How to steal like a pro: Rapid design collaging
Apparently, all great artists steal. It makes sense, artists (including UI designers) need inspiration to help fuel their creativity. This creativity, in turn, leads to new and interesting works being made.
But unlike traditional artists, UI designers aren’t typically getting their design inspiration by studying other peoples brush techniques in a gallery, and then practicing them back in a studio. Our medium is the digital image, our canvas exists in tools like Photoshop and Illustrator, and the gallery we visit for inspiration is the web.
While all of this is well and good, it’d be nice to have a quick, easy, and repeatable way to get inspired and at the same time use these ideas to create hi-res design prototypes. Lets face it, creating high fidelity visual prototypes can be somewhat time consuming. And while sometimes what is needed is a well planned, collaborated, researched design, there are also times when working quickly is totally suitable. For example, you may simply wish to play with and communicate different design ideas, or sit down with a stakeholder and create a hi-res design with them in a quick and engaging way. To this end, I’ve come up with a very simple technique I refer to as ‘collaging’.
In this 20 minute talk I’ll explain and demonstrate this approach by creating a design from scratch, and by the end produce a hi-res image that will hopefully make you go ‘ooooooo, aaaahhhhhh’. No pressure! But really, the aim is to share with you something that works for me. Hope to see you there!
