6 Tips and Tricks to Stop Your Designs From All Looking the Same
Designers often find it hard to create new designs and come up with new ideas for clients that doesn’t just end up looking like something that they’ve already created. Therefore, it’s often good to get different inspiration and ideas on how to create something totally new. However, it’s often hard if you’re having a mental block. Therefore, we’ve come up with a list of 6 tips and tricks to stop your designs from all looking the same and help you create something brand new that you may not have thought of creating before.
Look At Past Design Inspirations
The first idea is that you look into past designs. If you look at old designs from a decade to even a century ago, we see some great inspiration in design trends that is now becoming trendy once again. The retro look is VERY popular at the moment, especially with branding and logos. Old curly fonts and matte colours are being used by everyone from coffee companies to retail stores and more. Therefore, we’d highly recommend going back and having a look at some of the big brands and designs from a long time ago. We’d specify logos and branding rather than website design, there’s nothing you want from a decade ago there!
Experiment With Minimalism
Sometimes, we often find ourselves looking down at a design or a creation and thinking it looks far too cluttered and as a result doesn’t look good at all. Therefore, why not try experimenting with minimalism if it’s something you’ve not previously worked with. You could either try removing sections of the design that are merely there to fill space of start from scratch and work out the best parts of the design and simply include those. It’s a great tip to also make your creation, website, design, whatever it is, more modern and contemporary which is important with clients in this day and age.
Look Back At Your Previous Work At A Different Angle
This one may sound a bit contradictory to the point of this article, but looking back at your previous work can sometimes create new ideas. If you look at your work from years ago or you look at work from different angles (by angles we do mean literally…) and see if it inspires any different creation within your head. Sometimes old shapes and lines can be seen in different ways you didn’t originally see when creating the original piece.
Choose A New Favourite Font
If you have a select criteria of fonts you use, this could be the reason that all of your designs end up looking the same. If you’re constantly using the same serif font or the same serif font, try looking on the internet for a new font that would add something a bit different. You can find a font online that is either vastly different from your usual font preference or choose a font that resembles one of your favorites but differs just enough to make a design look different. Different font choices can also result in different designs working better, creating different ideas of what looks good and what doesn’t.
Don’t Be Afraid To Use Templates
A lot of designers shun templates as they say that it is a cop out and the easy way to make your designs look good. Get a good designer to create a look and you just change the text and images. Not exactly. If you find a template you like, you can use it as inspiration. There’s a fine line between directly copying something and using it’s influences on your own work. We’d recommend selecting the main reason you like that template and work off an method based on that preference. For example, if you like the color scheme, or you like the style, or you like a certain way the template has used fonts.
Try Sketching – It Results In More Crazy Designs
Finally, we recommend going analog. It’s something we don’t often mention here on Geeks Zine, but when it comes to designing something, sometimes there’s nothing better than a pencil and a piece of paper. You are completely unrestricted to what you can design and everything you want can be drawn exactly how you see it. In addition, with a pencil and paper, you can just begin drawing random shapes and see what ideas form from those. This is one of the few times we will mention these ‘P’ words, but we’d definitely recommend them if you’re stuck for creative ideas.
