12 services for boosting your observational skills and searching for ideas from the head of the Selectel design team
. Have you ever heard that the main thing in our work is inspiration? Me too, so in this article I’ll tell you what place it actually plays in the design process, along with observation and experience. I’ll also share specific sources and tips from our team’s practice that help create cool visuals every day.
Use the table of contents if you don't want to read the entire text:
→ How hard work, inspiration and observation correlate in a designer’s work
→ 12 services for observation and searching for interesting solutions
→ The references have been collected, but what to do next? Three tips from practice
How hard work, inspiration and observation correlate in a designer’s work
Skills and observation help the designer to quickly complete tasks and create cool visuals. Both are developed with experience. This often causes rejection among novice designers: “How can this be? What about inspiration?!”
In fact, inspiration is a nice addition, not a starting point in your work. To understand why, let's define some basic concepts and look at a few examples.
Hard skills
– professional foundation. This is knowledge about composition, color, fonts, layout, UX, and programs such as Figma, Adobe and others.
Observation – visual experience, which combines knowledge about visual techniques and cases when these same techniques are appropriate to use.
Observation is similar to artificial intelligence that is built into the designer’s head: it trains when a specialist creates or evaluates visuals, checks how they work for the task and fit into trends.
Inspiration – an abstraction that is difficult to touch. Everyone feels inspiration in their own way, but globally it is a surge of strength, interest in the task that makes the work process easy and smooth. In the work of experienced designers, inspiration is a nice bonus. The basis is still skill.
Selectel Day Off is a task we accomplished thanks to a mix of skills, observation and inspiration
Selectel Day Off is an offline event for 700 people that we held last summer. It was a festival for IT specialists who want to develop in their profession while taking care of themselves.
The idea of the event and the entire design were put together from scratch by a large company. HR, event manager, design and content teams worked.
At the start, everyone received an introduction about the event and later returned to the meeting with ideas, references and directions on where to go.
With the help of best practices, team experience and inspiration, we were able to create something new: the concept of “summer at grandma’s dacha” and the slogan “How to meet adult KPIs and remain grandma’s little pie at heart.”
We decorated the event in the style of a holiday at grandma's: flower beds in tires, bicycles, jam.
First screen our landing page Selectel Day Off.
We've sorted out the terms, now we can move on to the tools that help designers solve work problems.
12 services for observation and searching for interesting solutions
The Selectel design team has an Inspiration section. This is a weekly work call where each participant shares what inspires them. This way the whole team sees great references and gets ideas for work.
We reviewed a selection of guys and collected 12 services that will help improve the insight of designers with different experience and take cool ideas into their backlog.
Digital design
1 and 2. CSS Design Awards And ilovecreatives.
These are resources with collections of full-fledged websites and one-page websites. They have quite a lot of animations, unusual layout and other visual wow techniques.
Typically, these sites can be classified as either image or informational. Special thanks to ilovecreatives for convenient filtering: you can search for references by industry, platform, and even font.
What you should pay attention to. You shouldn’t copy all the techniques from bright references. Most often, excessive visual effects irritate users and do not solve business problems.
3. Lapa Ninja. We have made this service separate – it contains simple and close to reality sites: small online stores, business sites and landing pages. The resource is good for the realism of sites in terms of working with content and functionality, and a variety of styles.
How does the service help? Take a broader look at the possibilities in website design: Lapa Ninja has many different directions and topics. Each example can be taken apart “piece by piece” and analyzed how each element works.
Projects on the Lapa Ninja website – there are examples of websites for ateliers and design studios.
Motion design
4. Dribble
. A useful service for beginner motion designers. In Dribble you can search for references for micro-animations: icons, infographics, interface elements and simple illustrations.
5. Steep.design. There are many interesting motion techniques that will be useful when developing materials for social networks – Reels and Stories.
6. Vimeo. A more general resource where you can find cool examples of motion design. There is everything from videos with footage and elements moving on top to animated films with complex frame-by-frame animation. You can search by keywords – names of famous companies and brands.
How to use the services. Take the reference you like and literally analyze frame by frame what is happening to the object: does it jump sharply or smoothly, appears from transparency or not. Next you need to analyze whether it is suitable for your project and how to achieve the desired effect.
In the Steep.design service you can see examples of illustrations in Stories and Reels.
Illustration and graphic design
Telegram channels will be useful here.
7. illustration. A popular channel with selections of cool illustrators and designs, with a short and interesting analysis of techniques.
8. paper lion. Inside, everything is the same as in the previous channel, but rather about book illustration.
Shared Resources
9. seen
. Telegram channel, a guide to the world of modern video advertising. The posts examine how product strategy influences scripts, directing, and cinematography. This helps to increase visibility not only visually, but also in the field of marketing in general.
10 Same energy. A resource that collects a selection of images upon request into one word. Within the service, everything consists of visual things, but if you wish, in the same way you can, for example, draw up an association map immediately with visual examples, from which you can then build on in the search for images for the task. The service allows you to expand the palette of solutions when there is little introductory information at the start and there is freedom of action.
11 and 12. Behance And pinterest. Services are useful at the top level of entry – look at the style of the reference. If you need to see how an identity or sites work in reality, it is better to dig deeper and switch to real materials.
The Same energy service shows such a selection upon request sea – “sea”.
The references have been collected, but what to do next? Three tips from practice
Tip #1. Don't get hung up on finding the perfect references
If you understand that the process has been delayed, but the work has not started, stop, breathe out and start doing at least something. Then the work will go easier.
Here's what can help you avoid wasting extra hours at this stage:
- Limit yourself in time. For example, allocate exactly one hour, no more, to select references.
- Divide references according to areas: style, mood, color. Next, push off from one of the groups.
- Collect references in the evening, and start the main work on the task with a fresh mind the next day.
- Start working on a different task – this will help your brain switch, and new ideas for work will appear.
Tip #2. Rely on your feelings
You should not look at the reference as a set of ready-made techniques. Listen to your feelings that arise when interacting with the reference. If they fit the purpose, look for a way to incorporate them into your design.
And don’t mindlessly repeat details or techniques because you liked them. Copying without analysis will not lead to a consistent result. To analyze the reference, it is worth asking the question: “Why do they work in this particular context?”
Tip #3. Soberly assess your resources
The desire to do everything perfectly can interfere with work and take away extra energy. And if this becomes a constant practice, then there is a risk of burnout.
Therefore, before diving into a task, it is worth making an assessment and seeing a realistic picture: do you really have enough time to conduct a full study, or do you need a shorter and more dynamic search for options?
We are growing quickly and are constantly looking for designers – either on staff or freelance. If you want to cooperate with us, send your response and portfolio by email: jobs@selectel.com.
Join our team: we will help you grow your hard skills, experience and insight into interesting projects 🙂
