, and much more. People love to hear stories, we’ve been excited to hear stories since we were kids. So by being a designer that also tells the stories behind their work, you can excite your audience and make your posts much more engaging and rememberable.

3. Be trendy, but also innovative

That’s not easy. But trends have always been a big thing in design. Some people say that you shouldn’t follow trends, and that you should stick to your authentic style. But most of the times, being off-trend makes your work look old fashioned and not fresh.

Designers that understand trends and identify them fast can get their work to be featured on design blogs/websites easier. By doing that, I’ve seen designers get lots of exposure and credibility. I’m a big believer in trends. I think it’s an initial part of the design world, and it’s how tech, culture, and society evolve. One year a certain style is very popular, and the other year a very different one.

But, being on trend is not enough. If you’ll only follow a trend without thinking of a way to evolve it, your design won’t be innovative. I found out that innovation in design is the most powerful way for designers to position themselves as influencers, thought-leaders, and inspiring creators. If you want to stand out you can’t just publish stuff that look like all other trendy stuff around the web, you have to add something new.

An easy way to do that, is to always think of a way to add a personal touch and an outside-the-box thinking to each and every work that you do. It can be in the small details, in the colors, and maybe in the way you present it. It doesn’t really matter, as long as it brings something new to the world, that looks unique and innovative.

4. Go beyond design

Most of the designers design, actually 100% of them design. But only a small amount of them also do other stuff. You’ve probably already seen these questions around the web like “should designers code?” or “should designers draw?”. In my opinion: no, they shouldn’t, but they might want to. No one should do anything nowadays, people do what they want and if they’re good at it — they get paid. That’s how it works.

Designers that love doing other stuff besides designing stand out better. For example, if you’re a designer that also loves taking photos yourself, you can use your photography skills to capture and integrate photos in your designs. Same when you have some coding skills, you can achieve a better understanding of web design, communicate easily with developers, and create some prototypes yourself.

I’ve seen many designers stand out better by learning skills like illustration, copywriting, 3D, CSS and more. I think it’s important for everyone, not only for designers, to expend their tool box and enrich their skills toward different worlds.

2018 is the year of “one man band”. We see a huge revolution in the world of celebrities and influencers nowadays with many creators that do everything themselves. Most of the influencers and vloggers nowadays shoot, edit, publish, and manage their brand by themselves. It’s like the new generation of entrepreneurship since everyone can learn to do everything alone and execute their ideas easily and faster.

5. Contribute and help others

Doing good is a very powerful way to make yourself stand out, and designers can contribute and do good in many ways. I’ve seen many designers do things that give value to other people like sharing their professional insights, publishing tutorials, giving advices, and helping others with things they’re good at.

Some designers vlog, some do podcasts, write books, and even create websites and resources as side projects to benefit other designers and contribute to the design community.

Sometimes it might feel like things that don’t give an instant value to us and are worthless, and some might say that investing in yourself, polishing your portfolio and getting more clients is just enough. But the reality is that people and clients don’t appreciate you only for your skills nor for your beautiful Dribbble shots. They also judge and care about your personality, your story, your mission, and your will to help them.

At the end of the day, potential clients hire you not only for your software techniques, but for your ability to offer them a good design service that will enrich them and give them a meaningful value.

Thanks for reading! ✌️

How do you stand out as a designer?

I’d be happy to hear your opinions and insights. Please let me know in the comments below what you think!

Gal
galshir.com

How Designers Stand Out in 2018 was originally published in Muzli - Design Inspiration on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Lately, a lot of people are asking me about the apps and tools I use as a designer. So I decided to open up my secret box and share a short list with all the stuff I use for my design work. 🎨

1. After Effects

One side effect of using After Effects: people will constantly ask you what software you’ve used. Many people are unaware of the wide angle of stuff you can produce with After Effects, and they’re always surprised to realise.

