As the previous articles in this series have covered, there are a number of skills you need as a designer, that have nothing to do with design. Today we are going to talk about Research Skills.

Research, Research, Research!
Though researching the project  is one of the first things they try to emphasize if you go to design school, in the real world this sometimes gets thrown under the bus for the sake of deadlines. Which is rather unfortunate since in many ways taking the time to do a little research can save you a great deal of frustration.

Weather a design is concept driven or visually driven, if you don’t really understand the product/event/person/business or the audience, or their history/nature, then your ability to make a real connection.

Research In Web Design
For web designers research can take on multiple levels. Sometimes research will be necessary to determine weather a certain technology is appropriate to use in for a project. Research may also reveal known issues in a technology that may meet one of the clients needs but not another. The customer may want a Flash solution, but also want SEO. SEO hasn’t completely embraced Flash design so a “Full Flash” site may be what the customer was expecting, but will not be practical or suit their needs.

Reference Material
Researching a project is important in developing your ideas, and one great way to do this is to pull down reference material. I like to find similar projects, or potential elements or ideas by doing a Google image search for my projects and collecting them in a folder so that I can look at them later. You can also use other tools research. Lets say that you need to start thinking of colors to use for you palette. You can visit Kuler.Adobe.com and build a custom color palette, or use on that has been created by the community.

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Roberto Blake

Roberto Blake is a Professional Graphics Designer and Photographer, living in Fayetteville NC, has work been working with Photoshop® for over 8 years now, and Flash® for the past 5 years.

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