12 Hacks For Graphic Design
Newbs

Imitate Great Designs: But don’t
forget to embed brand’s unique personality and vision into the design.

Good designers copy, great designers
steal. ~ Pablo Picasso

Practice Bookmarking: Found something interesting?
Liked a color palette? Bookmark it for future reference or later read.

On Pinterest the average visitor
spends 88.3 minutes bookmarking per day.

Keep Your Camera Handy: Create
your own library of real life photos.

Did you know that the
search for Instagram-esque imagery hit an overwhelming 661% rise in 2013 and they are still in vogue.

Rent out a cloud server:
Make space for more work, store drafts and archives on the cloud.

5 Reasons why you should
store data on cloud: 1. Access to data in disaster 2. Cost Effective 3. Unlimited Storage 4. Easy to organize 5. Effortless sharing over the Web

Use Keyboard Shortcuts: Learn shortcuts
for graphic design tools and employ them frequently.

Photoshop shortcuts

Illustrator shortcuts

Limit social media usage: Restrict
social media activities to specific hours (not more than 3).

US users spend more time
on social media than any other major internet activity, including email. Average usage times for social media rose from 1.72 hours per day in 2013 to 1.66 hours per day in 2014. The average user logs 1.72 hours per day on social platforms.

Avoid Procrastination: Devise a daily
routine. Define goals and set deadlines to achieve them.

Approx. 95% of the world
population is prone to procrastination.

Better done than perfect: Perfection
is a myth. Focus on sensible and complete design.

The idea of perfection is
so imperfect.

Avoid the chicken and egg
trap: You can’t edit a blank page. Don’t wait for the right moment, start now. And don’t let your doubt sabotage your success.

Doubt kills more dreams than
failure ever will.

Manage Stress: Sleep more. Take
short naps. Swim, dance and run often.

A study in the journal
Frontiers in Human Neurosciences shows Regular Exercisers do better on tests of creativity than their more sedentary peers.

Overcome Creative Block: To get
your creative juice flowing, tap into your unconscious with mindmap.

“The creative process springs as
much from the subconscious as it does from a conscious thought process. Most often, creative solutions are not wrestled from your mind through sheer force of will. Eureka moments tend to occur spontaneously, almost always when the conscious mind is thinking of something else, or nothing at all.”

Create a repository of ideas:
Create a dump (Excel or Word File) for unripe ideas for future reference.

A single idea from the
human mind can build cities. An idea can transform the world and rewrite all the rules. ~ Cobb, Inception