How to be better at what you do

Matto · 05-15-2013, 11:58 AM

I feel that most people do not think this way and/or look at things this way, by reading this I feel you will realize its only beneficial to you and will greatly help you in bettering your skills. Anyways, this is more aimed at people who want to excel in things like music production or web design but can be used in almost ANYTHING you want to use it for.

Lets start with web design, lets just say you're an amateur web designer trying to make it in the world of web design, but even you know your work isn't up to par with the professionals. This is where the "Trending" mindset comes into play, what I mean by that is staying up to date with the newest techniques and styles of web design. An examples is being responsive (fits all screens and mobile devices) or going horizontal (page scrolls to the left and right not down and up but can also be both) which are both massively trending in web development today.

Take a look at these two websites (both very random)
Your website
Professionals website

As you can tell, yours is pretty amateur but isn't THAT bad but if you compare it to the professionals, it turns into not being THAT bad to being awful. So your work that you considered good is actually not good at all... Being in this position allows you to one-up yourself and set your standards of good higher. When I say set your standards of good higher I mean don't be releasing or selling any work until you can design to your set standards, which in this case should be not releasing any work until your sites look like the professionals (and I don't mean look like the professionals exact website, but have the professionals professional feel). I know this sounds kind of silly, and could potentially lose you money depending on if you actually were successful with your amateur web design (lots of people are just depends how you sell it) but it is way easier to do then you think.

What I do to set my standards higher and actually be able to design at the newly set standards is simple, all you have to do is set your goal to remaking that exact website whether it be designing and coding a duplicate (for learning purposes obviously, not to steal the design) or just designing it. Take a look at the professionals site, nothing on that site is something you right now couldn't do, for example the background is just a pre-made texture most likely downloaded from http://subtlepatterns.com that repeats itself and for the text it only really looks as good as it does because of the color scheme and the in-line effect it has (the small white bevel look) which are both easy to do. The fade in on the pages is a simple jQuery fade in, which is also VERY easy to do. Everything else is simple shapes and vectors placed properly going very nicely with the textured background using a grayish color scheme... The cool little robot may take some skill to design but the slide down effect is very easy to do.

What i'm trying to say is the professionals isn't professional because of his unmatchable technique, its the style he has and where he can place things like images or text. By remaking his website successfully you will gain the style of web design the professional designer has and the little things they use to make things flow and seem nice on the eye, which once again is EASY to do and is so important. Each time you do this you will basically be absorbing the professionals style and methods of web design and be merging them with your true style (which does eventually come out after time depending on how long you've been doing web design).

Now with music production I don't exactly do the same thing, as in look for the best song I can find in the genre I want to produce in and replicate it 100%. With music production I break it down into little goals/steps, for example:

Make drums as clear and crisp as the professionals
Try and remake a certain sound within the professionals song

Treat that as a mental list in your head, and after you complete a step on the list you check it off and know that once you check that off your list you are one step closer in becoming professional, and if your list is built properly once all things are checked off you can consider yourself a professional.

The final point i'm trying to make is learn from others, use others standards as your own and absorb everything you see/hear into your own style. It's really late where I am right now and I was very not sober before writing this and for the amount of time I've been writing this I am now sober, so I apologize if this is something you already know or if this doesn't make sense, I hope it helped someone.