Incorporating Design Into Your Life

News designers can hone their skills even when away from the job, says Amy Junod, a Baltimore Sun designer. Junod, who spent this summer as a Poynter Visual Journalism Fellow for College Graduates, offers these tips on fostering creativity and connecting with audiences.

Buy tracing paper. Every time that you see a design that catches your eye, trace it. Turn it into blocks. Not only will you get a sense of how the page was put together, you'll start amassing your own personal collection of ideas for future projects.

Allow yourself to be inspired. Good design is good design, whether it's a book, magazine, billboard or cereal box. Allow yourself to soak in all of the good visual ideas that surround you in your everyday life.

Be a detective about your audience. Wherever you work, whatever you produce, you're going to have a target audience. It is your job as a good designer to shadow this group until you learn everything about them. What sort of things do they buy at the grocery store? What brands of clothes do they wear? What music do they typically listen to? Once you know the merchandise they allow into their lives, you can get a sense of what visual styles appeal to them and how accepting they are, overall, to changes in appearance, tone, and stylistic approach. This will give you an indication of how far you can push, from a design standpoint, without having to find out through costly errors in on-the-job judgment.

Take up an artsy hobby. Whether it's figure drawing, pottery or making crushed eggshell mosaics at the YMCA, an artsy hobby will help you keep your sanity. It will remind you that page design is not fine art. It will keep your stress level down, and it'll keep you from facing embarrassing bouts of separation anxiety when your pages move on to stages in the production process that are beyond your control. Plus, it'll give you lots of nice things to arrange around your desk.