How-To

How to develop an eye for good design on autopilot

To develop as a designer, it’s important that you train an eye for good design. Here are some tips and resources that will help you to build this good habit.

Designers are like poker players: the more hands you’ve seen, the better you play. Developing an eye for design should become your regular exercise. To make it a habit, you’d better stick to a firm schedule.

For instance, I spend 30 minutes a day checking out new stuff on Dribbble and Behance, visit websites of my favorite studios once a week, and go through new collections of brand identity and typography once a month.

To automate this routine, I’m using a combination of browser bookmarks and the Tab Snooze extension for Chrome.

Here’s how I automated my weekly visits to websites of design studios and agencies. First of all, I created the Studios & Agencies folder in my Google Chrome Bookmarks and filled it with bookmarks to the sites I want to revisit from time to time (the links are below). Then I set up Tab Snooze to pop up this folder for me at noon every Friday.

That’s it. Every Friday, at 12:00 p.m., the folder shows up on my display. All I need is to click through the links and explore new content.

Similarly, I get reminders about the other resources I chose to develop my eye for good design.

Bonus: Useful links

As a product designer, I regularly visit the following four categories of websites:

  • Product teams
  • Studios and agencies
  • Galleries and collections
  • Related disciplines

Product teams

Studios & Agencies

Galleries and collections

Related disciplines

About the author: Aleksey Popov, product designer and maker

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