5 Dif­fer­ent Ways To Be­come The Best De­signer In The World

When you start build­ing web­sites you ob­vi­ously want to be­come the best de­signer in the world, but it’s hard and you need to know what to do.

You can’t just start de­sign­ing great web­sites out of the blue one day. We’re go­ing to take a closer look at some of the tech­niques you can use that most peo­ple don’t talk about, but they def­i­nitely still work.

You just need to re­mem­ber that as long as you keep im­prov­ing your hourly rate will in­crease, so even­tu­ally you will be able to live a fan­tas­tic life be­cause peo­ple will be giv­ing you any­thing you want for you to de­sign some­thing for them.

You can get started with any of these straight away, so it’s up to you how quickly you go from am­a­teur to pro­fes­sional to master.

Prac­tice while peo­ple are partying

I think it was Arnold Schwarzeneg­ger who talked about work­ing hard while your com­peti­tors were out partying.

While you’re laz­ing around there will be peo­ple out there get­ting stronger and smarter.

You won’t come up against them while on stage and cov­ered in baby oil, but you will prob­a­bly com­pete with them for the big jobs.

I guess the take­away is to never stop prac­tic­ing be­cause as soon as you slow down you are mak­ing it easy for some­one to be bet­ter than you.

“When you’re out there par­ty­ing, hors­ing around, some­one out there at the same time is work­ing hard. Some­one is get­ting smarter and some­one is win­ning. Just re­mem­ber that.”

Arnold Schwarzeneg­ger

Build a great network

No mat­ter what you do it al­ways helps to build a great net­work be­cause hav­ing friends in the right places is essential.

Can you imag­ine be­ing able to ask qual­i­fied per­son a ques­tion if you’re stuck with­out hop­ing a stranger helps you on a forum?

If you are friends with great de­sign­ers you can also meet up for drinks where you can learn about new and ex­cit­ing ideas from each other. They can even pass on some work to you, so you will make more money just from know­ing someone.

Learn from the masters

At the end of the day, if you want to be the best you’ve got to learn from the best.

You can spend as much time mess­ing around as you want, but you will need to pay money to take courses and buy books. You can’t be­come amaz­ing if you don’t know all of the essentials.

Hope­fully you have the chance to take classes in per­son with some­one and you can ask them ques­tions as you work. This will mean you end up skip­ping to the front of the queue, but it could be expensive.

Play around with your subconscious

It’s hard to come up with some­thing when you’re sit­ting down star­ing at a screen. Cre­ativ­ity does­n’t just hap­pen when you click your finger.

I bet you’ve felt very cre­ative when wak­ing up in the morn­ing or go­ing to sleep at night. This is be­cause your con­scious mind puts its guard down and you can tap into your sub­con­scious mind a lot easier.

You can also do the same thing with hyp­no­sis and med­i­ta­tion, so prac­tice them and you’ll spend more time in a cre­ative state of mind.

Learn from your mistakes

Every­one in the world will make mis­takes on a reg­u­lar ba­sis, but every­one also has a choice.

You can learn from those mis­takes and be­come a much bet­ter de­signer, or you can let those mis­takes ruin you. Try to fig­ure out why you failed mis­er­ably in the first place then look closely at what you did to fix it. Soon you will be able to limit the amount of times you mess up be­cause you’ll au­to­mat­i­cally know what works.

How can you ever im­prove if you never make any mistakes?

[rms] Great ar­ti­cle, cov­er­ing mind set as well as ac­tion­able to dos. I liked the Ar­nuhld ref­er­ence and added the ac­tual quote to the ar­ti­cle above.

He’s built 3 (!) sep­a­rate ca­reers (body builder, movie star, politi­cian), each of which would have been enough for a life time.

If you feel you need to up your game, get his Au­to­bi­og­ra­phy and read it specif­i­cally for the many pas­sages where he de­scribes how he’s set­ting goals and avoid­ing dis­trac­tions. I’m read­ing it for the sec­ond time now, it’s a great in­spi­ra­tion for rais­ing your standards.