Graphic design

How to become a designer

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I got my job as a designer without going to design school. I had hacked together my own design education in 6 months while working a full-time job. I didn’t think I was ready but started applying for jobs anyway – and got a job at a great startup, Exec.

To be clear, I’m nowhere near as good as those design prodigies that come out of a 4-year education at an elite school like RISD. But I’m definitely good enough to do my job well. I’m the only designer at Exec, so I do a pretty wide range of things – visual and interaction design, print, web, and mobile app design.

Maybe you want to change careers and become a designer full-time.
Or you want to learn some basics for your startup or side project.

This is a guide to teach yourself design.

Update: I first published this blog post over a year ago. Since then I’ve gotten hundreds of emails asking for more guidance and easier to follow steps, and I finally found one: Designlab. This course wasn’t around when I was learning, but man do I wish it was – it would have made the whole process a lot less daunting. What I really like about it is that it gives you project assignments, and then connects you to a design mentor who gives you feedback (they have really good ones who work at Facebook).

Step 1. Learn to see
The biggest mistake is jumping into Photoshop too fast. Learning Photoshop does not make you a designer, just like buying paintbrushes does not make you an artist. Start with the foundation.

First, learn how to draw.

  • You don’t have to sit in a room with a bunch of other artists trying to draw a naked woman.
  • You don’t even have to get that good at drawing. Just learn some basics so you can be comfortable sketching with a pen.
  • You only have to do one thing to learn how to draw: get the book You Can Draw in 30 days and practice for half an hour every day for a month. I’ve looked at a lot of drawing books and this is one of the best.

Learn graphic design theory

  • Start with the book Picture This. It’s a story book of Little Red Riding hood, but will teach you the foundations of graphic design at the same time.
  • Learn about color, typography, and designing with a grid. If you can find a local class to teach the basics of graphic design, take it.
  • Go through a few of these tutorials every day.

Learn some basics in user experience

Learn how to write

  • Here is a sure sign of a bad designer: their mockups are filled with placeholder text like Lorem Ipsum. A good designer is a good communicator. A good designer thinks through the entire experience, choosing every word carefully. Write for humans. Don’t write in the academic tone you used to make yourself sound smart in school papers.
  • Read Made to Stick, one of my favorite books of all time. It will teach you how to suck in your readers.
  • Voice and Tone is a website full of gems of good writing examples.

Step 2. Learn how to use Photoshop and Illustrator
Hooray! Now you’ve got a pretty solid foundation – both visual and UX. You’re ready to learn Photoshop. Actually, I recommend starting with Illustrator first and then moving on to Photoshop after. Illustrator is what designers use to make logos and icons.

Learn Illustrator

  • There are a ton of books, online tutorials and in-person classes to learn Illustrator. Choose the style that works best for you. Here are the books I found especially helpful to learn the basics of Illustrator:
  • Adobe Illustrator Classroom in a Book – It’s boring, but if you get through at least half of it, you’ll know your way around Illustrator pretty well.
  • Vector Basic Training – This book teaches you how to make things in Illustrator that actually look good.
  • Now for the fun stuff! Follow these online tutorials and be impressed by what you can make. Here are two my favorites – a logo and a scenic landscape.

Learn Photoshop

Step 3. Learn some specialties
Do you want to design mobile apps? Websites? Infographics? Explore them all, and pick and choose the ones you enjoy to get better at them.

Learn Logo Design

  • Learn how to make a logo that doesn’t suck: Logo Design Love
  • You’ll want to take it a step further than a logo though. Learn to create a consistent brand – from the website to the business cards. Check out this book, Designing Brand Identity.

Learn Mobile App Design

  • Start with this tutorial to get your feet wet on visual design for mobile apps.
  • Read this short but very comprehensive and well-thought out book on iPhone design: Tapworthy. It will teach you how to make an app that not only looks good but is easy to use.
  • Geek out on the apps on your phone. Critique them. What works and what doesn’t?

Learn Web Design

Now for the hairy question of whether you need to know HTML/CSS as a designer: It depends on the job. Knowing it will definitely give you an edge in the job market. Even if you don’t want to be a web developer, it helps to know some basics. That way you know what is possible and what isn’t.

