Creativity researcher Keith Sawyer described art and design school as a place where students learn to see their own work: they bring unfinished work into critique, hear what others see in it, and practice identifying the gap between intention and result.

David Hoang turns that studio lesson into exercises early-career designers can continue long after school:

To train the eye, spend time doing three things: Capture, Collect, and Curate. To Capture, bring the tools that work best for you: a physical notebook, camera, recorder, or phone. As you walk around, travel, read a book, or surf the internet, Collect what matters. The point isn’t volume but discernment. I keep folders on my Mac for interesting textures, color palettes, fonts applied in the wild, and shapes found in nature. Finally, Curate what you captured. Don’t bury it in a Photo Library with tens of thousands of images. Put your observations somewhere you can revisit daily. Print them out or make a mood board. Whatever you choose, give your trained eye the proper attention.

Hoang then moves from observation to making. He recommends rebuilding strong interfaces from scratch, with the original on the canvas beside your work:

For interface designers, my recommendation is to copy from the masters. By copy, I don’t mean taking a screenshot and putting it in Codex or cloning from a UI library. Look at the work and reproduce it in your UI drawing tool. Put the screenshot on the canvas and reconstruct it from scratch. As you do this, note the margins, spacing, and font sizes. Ask why they work. What deliberate decisions produced this output?

And designers have to explain those decisions. Hoang treats critiques, presentations, and written rationales as more practice because each forces intuition into words. All of it feeds the same loop:

Experience isn’t time spent; it’s evidence of what you can do. The proof of work comes first. Design intuition can feel mysterious because the reasoning behind it becomes difficult to see. An experienced designer may recognize that something is wrong before anyone can explain why.

Edward de Bono argued that creativity isn’t an innate talent but a deliberate skill anyone can develop. I believe this, but it requires rigorous training.

This is why the repetitions matter. Every time you notice a pattern, reconstruct an interface, study an aesthetic movement, or defend a design decision, you give your intuition more evidence to draw from. Over time, the distance between seeing, understanding, and making gets shorter. Your eye begins to match your hand, and your hand begins to keep pace with your judgment.