Turbo design: 8 tips for designers to be productive

Many books and articles have been written on the Internet about improving efficiency. But the sharpeners laid out in feng shui on the table and the letters marked in different colors in the mailbox will not help you to hand over the layout in the shortest possible time. Below are tips from Pavel Lebedev, head of the largest Photoshop and Adobe Illustrator communities on VKontakte and the skillsup.ru portal, on how to create designs with and without inspiration.

1

Sharpeners with pencils can lie on the table in any order, but the workspace of the program should be convenient. Customize it to help you with your work. Set the palettes you are using in a prominent place, and hide those that are rarely used.

2

If you can, connect a second monitor to your computer. This will allow you to organize your workspace so that you don't have to switch between windows, which is a huge time-saver. Set up one monitor for a working document and another for mail, instant messengers, job viewers, and additional tools.

3

There are situations when a designer needs to save the world: make a layout in an hour so that it looks like it has been worked on for weeks. For such cases, keep in a separate folder previously unapplied options for other clients. Collect for typical solutions that you like and which you can repeat. Create templates for work and lists of their standard "original" ideas.

When templates are very urgently needed, use Freebies:

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Find new free design sources and build your own template library. To keep abreast of new content, I recommend adding template sites to the RSS Reader.

4

Don't waste time looking for files! Most of the time we work with them. And often we spend much more time searching for files than it takes. To stop wasting time, you need to use three basic principles of file storage:

by the name of the file, you can always understand what is inside;
all files must be located unambiguously;
files and folders you don't need shouldn't be distracting.

So, so that you can always understand what is in the file without opening it, make it a rule to write the correct file names. More often than not, names like Untitled appear not because of lack of time, but because we do not know what name to give the file. Therefore, it is worth developing a system that will allow you not to think about how to name the files. For example, at the beginning of the file, always write what kind of layout it is (flyer, brochure, poster, etc.), or write which customer it belongs to if you have several customers.

The second important rule is to forget about two words in the title: Final and New. Because as soon as new edits come from the customer, Final will no longer be Final. And you won't have time to rename all the previous files.

To navigate the folders, start a certain numbering of projects, but so that the numbering is not duplicated. For example, it can be a unique project number or the date the order was received in the YYYY-MM-DD format.

Thus, all new projects will be at the bottom of the list, and old ones - at the top. If there are too many projects in the folder, you can always send the old folders to the archive.

The organizer program Adobe Bridge will also help with the organization, in which you can add color markings and ratings to images, edit XMP, IPTC and RAW formats, work with different versions of the file.

5

Create layouts so that they can be easily redesigned. Need to replace one with the other? Use smart objects in Adobe Photoshop and symbols instead of groups in Adobe Illustrator.

We need to play with colors - create a palette of global colors (Swatches) in Adobe Illustrator. Change the color in one place - the colors change throughout the layout. In Adobe Photoshop, use custom layers, gradient maps, custom Solid Color layers, and vector objects. Also use layer effects, which can be copied and pasted for other layers.

Need to play with fonts? Use Character styles and Paragraph Styles for texts. This will make the layouts more accurate, and you can change the size or style very quickly. Keep the layout in order from the beginning.

Group the layers into folders as soon as we understand that they need to be moved together. We sign the folders as soon as the layers are grouped into a folder. We sign the layers as soon as we found the desired unsigned layer. We delete empty layers as soon as we saw that we have an empty layer.

6

Train yourself to use hotkeys. Customize keyboard shortcuts to make your work easier. Illustrator has many keyboard shortcuts, but none of them can save you as much time as the X key. With it, you can switch between fill and stroke in the Tools palette. Try to use this key in your work, and very soon you will not be able to imagine your life without it.

7

Use cheat sheets. If you can't remember hotkeys, paper sizes, etc. Feel free to print cheat sheets for yourself. Keep them in front of you until you memorize them. And in the working layout, customize for yourself guides and modular grids so that they help determine the center and main parts of the document (thirds, quarters, etc.). This will also save you time.

8

Automate the process. Train yourself to use Actionsif you do the same action more than five times. Set up batch processing where possible.

Ready! You are gorgeous! There are still two hours before the layout is completed - it's time to watch the new series of "Game of Thrones" or walk to the cherished square with the inscription "2048".