There are so many great resources to learn HTML and CSS:

  • My favorite free one is Web Design Tuts.
  • My favorite paid one (pretty affordable at $25/month) is Treehouse. If you’re starting from the beginning and want someone to explain things clearly and comprehensively, splurge for Treehouse tutorials.

Step 4. Build your portfolio
You don’t need to go to a fancy design school to get a job as a designer. But you do need a solid portfolio.

How do you build a portfolio if you’re just starting out for the first time? The good news is you don’t need to work on real projects with real clients to build a portfolio. Make up your own side projects. Here are a few ideas:

  • Design silly ideas for t-shirts.
  • Find poorly designed websites and redesign them.
  • Got an idea for an iPhone app? Mock it up.
  • Join a team at Startup Weekend and be a designer on a weekend project.
  • Enter a 99 designs contest to practice designing to a brief.
  • Do the graphic design exercises in the Creative Workshop book.
  • Find a local nonprofit and offer to design for free.

Resist the temptation to include every thing you’ve ever designed in your portfolio. This is a place for your strongest work only.

Steal, steal, steal at first. Don’t worry about being original – that will come later, once you are more comfortable with your craft. When you learn a musical instrument, you learn how to play other people’s songs before composing your own. Same goes for design. Steal like an artist.

Go to Dribbble for inspiration on some of the best designers. Check out pttrns for iOS inspiration, and patterntap for website inspiration.

Step 5: Get a job as a designer
When I first started learning design, I went to a job search workshop for designers. I walked into a room full of designers who had much more experience than I did – 5, 10, 15 years experience. All of them were looking for jobs. That was intimidating. There I was, trying to teach myself design, knowing I was competing with these experienced designers.

And yet 6 months later, I got a design job. There was one key difference between me and many of the other designers that gave me an edge: I knew how to work with developers.

The biggest factor to boost your employability is to be able to work with developers. Learn some interaction design. Learn some basic HTML and CSS. Designers in the tech industry (interaction designers, web designers, app designers) are in extremely high demand and are paid well. That’s where the jobs are right now.

If you don’t have any experience working with developers, get some. Go to Startup Weekend, go to hackathons, or find a developer through a project collaboration site.

Make a personal website and make your portfolio the centerpiece.

Go out and make serendipity happen – tell everyone you know that you’re looking for a job as a designer. You never know who might know someone.

Research companies and agencies you might be interested in. Look on LinkedIn for 2nd and 3rd degree connections to people who work at those companies and ask for intros. The best way to get a job is through a connection. If you don’t have a connection, there’s still a lot you can do to give yourself an edge.

Once you’ve got the job, keep learning
I’ve been at Exec for a year now and have learned a ton on the job. I seek out designers who are much more talented than I am, and learn from them. I find design classes (good online ones are Skillshare, General Assembly, Treehouse, and TutsPlus). I work on side projects. I geek out at the design section of bookstores. There is still so much to learn and to improve on.

Keep your skills sharp, and always keep learning.

This article is repost from http://www.karenx.com/blog/how-to-become-a-designer-without-going-to-design-school/

High-tech

What experience should have graphic designer today

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With the great graphic designer visuals increase engagement by at least 10%. The most important quality for graphic designer is creativity. Great graphic designers create and need to be good in drawing! The second important skill is typography. Today’s graphic designers should have a good understanding of font families, line-height, tracking, and more. Design and multimedia software proficiency is needed, at least 2 years of day-by-day experience, not occasional small projects, but complex work for printing and web. Color theory is may be subtle, but knowing how to utilize, contrast, juxtapose, and mix different colors based on context is an invaluable skill. Color theory also involves lighting and shadowing along with the effects they produce. Since HTML & CSS are the programming languages of function, structure and style, graphic designers should know them so they can go behind the hood of the site or CMS they may be working on. Layout is very important for Conversion Optimization! Any good layout should present information and a path for the consumer while hitting that perfect balancing point between space-wasting and cluttering. For the printing design graphic designers should have knowledge of color space, printing processes, color separation, grid layout, and master pages. Read more

Banner Design Success Techniques

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Banners have been a major part of the World Wide Web world since its early days. Copywriters burn the midnight oil looking for new designs that will grab the visitor’s attention and compel him to click on their banner. This article discusses some of the most successful banner designs. Read more

What is Branding?

