Design Hacks Newsletter

Hey Harry,

One of the most common UI questions I get is: "My design looks like everything else. How do I develop my own unique style?" 🤔

To which I say:

Don't worry about being unique. First, get really good. And then you won't have to worry about being unique.

[PSA: Learn UI Design / Learn UX Design / Landing Page Academy are open for enrollment for 6 more days 🥳. Also, I'm doing a live design event on Monday, details at bottom; reply with your submissions!]

For example, one of my favorite designers is Brijan Powell. His work is chocked full of personal style.

Overall, Brijan has crafted this incredible personal style. Look for:

  • Small numbered lists that would otherwise be unordered
  • Arrows and em dashes
  • Rare fonts, bold weights, and creative settings of type
  • Dark, cool color schemes

But I would be remiss if I didn't mention that despite the flashy, wavy, 3-D effects and all, Brijan can still make a simple paragraph look wicked cool.

Prompt: A short article about a motorcycle, please.

Brijan Powell: Bam.

Look. Unless your short-motorcycle-article design is this good, I recommend worrying more about quality than personal style.

And I'm not being snarky! You can study this stuff.

It's one of the fastest ways to get good at UI design:

  1. Find something great
  2. Study why it works
  3. Add strategies to your toolkit

The strategies I annotated above, by the way, are ALL covered in Learn UI Design.

(Except the 3-column one; that's rare on the web! 🙈)

Learn UI Design is a lifetime resource of design tips, strategies, and frameworks that are actually practical. My litmus test for including something: will it help you make your bad design look good?

And trust me, if you've tried to make a bad design look good, you know it's not easy. No blog posts about design systems or baseline grids or color theory are going to help you! 😬

But make-your-bad-design-look-good is the central goal of Learn UI Design.

Join over 5,000 students and get:

  • Instant access to the most complete online UI course on the planet
  • Over 36 hours of video and dozens of homework assignments to test your understanding and improve your skills
  • Access to the Learn UI Design student community, where you can get feedback, design reviews, and share your experiences with other design practitioners
  • The Live Redesign Vault, with 41+ hours of me redesigning student submissions

Comes with a no-questions-asked, 30-day money-back guarantee.

Ready? It’s go time.

See you there – or Landing Page Academy or Learn UX Design, either way 🙂

Cheers,
Erik D. Kennedy

PS. On Monday, I'll be doing a live design event where I will redesign 1-2 reader-submitted designs in an hour or so (and answer other design questions of yours).

If you're looking to get design advice on something you're working on, please reply with screenshots/Figma/link, plus a bit on the UX/UI issues you're looking to solve.

(Mobile apps, dashboards, landing pages, send it all! 😀)

It's happening Monday, March 3rd at 12:30 PM Pacific.

👉 LIVE REDESIGN WEBINAR: REGISTER HERE​

Hi Harry! 👋 You got this email because you signed up for Design Hacks. I send out original UI/UX design tutorials and occasional news on my three design courses: Learn UI Design, Learn UX Design, & Landing Page Academy. You can edit your name/email or unsubscribe if you want (don’t click those if you were forwarded this email 🙂). Drop me a line if you're ever in my neck of the woods → PO Box 386, Maple Valley, WA 98038. Cheers!