Build your career as a professional graphic designer - 5Ws and 1H answered

Build your career as a professional graphic designer - 5Ws and 1H answered 

Visual communication, which helps in presenting messages or ideas in an aesthetically appealing way, also plays an important role in making the content engaging and impactful. Simple and beautiful designs make a positive impression on the viewers, set the brand apart from the competitors, highlight credibility and professionalism, and make complicated ideas or messages easy to understand. Communicating with the target audience through designs that fulfill these purposes is extremely essential for brands to survive in today’s cut-throat competition. Thus, professionals skilled in graphic design are in demand. If you are also enthusiastic about skilling up as a graphic designer, here are a few things to know beforehand. 

What is graphic design? 

Graphic design is the craft of communicating and solving customer problems through visuals. These visuals are created by combining various elements (such as lines, shape, color, size, texture, and typography) and principles (such as balance, alignment, proximity, contrast, and repetition) of graphic design. Visuals concepts are designed to create awareness, inspire, educate, entertain, and solve customers’ problems. Great designs help in differentiation and identification, improving user experience, beautification, setting mood and emotion, providing essential information, building a unique individual or brand identity, and allowing customers to use their purchasing power at its best. 

Why learn graphic design? 

Whether it is print, logos, website, or branding, visual communication experts get lucrative career opportunities and enjoy the liberty of being creative and artistic at their work. As all brands across the globe require graphic designers for marketing and branding purposes, there is a huge scope for skilled visual communicators. Graphic designers enjoy a significant reputation as they closely work with different departments and ideate, plan, and design the brand identity (logo, website, apps) and marketing campaigns of an organisation. They make the products and services of a brand aesthetically appealing and salable. Learning graphic design could help you build a dynamic career, become technologically sound, have a great work-life balance, work on multiple projects simultaneously, continue learning through comprehensive online courses, and enjoy steady career growth. 

When do organisations need graphic designers?

Brands or organisations need graphic designers for the visual interpretation of their digital and physical messages. Designers contribute to every aspect of a company’s operations right from its incorporation. Organisations hire designers to build the brand’s unique visual identity through a logo, typography, color palette, and image or illustration libraries that never change and are used all across media for branding. Graphic designers also analyse customer behavior, conduct market analysis, and create visuals for newspapers, magazines, television, email, or online advertising. They work closely with UI/UX designers and design, execute, manage, and improve the look and feel of the company’s website and mobile app. For outdoor or environmental graphic design, designers collaborate with different skilled people such as architects, interior designers, or industrial designers and design their office space, hoardings, retail store interiors and exteriors, and designs for advertising on public transport. Designers also contribute to increasing the value of a company’s product and services by designing attractive, informative, and protective packaging for the product. 

Small scale organisations or startups usually hire 1-2 graphic designers who could manage all these tasks, whereas MNCs and renowned brands usually prefer specialised designers that dedicatedly work on visual identity, advertising and marketing, packaging, environment, web design, and other aspects. 

On a regular basis, organisations need graphic designers to brainstorm, plan, ideate, take briefs, and finalise the design requirements of different teams. To create a rough draft based on the brief, and select the colors, typefaces, layouts, and images for the same. To create different designs through hand made sketches, photo editing software, illustration, or graphic design and layout software and share the drafts with the respective teams. And to make the suggested changes, review the final designs, and recheck with the teams before publishing, uploading, or printing the designs. 

Where can graphic designers find suitable jobs?

• Marketing and advertising industry - Graphic designers can work for marketing and advertising industries/ agencies that handle accounts of high profile brands. They could either be assigned single or multiple brand accounts to work on where they design still or motion visuals for print, TV, or online advertising. The major role of visual communicators here is to attract customers’ attention to the brands’ products or services. Their designs should add life to the message, should reflect on the USPs of the offerings, and must drive conversions to increase the sales, revenue, and profit of the brand. 
• Publishing industry/ agencies - Publishing industries produce physical copies of content, literature, information, or music in bulk that could be distributed/ sold to the general public. While earlier publishing industry was restricted to producing print products such as magazines, brochures, journals, directories, and books, technological advancements have now allowed the industry to venture in e-books, online magazines, and other digital content production as well. Graphic designers handle essential responsibilities in publishing industries such as choosing art forms, pictures, typography, creating layouts for a whole magazine or books, creating covers, supplying artwork, arranging photoshoots, editing the pictures, and working with photographers and illustrators. 
• Corporate branding and consultation agencies - Logos, color palettes, typography, website design, and mobile apps of even the most modern organisations could become dull and boring over time and require constant improvement and updating. Graphic designers could work with agencies that provide corporate branding and consultation services to various clients to help them keep their brand’s visual identity updated as per the modern industry norms. Designers here inform and educate the brands about new changes in the design field, and assist them in refreshing their logos, following current trends to attract new customers, polishing the story behind the brand, and ensuring sustained growth. 
• Packaging and manufacturing industry - Packaging and manufacturing go hand-in-hand where skilled graphic designers are required to work closely with engineers, content developers, manufacturers, and marketing professionals for designing unique and attractive product packages. The packages they design must have essential details such as brand name and logo, product category or type, variant, functional benefit, instructions to use, size, weight, manufacturing and expiry date, and other content details that could encourage the customers to buy the products. Graphic designers work on the look and feel of different kind of packaging such as molded packaging, replica model packaging, protective packaging, and transparent packaging. 

Who can do graphic designing? 

Graphic designing is an intricate responsibility and requires essential technical and non-technical skill set based on the type of designing you wish to do. To build a career as a graphic designer, one prerequisite is that you must have experience working on Adobe Photoshop. Some organisations also demand working knowledge of Illustrator & InDesign, so you might also have to learn these to get senior-level roles. For graphic designing, you must have knowledge of design elements and principles of design, and keep yourself updated with the latest technological developments and trends in the design industry. An idea of things such as trending art movements, competitors’ design strategies, customer preferences, new color palettes, marketing and advertising strategies, changes in UI/UX designs, is essential to land lucrative job opportunities. 

As a design combines multiple elements for the purpose of creating awareness, informing, educating branding, marketing, advertising, and fulfilling social responsibility, designers have to communicate and work closely with different departments. Thus, they must hone essential soft skills required to work with cross-team members such as ideation (creating mood boards, drafts, etc.), creativity, communication, strategizing, time management, and problem-solving.  

How can you learn graphic design? 

Graphic design can be learned through beginner-friendly, affordable, up-to-date, and practical knowledge-driven online trainings. Other than instructor-led video tutorials, online trainings feature placement assistance for finding lucrative internship/job opportunities, doubt clearing Q&A forum, certification of training, and downloadable training content to assist you professionally. 

After enrolling in a credible online graphic design training, you can build technical and non-technical skills required to design stunning graphics using Adobe Photoshop. You will watch training videos, divided into multiple modules, to learn different concepts like creative process and history of graphics, composition theory, image concepts and graphic design tools, Photoshop- interface and tools, workflow and photo correction in Photoshop, effects and techniques in Photoshop, and beauty techniques in Photoshop. The training also includes quizzes, assignments, modules tests, and a final test that allows you to implement your learning, practice, and strengthen your practical knowledge of the subject.