I know personally I have learned a lot from the personal design projects I have done in the past. It seems to help keep design work fresh. When you are working regularly for a lot of the same clients you can find you are not stretching yourself. You use the same programs, same fonts (sticking with the corporate style you have set up) same sort of images and logos. By setting yourself personal projects you can safely (ie no-one else necessarily has to see it) learn new programs and experiment with different techniques.
More recently some of you will know I have been trying to learn CSS and HTML and although my skills are still very basic, by adapting a wordpress template for my character designs (another personal project) I have managed to create myself a simple web site and at the same time learn more about CSS and HTML on the way. Blogging on this blog (another personal project ) has helped with this too, and I am not so afraid to get my hands dirty and tweak the HTML and CSS (although it doesn’t always go to plan).
