The design industry is constantly evolving, with new trends, best practices, and entirely new design tools emerging all the time. Regardless of whether you're focusing on user interface design (UI design), user experience design (UX design), product design, or web design, it can feel overwhelming trying to stay up-to-date and progress in your career.

In a growing and competitive industry, improving your user interface design and visual design skills is the key to standing out. Bad design, conversely, is easy to spot and will make you stand out in the wrong way. Design tools and trends come and go, but good design skills and learning fundamental principles — color theory, design theory, user interface design patterns, design processes, visual hierarchy, gestalt principles, user research, and negative space — are timeless and an incredibly valuable investment in your career.

But how do you get good at design, particularly user interaction design? We've written this blog post with several tips to help you improve your UI skills and get ahead in this competitive industry. Let’s get started.

Image from Unsplash

Seek design inspiration from your peers

Design inspiration and learning from other designers plays a huge role in any creative niche. One of the easiest ways to get inspired is by following the design portfolios of other UI/UX designers. After all, the collective work of your peers is what drives good design — we're all just continuous learning from each other and trying to design the best solutions for each design project. 

Following great designers, especially designers with different styles, will help you always stay on track with the latest innovative design approaches. Ultimately, it’ll show in your own designs as well. Even if you consider yourself a good web designer or good graphic designer, there's always someone out there for you to learn from.

Continuous learning from other designers leads to progressive enhancement — start from a rock-solid foundation with best practices and then add improvements. Approaching UI/UX design with this mentality works because you're combining the best design work from the best designers to create something new.

As you absorb and learn from great designers, you'll quickly develop an "eye" for design and will find it much easier you'll be able to improve various aspects of your UI/UX design, such as visual hierarchy and color palettes. This is the kind of intuition that can't be taught in an online course or book!

There are tons of great designers and many great websites to follow beautiful design work. These are some of the best examples and our favorite websites for inspiration at the moment:

• Dribbble
• Nicelydone
• Landingfolio
• Godly
• Siteinspire
• Bestfolios
• Best Website Gallery

The great thing about these websites is that they offer a huge selection of all kinds of user interface design, product design, web design, and graphic design inspiration. This makes it easier to stumble upon new things and inspiration outside of your design niche, too. Even though UI design is a specific design field, it coexists with other types of creative fields, such as UX design and graphic design.

If you're looking for the best examples of world-class UI/UX designers web designers, and product designers, these are a handful of people and design studios to follow on Dribbble that inspire Jordan Hughes (creator of Untitled UI):

Oğuz Yağız Kara

dribbble.com/oguzyagiz 

Oğuz is a product designer and web designer at Winden.co and flowbase.co. His work is a nice balance of web design and UI design and is always beautiful, fun, and creative.

Break down how other designers have approached their designs

Ever thought about learning how successful self-taught designers approach design projects and structure their design work? A great way to go about this is by exploring and reverse-engineering how Figma files have been built.

Figma UI kits and design systems, in particular, are a fantastic way to learn and improve your design UI design skills because they contain all the design elements and other important elements that go into modern interface designs. Diving into them and exploring the many different ways they're built is often the fastest way to learn best practices and techniques straight from great UI designers around the world. Plus, you can use these files as reference points for multiple projects in the future.

Untitled UI offers a 100% free Figma UI kit and design system which is a great place to start. It's the largest UI kit and design system for Figma in the world and is packed with thousands of design elements, design patterns, and graphic elements to explore, all built with best practices. Untitled UI includes documentation exploring the fundamental principles of good UI design, color palettes, font styles, and all the important elements you need to start any new project.

Reach out and get involved in the design community 

Reaching out to other designers might seem scary in the beginning, especially if you’re a newcomer. However, if you truly want to get noticed and create a career in UX or UI design, let go of your fears and become proactive! Once you start networking, you’ll realize how much you have to gain by communicating with other designers, as you can share your designs with them and ask for genuine feedback. 

If you’re already working in the design field, don’t be afraid to reach out and ask for comments or feedback from your working colleagues. If you’re a freelancer or a beginner, check out these design communities where you’ll find great articles, discussions, and other important information on UX and UI design: 

• Twitter
• Design Gigs For Good 
• Dribbble
• Ladies That UX 
• User Experience Design (Reddit)
• Figma (Reddit)
• UX/UI Design Projects (Facebook)

Invest in an online design course 

Investing time into online courses for UI UX design is one of the most common answers to “how to improve in UI design?”, and rightfully so. No matter if you're a self-taught designer or an experienced designer, there's always more to learn and room to improve your visual UI UX design skills. Even the best UI designers with years of experience in the design industry sometimes lack specific fundamental UI UX design skills and don't venture outside of their comfort zone.

Online design courses and tutorials provide in-depth knowledge of specific aspects of the UI or UX design process and are often the easiest and most affordable way to improve quickly. Moreover, if you get stuck on a certain aspect of your design project, an online design course or a short tutorial video that elaborates on the specific issue that you’re struggling with might just do the trick. 

Luckily, there’s a huge number of online design courses on UI UX design and product design these days. If you'd like to focus on specific UI UX design skills, such as visual design, typography, visual hierarchy, color theory, or how to use white space, chances are there's a design course out there for you. And many of them are free of charge!

Learn from the best UI designers in the world with our posts on the best free Figma courses and the best paid Figma courses.