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Branding is not only your logo but also your business name. Great names evoke intrigue, savvy and class, and tell customers a lot about who you are. When you begin the branding process, think first about your name. Next, envision an image that works with that name. Finally, create a byline, which is a short sentence that describes who you are or what you stand for. Here’s an example. I named of one of my first coffee bars “Caffe Primavera.” In Italian, “Primavera” means springtime. For my logo design I used a Corinthian column with a floral theme at its base, surrounded by two renaissance angels. The byline I chose was “Coffee delivered from heaven.”

There are many examples of expired branding in the coffee world. Let’s look at Seattle’s Caffé D’arte (Italian for “coffee of art”). Its simple logo incorporates the company name and a cup in a design that uses traditional Italian colors. Its byline, “Taste the Difference,” tells you a lot. It indicates this company has traditional Italian coffee and suggests it is a high quality product.

Another Seattle coffee company with impressive branding is Caffé Vita. Its logo design features an Italian clown holding a cup. The image is classy, whimsical and reminds me of Carnival in Venice, reinforcing the link to Italy, the Mecca of espresso. The company uses its name and branding in fun and unique ways, probably more so than any other company in the industry.

Recently the company gave away black hats with an embroidered logo design that simply said “Caffé Vita.” But for the younger crowd, as a very creative and unique promotion, the company created cheap black and white foam baseball hats that from a distance read “VITA SUCKS.” Upon closer inspection, you could read small print that said, “VITA is great! What SUCKS is when you can’t find any!

Written by: Bruce Milletto
Source: http://www.expresso101.com/

History of graphic design and its audience

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To insist that, or to prescribe how, the history of graphic design need be taught in any particular way is to unnecessarily limit the field in both methodology and pedagogy. Since there is no consensus amongst historians of graphic design on what the history of graphic design is or what it should be, no scholar studying the subject should commit to any one way of researching, writing, and teaching.

Web Designers vs. Print Designers

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Many Web designers come to the Web with a print background. Either they were print designers, or they are just used to the control that a print world gives. When you print something, it provides permanence and stability. You don’t have this on the Web.

The problem is, that it’s easy to forget. When you build your Web page and test it in your browser, you get it looking exactly how you want it to look. But then you test it in a different browser, and it looks different. And if you move to a different platform, it will look differently again.

As you’re a designer, you’ll need to work with customers. You will be doing them and yourself a disservice if you don’t explain the difference between print and the Web. Especially if you bring your portfolio as print outs. This is a common problem, where the customer expects the printout to represent exactly what the page will look like.

What To Do? Working with Customers
Printouts as a Portfolio
It is always important to have a portfolio, but remember that the Web is not print, and bringing a print out is not a strong representation of your Web site design skills.

  • Setting Expectations
    Be up-front with your customers. If they want their page to have very specific layout, font, and design elements, be sure to explain the tradeoffs such as download speed and maintenance before simply building them a completely graphical page.
  • Know what your customer uses
    If you’re a big Netscape on the Mac fan, and your client only uses Internet Explorer for Windows, you should keep this in mind in your designs. Your page could look very different to them.

Design Techniques

  • Know your audience
    Know the characteristics of the audience of the site you’re building. If they are propellor-heads, they might browse in Unix on a 21 inch monitor. Or if they are more conservative they might have a 12 inch monitor running Internet Explorer 3. If you design a site that suits your audience, your customer won’t be complaining to you later.
  • Test test test
    Test your designs in every browser and OS combination that you can get your hands on. Emulators work if you have no other choice, but there is no substitute for hands on experience.
  • Don’t forget resolution
    Browsers and OS are important, but if your readers and customers are browsing on a smaller screen than you design on, they could be unpleasantly surprised.

The Web is Not Print
While it is possible, with CSS, to get very precise layouts, but it will never be as precise as print. If you can remember that as you’re designing your Web pages, you’ll save yourself a lot of stress.