I personally go with AE for any motion work, animation, interaction design and prototyping. When I abandoned Adobe Animate (aka Flash) and started using AE, my animations have improved a lot and I learned many new techniques for creating smooth motions.

2. Sketch

The one and only for product design. I use Sketch and several of it’s plugins to design user interfaces, landing pages, data visualisations, and even icons. For me, Sketch is the most simple, intuitive and fast design software on earth, and it‘s the only app that runs 24/7 on my computer besides Chrome.

3. Photoshop

The mother of them all. Breaker of paint. The one that got me into design years ago. Even though I’m using Photoshop less lately, it’s still powerful and is one of the tools I can’t live without. I use Photoshop for photo editing, for cutting objects, and adjusting colors.

4. iPad Pro 12.9" & Apple Pencil

My new toy which is slightly becoming an integral part of my work. I like the portability, the intimate feeling when holding it, the screen size and the apps that work with the Apple Pencil. I use my iPad Pro for sketching and illustrating, and the apps I use are mainly Adobe Illustrator Draw and Procreate.

The Apple Pencil is amazing. I was surprised by how smooth and natural it feels. Since I got this pair, my illustration work has become much more fun, quick, easy, and I was able to achieve that authentic “hand-drawn” style of illustrations (the icons for this article for example). Watch how I draw with the iPad and the Pencil on my YouTube Channel.

5. Dot Grid Notebook

Love that notebook! This dots grid is very useful for many things such as logo design, icons, typography, and UI layouts. Even though I’ve been using the iPad Pro for sketches and drafts lately, I still love to go back to the roots of pen and paper. Something with this off-screen activity engages a different part of the brain and can bring better results.

6. Dribbble

My BFF for inspiration. I start my mornings at the office scrolling through popular shots on Dribbble for around 30 minutes. For me, it’s the best place to keep myself up-to-date with the popular trends, styles and techniques. I love seeing other designers work and I love sharing my work to get feedback. Dribbble is my tool for finding inspiration, ideas and best-practises.

7. Color Hunt

My side project, Color Hunt, has become a useful resource for me. I use Color Hunt to catch the right color palette for my illustrations, animations, and branding projects. Since all the palettes on Color Hunt are created by its users (designers from all over the world) It gives me the possibility to pick a palette of colors I would’ve never come up with by myself. Read more about Color Hunt here.

Thanks for reading!

I hope you found this list useful! Give it a 👏 and write a comment below if you have any feedback or question!

Gal

How a side project I launched two years ago grew to become a popular resource that reaches 200k monthly users

In this article I’m going to tell the story of Color Hunt, a curated collection of color palettes. I started Color Hunt with the goal of sharing my passion for colors, and provide a go-to resource for designers, artists, developers, illustrators, and basically anyone who needs a fresh color combination for their design project.

The Idea

It all started from a repeating situation of me being asked by someone to help with choosing colors for their work. Friends of mine which are content creators or work in the creative field, were sending me messages once in a while that go like “Hey Gal, can you help me choose 5 colors for a pie-chart I’m making?” or a request like “Can you advise 3 colors that work with purple?”

After too many distracting and context-switching requests, I came up with the idea of setting up a simple web page, that features several basic color combinations I made. I thought that by doing that, I can easily send a link to my friends and direct them instantly to pick a color palette I made before. So I started coding it.

🤔

The Vision

I’m not a professional web developer nor an experienced marketeer, but I know how to combine colors. I started by making a simple HTML page that lists some color palettes I created, and connected it to a database where I store all the palettes. To let myself quickly add more palettes to the database, I developed a simple Palette Creator.

I set some rules such as limiting the amount of colors in each palette to four, and displaying the colors in each palette with a specific hierarchy I came up with. A ratio that gives each color a different importance by displaying it in a different size.

After getting this simple web page ready, I decided to transform this personal collection into a public resource for the world. Then came the two following ideas: A) the like button that lets users save their favorite palettes, and B) the sorting menu that lets users change the order of the listed palettes based on their popularity, their age, or just random.

