Design software is readily available anywhere. With a few keystrokes and mouse clicks, anyone can own professional software and start designing, but there’s more to it than that. Besides computers, there are three things designers must possess in order to be successful—creativity, knowledge and passion, the secret weapon. One we work to express, one we work to achieve and one we put into our work. Creativity comes to us naturally, which we use to express ourselves both personally and professionally. Knowledge, however does not come so easily. We have to work for it, research and study for it and retain it for the future. Passion is what gives us the desire to create and learn and improve ourselves.

Creativity

The first key to being a successful designer is creativity. Everyone has an ability to be creative. It just so happens that we as designers possess a stronger creative mind than others. Creativity should be nurtured, fed with inspiration and expressed through any outlet it requires. Without it, the human mind can become stagnant and depressed.

Knowledge

Creativity is nothing without the means to express it. If you’re a painter, you need to know what colors to mix to get the color you want. If you’re a hair stylist, you need to keep up on the latest trends and which hair products work best for which hair styles. If you’re an engineer, you must be aware of new safety codes being enforced. This brings us to the second key to being a successful designer: knowledge. You can be an expert at Photoshop or a guru in Flash, but the second you become unaware of the latest technology or processes, your competitors surpass you. A designer should never stop learning, given the ever-changing nature of trends and technology. If you’ve mastered web design, move on to HTML and CSS. If you’ve mastered that, try your hand at PHP. I’m not saying become a jack-of-all-trades, but instead learn as much as you can about what you do and never stop. This leads me to the third key to becoming a successful designer…

Passion

Passion is the secret weapon every successful designer possesses. You can be an extremely talented designer, know PHP, AJAX, ASP and all other acronyms, but without the passion to apply it in your career—a drive to become better at what you do—chances are you will go nowhere but where you are right now. Passion alone will make you stand out from the crowd of designers with a wider creativity and more knowledge.

“Nothing great in the world has ever been accomplished without passion.”
– Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

Whether you are an expert or a novice, passion is what will take you to where you want to be. Its what tells you to continue when others try to hold you back. If nothing else, be passionate about what you do; it will take you places you’ve never dreamed of.

Within every person is the power to create. Being a designer or an artist, that power seems easier to wield and make use of because we are visual learners and thinkers–we can “see” what we want to put on paper or in pixels. This article is based heavily on a belief system, which some of you may or may not agree with. Nevertheless, its an attempt to compare the work of designers and artists with a power that is within all of us.

Introduction to the Subconscious Mind

I’m sure many people have watched or at least heard of The Secret, and if you’re like me, you’ve practiced the Law of Attraction. In case you haven’t heard of either, the Law of Attraction is, well, a law, that states what you think about most, you attract—think positively, experience positive events, think negatively, experience negative events. This all happens through the use of your subconscious mind. Your subconscious mind speaks to you through gut instincts and helps align events in the universe with what you think about most and attract. It’s not a religion, yet it shares many aspects with many religions and has a pretty heavy belief system. The subconscious mind knows an infinite amount of solutions to problems your conscious mind may never conceive.

When working on a design project, we’ve all experienced a dry spell in our creative juices at one point in our career. To help get our creative juices flowing again, we’ve either quit for the night, started work on a different project, or took a breather by going outside or watching tv until we get that “aha!” moment. Part of the reason why our creative juices dry out is because we’ve lost “communication” with the subconscious mind. The conscious, logical part of our mind steps in the way and creates a block, causing us to get frustrated, looking at a blank screen. On the other hand, we’ve all experienced that moment when we’ve been working on a design and make a happy mistake—a twitch of the wrist, a wrong keystroke, picking a different color than what we originally intended, or even coming across a new resource at the exact moment we need it—with the end result of creating something better than what we originally intended. That’s the work of the subconscious mind.

