Beginner’s Guide to Design: Build Your Design Skills in 3 Easy Steps

As beginners, I think we all have the desire to create fantastical things, whether that be dragons, Viking boats, or epic war beasts. 

It can be intimidating to see all the amazing work those around us are doing! But we can actually begin practicing this skill early on as a beginner and start to develop an intuition for design. Let's get started!

We want to start with the absolute basics! You are going to ask “But I am advanced! Who needs the basics?!” I would respond “Then why did you click on a Beginner blog post, huh???” Anyway, grab that pencil, pen, stylus, VR stick, whatever you are using, and try this:

What you want to do is draw 10 organic forms using contour manipulation and form wrapping techniques! Ah man, here it comes! "What the heck is form manipulation, form wrapping?” Okay, go ahead. I’ll wait.

You back?? Okay, well it may feel overwhelming, but you should be able to get to the section on Form Manipulation in half a day or so! Now you are ready to forge ahead! The reason we are manipulating simple shapes is because we can already begin developing our design intuition of what feels good.

Alright, now we are going to grab some references. Here, I am using insects because these are the basis for a lot of cool designs. What you are going to do is draw this insect. If you are a complete n00b, you can use simple forms here, essentially making a mannequin version. If you have more guts, then you will be using manipulated forms that you were supposed to be exploring in the step before!

If you get stuck here, head on back to the ROADMAP and continue a bit further on it! You can also start with the simple forms and then take those and manipulate them on tracing paper, or a new layer, etc. You should really spend the time to have a break through with manipulated forms as this is the secret sauce.

Now comes the fun part! As long as you are happy with the above! If you are not happy, keep redoing step 2 until you get something YOU genuinely enjoy. From here, you can make it into a mount, a war beast, or a walking city! Your imagination is the limit here!

You can start anywhere. With this idea, we are going with a mounted type of beetle! You can grab references for saddles and whatever else you may need. You want to apply these on top of your manipulated forms, being sure to follow the contours!

We take a turn here and add some armor pieces! No longer is this beetle simply moving goods or people. But it is ready to RIDE into combat.