I wanted to make a resource that feels alive, dynamic, and interactive. By showing the colors HEX codes on a mouse over I created a way to access the codes quickly without needing to click and navigate to a different page, and also, kept the layout clean and appealing.

The Challenges

1. Scaling The Collection

I wanted to grow Color Hunt to have thousands of palettes, but I couldn’t create so many by myself. My time is limited since I’m a full-time designer in a startup, and even on the creative aspect, I can’t come up with so many different color combinations. So I decided to make the Palette Creator public. Anyone who wants can contribute to the collection and submit their own color palette to Color Hunt.

2. Keeping The Quality

More palettes created by users = lower quality and less-curated collection. Color Hunt’s idea was to be a hand-picked collection on one hand, but also to be open and collaborative on the other hand. So I built the Review System. Instead of immediately showing every new palette on the homepage, all new palettes are sent to a managing dashboard I built. In that way I can review each and every creation before it goes public and choose the very best of these to show on Color Hunt’s homepage.

3. Driving Engagement

Since I wanted Color Hunt to be curated not only by me, either by the users themselves, I added the like button for each palette so the users could curate the collection themselves by clicking the button on the palettes they find beautiful.

But I knew that in order to run a likes system, I have to force my users to signup for the website, or connect using Facebook or Twitter, and I didn’t want to do that. I know that people hate signups and that I might get way less likes if only signed-up users could click the button. Since the community wasn’t big at the beginning, I couldn’t compromise on such low amounts of like.

Enter Local Storage. So I built a likes system that stores all the user’s liked palettes in his browser’s Local Storage without needing to have a user account on Color Hunt. My database also records each like with the user’s IP address so he can’t like a certain palette more than once.

4. Being Unique

There are tens of great color palettes websites online. I can’t win the competition and get all this huge audience to my side, but what I can do is to optimize the things that make Color Hunt different. Things such as the simplicity and the clean interface, the easy palette saving and quick accessing, the daily updating, and the hand-picked curation.

The Result

When everything was live, ready and tested, I published Color Hunt as a new product on Product Hunt and got an overwhelming amount of up-votes, exposure, feedback, and traffic. I started to see the palettes like-counters pumping, and my managing dashboard filling up with new palettes created by users.

Color Hunt got featured in many different websites, blogs, social networks and magazines related to design. After the first week I started to have so many new palette creations on a daily basis so I didn’t need to create any by myself anymore. Since then, all new palettes are created by the users themselves.

After the first month, I found myself wasting a lot of time curating and reviewing new palettes every day. So many palettes, that I even decided to hide the “Create” button under a dropdown menu to reduce the amount of submissions I need to review.

Today, Color Hunt is a popular resource that serves around 20,000 daily users from the design and the creative fields. Several months ago I launched the mailing list that currently has more than 3,000 subscribers that get a popular palette once a week directly to their inbox.

Choosing the best palette every day has become a daily routine for me, I enjoy maintaining and curating the website, and I even started to earn a small passive income from Color Hunt that lets me have a cocktail and eat some good food in a fancy restaurant once a week.

Whats Next?

I’ve been receiving lots of ideas and feature requests by users of Color Hunt from all over the world. There are still many things that can be done to make Color Hunt better. Many things, including:

1. Adding a search option for users to find specific color palettes based on a certain color
2. Developing a lists system for users to categorize their liked palettes and make different personal collections
3. Open the collection with an API to give access to the palettes in different apps and websites
4. Developing a Sketch plugin to let designers integrate and quickly use Color Hunt’s palette within the Sketch app

There are many more, and I always love to hear new suggestions. So if you’re a Color Hunt user, or either heard about it for the first time just now, please let me know if you have any idea or suggestion!

Thanks for reading!

