Design professionals need to constantly innovate and strive for perfection. Innovation or perfectionism isn’t enough for a good design. It requires a burst of creativity and an appreciation for what is considered aesthetic.
However, developing a sense of aesthetics cannot be taught in schools or training programs. It is something that a person cultivates over a period of time. Developing a sense of aesthetics not only helps one to appreciate the beauty around us but also create beauty as well. Designers know very well that their work will only be appreciated when they create beautiful products or services.
Hopefully, these tips will enhance your ability to boost your imagination and be innovative in order to upgrade your work.
Seek inspiration everywhere
This is something that literally all designers do all the time, even the well-known and highly-experienced ones. There are very few people in this world who don’t need to look for inspiration around them in order to get better with time.
Creativity is a state of mind, and being open-minded, asking questions, thinking out of the box, being observant, and always assuming there are better ways to do things
The amazing thing about inspiration in visual design is that it can strike you at the most unexpected hours; not only when you study visual design books, but also while you’re watching a movie, you’re flipping a magazine, or you’re stuck in traffic and looking at street ads.
Learn from all things beautiful
When you notice beautiful things and appreciate beauty in nature, you will observe that we are hard-wired to appreciate things that are perfect. Perfection can be described as a cognitive schema that makes us more attentive to geometrically uniform patterns. Such geometrically uniform patterns can be found all over the natural world.
An example would be a snowflake. A flake of snow contains geometrical patterns that humans can’t be reproduced. If you want to create a design that is beautiful, make sure that it is microscopically patterned and perfect.
Reject what is unpleasant or unnecessary including shallow appreciation of beauty
When Steve Jobs created the iPhone, he probably rejected everything that was not required on a phone. All those features which added to a device’s crassness were removed. Similarly, learn to reject what is not required. Beauty naturally forms because of the lack of unnecessary features.
At this point, we need to also state that what is beautiful is not necessarily beauty. A person who looks great need not be a great person. Learn to discriminate between shallow appreciation of beauty and inherent beauty. Hollow appreciation of external beauty is vulgar; and that is not aesthetics at all.
Keep things fresh
We can de-familiarize ourselves with the things that are normal to us when we start seeing them in a different way. This requires paying attention to their emotional and sensory aspects, such as appearance, feel, look, touch, sound, and other perceivable qualities. This attitude can turn the mundane, everyday life into an aesthetic treasure trove.
Develop an aesthetic sense slowly but surely
Learn to appreciate beauty around you but do not fall into the traps of noticing only external beauty. Beauty needs to be matched with perfection, whether perfection of design or perfection of human character; and in fact, it is the perfection of design or of human character that creates beauty. Slowly over a period of time, you begin to develop a more refined sense of what is beautiful and what is not. That will help you to create products and designs that are aesthetically pleasing.
Painting random colors on a canvas will not make it a beautiful painting. The creative thought and the intention behind a painting and the context make it beautiful. With that in mind, developing a sense of aesthetics does not happen overnight. It is a cultivated quality, which helps to create great design as well.