One of the cool things about creative people and I guess humans, in general, is that we’re all unique, but how do you find your personal design style?

Hey everyone, today I want to talk about finding your own personal design style. Now, if you’re an illustrator or you do your own graphic work on the side just for personal reasons, if you’re a graphic artist, you have complete creative freedom. You don’t have any clients telling you what to do, what color to use, or what font. You have an effortless time defining your own personal design style because it’s just your work. Right? That makes total sense. But there is hope for the rest of us.

There is a time earlier on in my career where I honestly felt a little stuck because I didn’t know how to define my own personal design style. I don’t really know why this bothered me so much, but I felt like I had to have one certain style that I would be known by and recognized for, and everyone would come from everywhere wanting me for my personal style. But I also felt conflicted because as a designer working for clients, my work should always reflect the client or the brand I’m working for. It’s true unless you’re doing your own creative graphic artwork on your own, you do have to follow the brand guidelines or the style guides as closely as you can. It’s the right thing to do; no shame in that. But what I’ve also learned is no matter what you work on, there is no other designer in the world who will make it exactly like you, and that’s where your personal style comes from. When I realized this, I felt so much better because I didn’t have to try to have a design style; it comes out naturally.

Essentially, design is about choices, and those choices that you make are what makes it your work and what makes it personal to you.

So how do we find this? How do we find our own personal design style?

Tip №1: Start with an Exercise

It took me a very long time and a lot of work, but I think I’ve finally done it. My biggest advice is to start with an exercise that I will tell you about in just a second that helped me so much.

Option №1: Design as per your Clients Requirement

First off, don’t be afraid. You have to actually make a choice now before your font library grows larger or your stock photo collection gets more interesting, which will happen over the years, so don’t worry if that’s the case with you. Make a choice and start with some fundamental things. I find this to be a lot easier when you’re making it for a client. They don’t want your personal style; they want to see that you can do whatever is needed at that moment.

So when I’m doing work for clients, I try not to have any biases or opinions about what I think should be done and instead ask them at all times, “What do you like? What do you want?” And keep asking questions until they give me something specific and then hone into that selection.

Option №2: Start with Typography

If you can’t do the work for a client, start with something like typography. That’s a great place to start because there are not many options out there, and you’ll find your groove pretty quickly. Find some typefaces that speak to you visually that look like how you want your fonts to look or use some real fonts from the internet, or use one of the font services out there and try it out in a few different ways.

Do these fonts feel masculine? Do they feel feminine? Are they quirky, or are they elegant? And see where it takes you because right now, you’re just researching to explore what kind of styles make sense for you and what doesn’t measure up.

After that, start combining them. Do this with everything, whatever it is, maybe you could combine some typefaces of two different styles and see what happens. Whatever it is, begin to experiment and try things out in a safe way. Maybe you haven’t paid for any of the fonts, and you’re just trying things out in Illustrator or Photoshop or on your phone while you’re sitting on a train. Just try things out but don’t worry about making mistakes because that’s the point of the exercise.

Tip №2: Work on with Different Designs.

Now, when you’re in school, or you’re learning design, you may not see it at first because you’re getting a lot of feedback, inputs, and critiques from your professors or your classmates; you’re all working on these same projects and almost trying to make them look the same, but the more and more design work you have, the more experience you have, the more you’ll start to see certain similarities throughout your work, and this is really exciting, right? Because you don’t have to force anything. It’s just going to come out in your work naturally, and I think that’s a pretty cool thing that a human has. Your work is always going to look like your work because you’re the one that made it.

So take me, for example; even though I’ve worked on so many different types of client projects, companies, all kinds of different industries, if I step back and look at my work as a whole, I can see certain similarities. I can see the amount of white space I like. I can see how I tend to go for more high contrast color combinations or certain types of graphics styles, and even things like more open and airy layouts are things that I tend to gravitate toward, so they end up looking like my personal style. Maybe you haven’t articulated this to yourself yet, but you also have tendencies that you gravitate towards that you like, that your eye sees that are only uniquely your, and that’s awesome. You do have a style; it will emerge naturally the more you work, and the more you refine your own design.

Tip №3: Ask for Suggestions from your Friends or Professors.

If you’re not sure what your own design tendencies are, it may help to ask a friend or a professor to look at your work and see if they notice any common themes. Sometimes we get a little too close to our own work; that’s hard for us to see it, or if you’re coming out of school, you maybe have some student projects, and you don’t have years and years of design experience.

What I did was I went out, and I collected inspiration from designer’s work that I really loved and gravitated towards. I go through my textbooks and find the designers from way back when I had just the most amazing style that I loved, and I see all this stuff out there. Even though my work was not to that level yet, I could still see what I liked and what kind of designer I wanted to be, and that helped me understand my own view about how I wanted my design work to look.

Conclusion

So you probably won’t be able to do whatever you want on your client project. The work is for your client, after all, not you. But even still, the small preferences and ways of seeing will come out in the details of how you solve your client’s work. So the answer to how you find your own personal design style is not that you find your design style, but rather finds you.

Anyway, I hope this article was reassuring, helpful, maybe giving you something new to think about that you haven’t thought of before.