I hope you enjoyed this article and liked to hear the story of Color Hunt. I’d be happy if you clap 👏 that button and let me know in the comments below if you have any feedback or question.

Gal
galshir.com

Every single day I’ve been walking the same path to my office and back home, let’s call it route A. But a little while ago I found that there’s an alternative route (B) that might be faster and I should consider changing my daily routine and choose the new route. But I wasn’t so sure about that.

I only have 24 hours a day, and every second is important to me. I’m really sensitive of my time and that’s why I really wanted to optimize my routines and do the best I can to save more time each day.

Why not use Google Maps or any other GPS to determine the duration of each route? 🤔

I did, I tried and Google showed that my current route (A) is faster by about one minute. But I knew I couldn’t relay on that because these maps don’t take in account the time wasted in red traffic lights at crosswalks, nor certain corners and roads I can cut through, and some other parameters.

So I decided to A/B test it

For 10 days, I walked to the office each day through one of the two different routes. Route A on Monday, route B on Tuesday, again A on Wednesday and so on. I used my iPhone’s stopwatch to record the duration of each walk and kept all my data on a note.

I needed lots of data

Since there are many dynamic parameters that influence my speed, I knew I needed at least 20 walks (10 through each route) to start getting data I can rely on. Lots of things are affecting the duration of my walk:

1. Crosswalk traffic lights are dynamic 🚦 and even a single long red light might be a game changer.
2. Unexpected things on the road such as constructions and people that walk slowly in front of me are changing my speed.
3. My current mood and my energy is dynamic and sometimes when tired I walk a bit slower than usual.
4. The weather is also a parameter since walking in cold weather is always faster.
5. The time of day is meaningful since there is a chance my speed is different between the morning and the evening.

I tried to walk naturally

Acting like no one is measuring me was the biggest challenge. It was really hard to stop thinking about my speed and the ticking stopwatch. I knew I had to keep my speed consistent without trying to adjust or compensate my steps. When I was concentrated on it, my walking speed wasn’t natural and reliable.

But I made it. 🙌 After 3 days I started to pay no attention to the test and stopped being focused on my speed.

During these 10 days of testing I knew there is a chance I might not get enough indicative data to come to a conclusion, and maybe I’ll have to continue my test for a longer time. Luckily, I started to notice some results after few days, but continued the test to collect more data and make it more accurate and reliable.

Result: Route B was faster!

Google Maps was wrong. I was surprised to realize that for a full year I was spending my time on route A, without knowing that there is a faster alternative route. In average, route A’s duration was 11:49 minutes, while route B was 11:11 minutes. That means I could’ve save 38 seconds each morning and each evening which equals to 6.5 minutes per week!

38 seconds are not a dramatic difference, but definitely enough time that’s worth saving. As I said in the beginning, I’m really sensitive about my time.

In addition, I discovered another interesting fact: my average evening walk duration is 11:09 minutes among both routes combined. This is way faster than my morning walk which is 11:51 (42 seconds slower).

What I’ve learned?

1. You know nothing, Google Maps.
2. I should always look towards alternative routes and solutions for every little thing in my life. The trick is to figure out how to measure and analyze each option in the most reliable way.
3. Beside the challenge, the curiosity and the excitement of making the test, I realized that A/B testing is an easy and practical tool everyone can use in their day-to-day life to optimize different activities without much effort.
4. Data is objective and the more data there is, the more accurate the conclusion. I‘m considering testing some other activities in my life which I can optimize such as my workout sessions, nutrition, the amount of money I spend, my sleep and more.

Thanks for reading!

Please hit the clap button 👏 if you liked this story! Let me know if you have any comments or if you ever tried A/B test in your day-t0-day life.

I’m Gal, a product designer and art director. You can subscribe to my mailing list and receive my next articles directly to your inbox.

✌ ️

Colors are one of the most important and powerful elements in design. Since design is an evolution, our perception of colors (and the ways we use them) is ever-changing.

