Comments on: Ready for a Career in Design?

By: Alice Job Seeker

Alice Job Seeker — Wed, 23 Jul 2008 12:07:01 +0000

Good article ! I think to this combination for a career in design : WORK, TALENT, CREATIVITY. Book like ” Becoming a Graphic Designer ” it ’s very useful.

By: Photo News Today » Blog Archive » 30 Photos That Inspired Me to Learn Photography

Tue, 19 Feb 2008 14:29:08 +0000

[...] a graphic designer has made me fall in love with all things creative, including photography. In a previous article I mentioned the importance of building a strong foundation in one career first, such as graphic [...]

By: MediaMisfit

MediaMisfit — Fri, 15 Feb 2008 00:59:50 +0000

I was just catching up on some old posts and saw this one. THANK YOU! I’m a marketing manager for a tech startup and it is vital that people, especially at a company like mine, be “Synthesisers of Talent.” I took that quote from an awesome speech by this guy. http://www.poetpainter.com/thoughts/

I talk to other professional at my local refresh meeting (http://refreshdallas.org/) and learn about a ton of jobs looking for people with skills in all areas of media and design. I always to try and convince my fellow students going through school. Diversify, don’t specialize.

By: Brad C

Brad C — Mon, 11 Feb 2008 00:05:00 +0000

I think the hardest part for entry level designers is dealing with expectations, especially at larger firms. Unless you’re a superstar, you’re going to start doing production work and move your way up the ladder. That can suck, but can be a great way to get your foot in the door working for larger clients.

By: Amanda Vlahakis

Amanda Vlahakis — Fri, 08 Feb 2008 20:14:57 +0000

I think that if you are a graphic designer creating designs that will be used on the web it’s going to be difficult for you to produce designs that not only look good but ‘work properly’ if you don’t have a fairly good understanding of how websites are built.

That doesn’t mean that you need the skills of an advanced web developer, but you do need to have an understanding of how websites are put together and issues that can arise such as the web safe fonts mentioned.

If you don’t know basics like this you will simply cause problems for the developer who comes to build your site, and even worse customer dissatisfaction when it needs to be explained to them why they can’t have the build ‘exactly’ like the design they signed off.

A designer should be confident that what they have designed can be built with no changes required.

By: Sean Hodge

Sean Hodge — Tue, 05 Feb 2008 20:11:23 +0000

This is a good book for someone in design school. I didn’t get a hold of this book until my Senior year. I think it would help a lot with planning if it was assigned to freshman.

For the DIY’s out there its still a good book if you want to see a broad spectrum of where design intersects with other careers.

You brought up some good points about having skills to tie together with design. I think for web design you will need to know Javascript as well. Its becoming necessary.

By: MC3

MC3 — Tue, 05 Feb 2008 15:53:25 +0000

Thanks for the tips. I notice more and more that studios and business want Graphic Designers to be web people and were not. but im trying.Anyway thanks for the help and all the great tutorials and info.

By: JamieO

JamieO — Tue, 05 Feb 2008 13:49:40 +0000

Great article! The concept of foundation learning / experience in other areas is an important one. If you are an amazing graphic designer who can’t code your way out of a box, learning to understand how the coding process works will improve the transition process when you hand off your designs to a developer to implement.

The stereotypical designer will get all worked up about a developer using the wrong font styling on “their design”. If they had used a safe-for-web font for primary content in the first place it wouldn’t be an issue.