Creativity, brought to You by the Subconscious Mind

Repetition affects our subconscious mind to help us remember or experience what we want, it helps us learn. When we do research for a design project, we peruse through CSS galleries, magazines and other industry-specific collateral. Researching allows us to focus on the images, designs and information related to the project, unknowingly letting it bake itself into our subconscious mind. When we attempt to design a logo, we start out by sketching 20 or 30 different ideas, none of which really appeal to us and we let it go and walk away. This is because the creative, subconscious mind is still thinking, while the logical, conscious mind is trying to figure things out. Each sketch is a new thought drilled into our subconscious, and at the same time, a conscious attempt to create what our subconscious is thinking (confusing, huh?).

Many times, an idea strikes us in the middle of the night or right after we wake up. When we sleep, our subconscious mind takes over and processes all the information it has accumulated throughout the day, some of which we dream about. Upon waking and falling asleep are the two moments our conscious and subconscious minds are in close communication, which explains why our best designs come to us unexpectedly at those times. We see an image of what direction our design should take and we just “know” that’s the one.

My Own Personal Experience

A couple years ago, I pursued a pet project called Superhuman Mind. It was a website collecting the best of the best articles on self improvement and the power of the mind. When designing the logo, I wasn’t exactly sure what I wanted. Something planet-like to portray the universe? Or maybe some type of stylized brain? I went though about 100 sketches or more and nothing was even remotely close to what I was looking for. So I stopped sketching and instead let it fester in the back of my mind. About two days later, I woke up with an image of it in my head, the final logo which is shown below. To my surprise, its extremely simple and yet resembles everything I was looking for—there’s a little bit of a planet symbolizing the universe, the negative space in the icon looks like a stylized brain to symbolize the mind, and there’s also a little hint of a yin-yang symbol in it as well, tying it to religious beliefs.

In case you couldn’t tell from this article, I’m a believer of the power of the mind. As a result, I sometimes meditate on designs, especially when nothing comes to me initially. It helps me create my best work, after all what better thing to trust than your own intuition and power of the universe around you?

As I said at the beginning, this article is heavily based on a belief system. Some people will get it, some won’t. Have any questions, thoughts or experiences you’d like to share? Leave them below.

I pride myself on being a pretty resourceful designer. I have colleagues who always ask me for help, whether it’s coding, how-to’s or a resource. I got to this point of knowledge through school, practice, talent and design blogs. Since I’ve been a web designer, I’ve always searched for resources, bookmarking everything like a pack rat—until recently. A week or so prior to writing this post, I realized that most, if not all of the feeds I subscribe to are geared towards the newbie, are rehashed materials, or are rehashes of rehashes. And that actual, resourceful material is now a diamond in the rough.

Recently, wherever I look there are articles “25 Must-Have Free Fonts,” “How to Draw a Character in Illustrator,” or “100 Truly Stunning Leaf Images.” I’m all for the designers and authors behind the articles offering free resources for the design community, but I think it needs to be stepped up. There’s not one “free font” listing that doesn’t contain a font located on another list, on an equally popular blog. Articles with opinions in the title are a big turn off for me; “truly stunning,” “must-have,” and “awesome” are all terms of opinion of the author, and quite honestly, some items in said articles I find to be under par with what the title advertises. I don’t mean to step on toes here, but I think we need to put some more effort into the content we publish, otherwise its just bloat.

Granted its great practice to publish lists and roundups, as those are what readers go for, but those are numbers. What about those readers who want something more—more theoretical and thought provoking instead? I believe I’ve reached the point in my career where I want to be stimulated and think, “wow, he makes a good point. I need to make note of that for the next time,” instead of the spoonfed, rehashed, “here you go, these are for you, go make things pretty.” I want something that helps me design and not push pixels.

The more we push out the same content, the more our designs will have the same elements and the more our message gets lost. How many sites have you seen recently that use Fertigo, Diavlo, Fontin or Museo in the logo? The more resources we push out that spoon-feeds us, the more of the same stuff we, as designers will create. With only innovative, new content that inspires us can we create something unique.

Like I said, I don’t mean to step on any toes, I’m only voicing an opinion. For all the newbies out there, the free fonts and resources and tutorials are a great way to get your foot in the door and get messy with web design, but to an extent. Once that extent has been reached, it’s time to scale back and concentrate on theory and thought, for that is what will help you think differently and make you stand out from the rest.