I’ve noticed that there is a new and fresh trend in design that involves a prominent use of gradients in UI, branding, illustration, typography and more. It seems like we got bored of all the existing colors in the world, so we started to create new ways to use them.

A gradient is created by using two or more different colors to paint one element while gradually fading between them. Gradients let designers create something that feels like a new color. A tone which didn’t exist before, something that looks unique, modern and refreshing.

Is this going to be the new way we use colors? Are flat colors old-fashioned now? Only time could tell because anything new these days is considered a “trend”. We all know that most of the trends change over the years, and lots of them will become old-fashioned themselves. And then Instagram might change their logo again. 🤔

Why are gradients so trendy?

1. Gradients are memorable

Gradients are something we don’t see a lot, our eyes catch them as something new, and being memorable is exactly what you want for your design or brand identity. We remember these unusual visuals much better because we aren’t used to see them yet. We are surrounded by a very limited amount of usual and flat colors, we all know them since we were babies and we recognize them in an instant.

Our language to describe colors is limited to a specific perception structure. So if suddenly we see something which we can’t name as “blue” or “purple”, we remember it. We remember it like we remember the first time we traveled to a new place or the first time we tasted something new.

2. Gradients are unique

Let’s be honest, there are not enough different colors in the world in order to let brands create their unique identity. I think there are around 20 common colors we can actually name and recognize, while on the other hand there are hundreds of thousands of brands trying to create their own unique identity. You can’t choose blue because Facebook already did, so you try a different blue and you realize that Twitter took it. Not enough colors for everyone. 🤷

That’s where gradients change the game. Designers can fade multiple different colors and the use of gradients actually adds a lot of more options to the amount of “tones” available. The amount of brands that use a “Blurple” (a gradient between blue and purple) is really small, so that gives brands the opportunity to obtain a unique color identity.

3. Gradients feel realistic

I’ve noticed that in the real world, where a circle doesn’t exists but a ball does, we see way more gradients than flat colors. Every lemon has its shady half which is more brown or green. Same in flowers, the sky, different materials, and more. They are all painted with gradients. Maybe it might be more natural and logic for our eyes to see gradients also on our screens.

4. Gradients are just more colorful and playful

People love colors. We are attracted to colors by our nature since we were on the hunt for fruits and flowers for too many years. Eventually those natural things were designed by nature itself to be as colorful as possible in order to attract us and other animals. So this is another winning point for gradients, since they basically got the potential to be more colorful, playful and attractive than a flat color.

Thanks!

These were my thoughts on how gradients can become a way more prominent element in the design world. I would really appreciate if you click the 💛 button to recommend this article and write a comment below to share your thoughts.

My name is Gal Shir and I’m a product designer and art director. Stay updated with new stuff I write by joining my private mailing list ✌️

Gal
galshir.com

Are Gradients The New Colors? was originally published in Muzli - Design Inspiration on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

When I was young, I’ve always had an answer for when people were asking me what my favorite color is. It was blue, but then after a couple of years it turned to purple, and then turquoise, and then yellow when I got older…

Colors are like music genres, some people love rock, others love classic music, and some love jazz. The relationships with colors are affected by our experience with them, same as our relationship with different types of food. After having a good or bad experience, this love/hate relationship can change over time.

Lately, a friend of mine asked me:

“As a designer, please tell me… What is the ultimate color?”

Over the last years, as I got deeper into design, I figured that I don’t have an answer anymore. I’m not sure if I have a favorite, I don’t know what the best color is, I can’t promise that a specific color would sell more, and no, I still can’t decide the color of the shirt I should wear each morning.

Colors Are Simply Tools

Since design involves constant work with colors, I noticed that I no longer relate to colors as appealing or not, but as suitable or not. When different design projects require different approaches, having only one color on my palette is not enough. My own favorite color doesn’t suit in most of my design projects.

When I realized that I can’t make everything yellow even though I really like yellow, I started treating colors as no more than a set of tools to create visuals.

