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What are some long term occupational goals?

What are some reasonable, great, and ambitious short, medium, and long term goals for someone developing user interface and graphic design skills?

  • Basically achievements that would be meaningful and worthwhile. Obvious ones might include posting to Dribbble/Behance to get feedback, or actually shipping an app that hopefully gets a great response. There are probably more structured goals/achievements than posting something to Dribbble, and something more medium term than shipping an app each time.

  • Answer:

    Reasonable and realistic short-term goals might be: learn the basics of Photoshop and Illustrator learn about the various UI elements and their proper use-cases begin introducing yourself to HTML and CSS learn a ton about layout and typography. practice as much as time allows you. Practice all the time if you can! One advice I give a lot is don't think the skeumorphic aesthetic is dead and start drawing flat, bland rectangles like crazy. Practice achieving various effects, try making your own textures in photoshop, experiment with materials, angles, lighting, shading and perspective. Get in the habit of developing your own techniques and becoming as versatile as possible. Having a broad skill set also helps in icon design. Long-term goals might be: find your first 'big' client, get on FreshBooks and Bandcamp and start managing your work process professionally. Begin learning a 3D package. Cinema 4D is a great choice for a UI Designer. Begin learning After Effects and QuarzComposer (or something similar) Considering you now have fundamental knowledge of HTML / CSS, it's now time to begin learning about preprocessors and SCSS as well as JavaScript and it's wonderful libraries. Start thinking in terms of "What do web design projects have in common?", "What do iOS projects have in common?", "What about Android?", "Icon design?". After figuring out what is it that you always do and what actions you find yourself doing again and again - start optimising your workflow. Generate templates, asset libraries, UI kits, photoshop actions, CInema 4D starter scenes (for icon design), illustrator templates for icon fonts, etc. You should try and reduce the time it takes you to complete a project by as much as you can. Generate enough momentum to become 'sought-after' designer. That generally means that you get more job propositions than you can possibly accept. This puts you in a position to choose what to work on, which is essentially - the dream. Create something of your own from start to finish. Ship your own product and experience the 'sink or swim'. Begin with either JAVA or C (Objective-C). After 5-6 years in the industry I decided to go with JAVA. It might not be your desire to program at all, and if so feel free not to do it, however to be truly on top of your game a UI designer should certainly know how to code.

Martin Velchevski at Quora Visit the source

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has some great advice in there for his short term goals. Absolutely, learning to use the tools of the trade and practicing is a great start. Long term, your focus should be about becoming a master of the craft. Learning a mixture of psychology and marketing will go a long way in helping to understand user behavior and design for that. You want to have a good grasp of information architure and content strategy on order to make sure the site you design are well organized. Learning to speak a little dev, well help you communicate your design goals to the development team. Once of the most important elements in becoming a great ui/vis designer is to constantly scour the net. And network with other designers.  Becoming aware of current trends, innovations, and best practices will help you develop both an eye for the aesthetic and and understanding of interaction.

Dara Pressley

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