How to start a career in Graphic Designing as a newbie?

by Chinthaka Samaraweera | Mar 27, 2019 | Become Your Own Boss, Graphic Designer

In day to day life, we want graphic designing skills to do our tasks whether we are students, employees or business owners. If we maintain a Facebook page or a blog, we want to design attractive artworks for it. If we are students or employees, we will want graphic designing skills to create awesome presentations for impressing our professors or bosses. When we share our knowledge over an eLearning course, we want to create some graphics for that.
So if we have the graphic designing skills, then we don’t need to hire a graphic designer for that and we can save a lot of money by doing our own work. We are going to tell you about how to become a good graphic designer in this article.

Actually, Do I Need A Degree To Be A Graphic Designer?

It is not essential to have a degree to be a graphic designer. If you have, then it is good. It will add an extra educational qualification to your CV. But it is not must. If you have the skills you can be a good graphic designer. Skills are the most important thing in this field. If you don’t have the skills yet, we are going to guide you to gain them through this article. So stay with us throughout this article.

So Is Graphic Design Hard?

If you are a beginner with no prior experience, then the graphic design will be an overwhelming job for you. You should not try to become a master in graphic designing within a month. Just try to complete a task at a time. By doing task by task, you will gradually gain the skills to the master level. Therefore don’t be so hurry to achieve everything at once and stay humble in the initial phase.
Read many books and blog posts on design principles as you can. Google as much as possible and gain the knowledge on the things what you don’t know or the things that you have less knowledge about.
Master Photoshop, Illustrator and InDesign. To master them, start to learn the tools inside each software one by one. Learning the tool one by one will help you to learn the individual concepts in graphic designing.
You can begin your journey as a graphic designer newbie and reach the professional level by following simple and specific steps. The guidelines below will help you to go in the right direction.

1.Inspiration gathering

Try to get inspirations from the masters in the graphic designing field. When you see a creative and unique design put it to your Pinterest board. Then try to recreate and add new things to the design.

You should not copy the designs on your Pinterest board. You can get an idea from that but you have to find out your own style using those. The inspirational designs that you collected will help you to discover your preferences. For example, assume that your collection of inspirational designs mostly consists of infographics. That means you love infographics more than the other design types. Therefore you need to pay full attention to infographics and begin designing your own projects.

You can find many sources of inspiration. dribbble.com or behance.net are great examples for them.

2.Observe and study

Take a considerable amount of time and observe the designs you collected. Observe how are texts, shapes, lines and other components masterfully combined in a design. You will see that all the designs are very simple but powerful.

When you study various designs you can get a better understanding about implementing the tips and theories you read into the real world designs.

Analyze past and present design trends in the world. Find a specific design style and discover the things that they have used. Swiss style is a good graphic design style to begin, because of its grid design system. Try to redesign them. Compare your design to theirs. If there is a difference between them, then do modifications to your design. Repeat this process for many other styles until you gain confidence.

Then take a coupon clipper and redesign the ads in a new style. Do the same process with billboards, advertisements and etc.

Then try to create your own designs. That way you can develop your skills. In this process of developing your skills, you automatically begin to guess the software and tools that professional designers have used to design specific components. Don’t much worry about color theories, negative space and typography at the beginning. You will automatically get the knowledge on them when you continue your work.

Now you have a great portfolio with you. Try to connect with a local business. And then do some free work for them to build your portfolio and to get more work. Or you can join to a graphic design company as an intern. And also you can try freelancing work as a graphic designer. Fiverr.com, 99design.com and Freelancer.com are some examples of freelancing platforms.

3.Take notice of alignment

Symmetry is a very important factor when increasing the attractiveness of your design. Though your design consists of many colors and decorations, to obtain the uniformity, it is important to adjust the alignments.

4. Select the correct font types

When you design, you must pay attention to the clarity of your design. Because clarity is an essential aspect of graphic designing. If you put unreadable text on your design in order to enhance the visual appeal, you will not achieve what you expect from your design. Your design will not be successful. It is not a good idea to use various typefaces in one design though some guides tell to use. Because it is difficult to adjust our eyes to various styles and forms at once. So it is better to use different font sizes of the same font family. 

However, you should not use the same font family to all your designs. Because the perfect font family for a project may differ from project to project. It depends on the requirements, expectations, goals, and viewers of a design. So you should research and select the perfect font style before starting a particular project. There are so many font styles, exploration and experimentation will help you to select the best one.

5.The target for color cohesion

Don’t try to implement all the things you have learned in one design. If you do so, then your design will be full of texts, colors, shapes, and all the other components. Another thing is that don’t use red/green, orange/blue or purple/yellow color combinations in your design because a large amount of contrast is not a good factor of designing. Select colors that match each other finely.

Select the colors that match your mood and intentions. For example, deep blue symbolizes spirituality, intrigue or depression while green color symbolizes peace, nature, and freshness. Analyze some inspirational designs that you have collected and identify the color combinations they have used for expressing their mood and achieving their goals. Try to accomplish the same thing, using your own color combination.

You can use the Adobe Color CC tool online for selecting a good palette according to your requirement.

6.Keep consistency of the image quality throughout the design

Meaning of the overall project depends on the images, diagrams, and illustrations you use in your design. Expressing a message, information, feeling or a thought in a clear and attractive way is the general purpose of graphic design.

You have to keep the quality of images you are using, consistent throughout the design. For example, assume that you are going to combine a professional image which you bought from a stock image website with your own photograph, then the viewers will see the shortage of consistency. Therefore the consistency of the style, lighting, framing, proportions, and quality of these components should have remained all over the design.

7.Learn from the feedback you receive from others

The whole purpose of learning graphic designing is to design graphics that are appealing to others. Therefore it is important to get feedback from others. Maybe you are not confident about your design. It does not matter. You should not afraid of feedbacks. You can ask for feedback from professional graphic designers you know.

You can learn from the feedback. Accept the criticism happily and use it to enhance your skills. They help you to be a skillful designer.

8.The target for a clean and readable design

After creating a design, just take a rest for a few hours and then examine it carefully. If it needs some modifications then do it. There should be a right balance between brightness and contrast. Text in the design should be clear and readable. All the other components in the design should accomplish the goals of the design

9.Give importance to the rule of hierarchy

You should strongly pay attention to the hierarchy of your design elements. Let’s assume that you create a design for displaying an important textual message. If you place it over a colorful image, then it will degrade the importance of the textual image. Then you cannot successfully achieve your goals through your design. Therefore prioritization of the design elements is one of the most important factors when designing.
You can successfully accomplish the priority over color, typography, scale, and compositional placement. Though you add many other components to your design, the message you convey through your design must not be degraded.

10.Always do the things you love most

Always try to do something you truly love. Assume that you are a vegetarian and you get an order to design a promotional poster for the KFC chicken. Definitely, you cannot do it with your heart. If you take the order for the sake of money and design the poster, it will not be much successful because you design it with reluctance. Therefore always try to do projects that you are passionate about. Your energetic interest in it will create a great design.

Always sharpen your creativity and innovative ideas. You can gain better results if you continuously practice. The hardest part is to start but when you pass this phase with courage, no one can prevent you from being successful.

I hope you got a clear idea about starting your career as a beginner in graphics designing and how to become a good graphic designer. Good luck for your career and await for more forthcoming articles on graphic designing.