Should Designers Love All Colors Equally?

Maybe we should check if Facebook would prefer hiring a designer who loves blue rather than a one who loves orange...

Design is all about choosing the right option in a certain situation, and when a specific color suits better in the composition, more than another, we consider it as a “good” color.

Like a carpenter that loves all his tools, I think designers should be able to like and use all kind of colors. These are our tools. Sometimes we need a hammer, sometimes a saw, sometimes green and sometimes maroon.

Yes, we still have our own personal preferences and sometimes we can’t ignore it, and this is good, we shouldn’t fight it. In many cases using our personal taste may help to solve design challenges. But, if we want to be able to produce a wide angle of styles and products, we have to learn how to leave our personal taste behind, and use all the tools in our box.

Thanks for Reading! ✌️

Do you have a favorite color? If so, do you happen to use it more than other colors? I’d be happy to know what you think. Write down below if you have any feedback.

Gal Shir
galshir.com

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Muzli Design Inspiration

Should Designers Have a Favorite Color? was originally published in Muzli - Design Inspiration on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

As I sometimes dig inside my work process, trying to understand what’s going on inside my head while I design, I started to realize what drives my decisions and thinking process.

Pushing pixels, placing objects in the space, and adjusting colors, sizes and shapes, are not an easy tasks. How should a designer know what to do? Are there any rules in design? Does every designer lay his personal “rule book” wide open on his desk from 9:00 to 18:00?

Lately I’ve been dealing with some challenging product design tasks, placing me in a spot where I have to make hard design decisions. While struggling with the composition of some objects on a single screen, I noticed there’s a guy, called “the voice inside my head”, telling me exactly what to do…

“Hey you, focus! Try pushing this title to the left… Ok, forget it, let’s center everything… Oh! This button should be green, absolutely, green. Trust me!”

And I follow his orders blindly, like a robot. Move my fingers on the trackpad as my master commands.

I think everyone talks to themselves (at least I hope)… It helps us process our thoughts better, and create order inside our heads. But where do these voices come from? What are these voices based on?

A. Experience Based Design

For the experience based designers, every design decision is a conclusion of the results of similar decisions made by them in the past. Experience is powerful, and designing based on experience seems to be the safest option. They aren’t afraid to say “I don’t know” when they have no related experience with a specific design task.

B. Intuition Based Design

Intuition is tricky, but is still the most common type of decision making tool among people. Designing based on intuition is probably the best way to work fast, and get stuff done in no time. Our intuition tells us what to do by having us “feel good” about something. Yes, designers make a lot of mistakes by following their intuition, me too, a lot. But following our intuition is something we hardly can take away from ourselves, and that’s what makes us human designers.

C. Reference Based Design

These designers have a BFF called Dribbble (Or any other reference around the world). They base their design decisions on other designers’ decisions. The obsession with being up to date with new products, trends and styles, makes these designers powerful. Unlike experience or intuition, design based on references is out of the designer’s comfort zone, out of what he knows or what he feels. Also, using a reference is the best way to learn new styles and perform diverse techniques.

When I noticed what that voice inside my head is comprised of, I immediately realized that all three cores (experience, intuition and reference) are necessary, and as a designer I should listen to that voice. Now that I know where he’s coming from, I can truly trust him, blindly.

How do you guys make your decisions? I would love to know.
Thanks for reading! Write to me if you have anything on your mind.

Gal Shir
galshir.com

Hey! ✌️

Nice to meet and thanks again for reading. My name is Gal Shir and I’m a product designer. I invite you to subscribe to my private mailing list to receive emails from me with more things I write and other cool stuff about design.

You can see my work on Dribbble or follow me on Facebook to stay updated. I’m also on Instagram & Twitter.

Gal
galshir.com

Muzli Design Inspiration

How Do You Make Design Decisions? was originally published in Muzli - Design Inspiration on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.