Deliberate Practice

I don't do nearly enough research outside of projects. Some of my design friends will spend hours looking through Behance, deviantArt, or Dribbble, percolating ideas and admiring work, but that's not me. Don't get me wrong, when it comes to doing projects, both personal and professional, I'm all over the place researching, looking at ideas and inspiration. But in my downtime, I find it difficult to sift through it all.

Of course, if I do want to get better at design research, I need to practice.

And as always, the things I read manage to shame me. One of the sections in the 99U book Maximize Your Potential, is all about building your expertise. One article in particular, Developing Mastery through Deliberate Practice, scolded me fairly effectively. "Practice undeniably lies at the heart of mastery," it reads. This isn't anything new to me; as a guitar player for six years now, I've seen the value of practice and the improvement it yields. Heck, if you want to see the value of deliberate practice, look at the harmonica, which supposedly takes only ten hours to 'master.' I've put the time in on that, and it shows.  I want to be a designer more so than a guitarist or a harmonica player, so I need to put in the work to prove it.

So, if I want to hone my creative mind, I have to start taking the deliberate practice to my design. One thing I've done toward that end is something I've taken to calling "tutorial binges." These are like the productive side of a Netflix binge, when I come across a neat tutorial on a site, I do it. Then, I hop to another one on that site and do it, and so on and so on, etc., etc. I've spent hours on sites like Tuts+ or the tutorial section of Creative Bloq, trying out little techniques and styles I can use in my projects. It's an ongoing process, and I won't be able to tell how much it helps until years down the line when I can hopefully look back and see improvement.

But rather than a corny line, I'll leave you with my favorite gif

(courtesy of colleghumor.com)