A selection of useful tips from Design Instructors
Tips for New Graphic Designers
Starting a career is always difficult, it takes time to build up your knowledge and confidence. In a culture that is more digital than ever, graphic designers are always in high demand. In this article we talked with our design instructors to collect from them the top tips for anyone considering starting a graphic design career.
Know your audience
Everything starts from knowing who is going to be the audience for your final product. The more you understand the project, the better your chances of succeeding and solving the problem. In the situation where someone is organising the project for ‘their client’, you must be more careful to absorb exactly what the client is looking for. Ask as many questions you might need and make sure that thing are not getting 'lost in translation' between you, the intermediary and the end client.
At this point of the project, reading and getting information about the project is essential. If you are designing marketing assets, this is even more crucial to understand the audience and how the client’s message needs to be delivered.
Research
It’s sounds a cliché, but the research process is extremely important to graphic designers. Not just research about the specific project and their competitors, but also abstract research that might help you in the future. Sometimes different ideas can come from unexpected places, such as art galleries, old or modern buildings, unusual textures. Every undiscovered street can bring a piece of inspiration for your projects. It is also helpful when you need to clean up your mind from old projects and come up with ideas for the new ones.
Time and Money
In the beginning, it is difficult to estimate how much time is going to take you to finish the project, as you are in the beginning and obviously takes more time to you to complete the tasks. As soon as you get used to your own style and your best way of working, you need to keep your activities on track. This will help you to estimate your time and be honest with your clients. There is a wide range of apps and software’s that can help you with it. We truly encourage you to pick up one of them and use to save your time from the account work.
Create your portfolio
The best way of promoting your work is showing people what you can do, even before to have your own clients and projects. It is always helpful to create your portfolio with samples of your work. If you don’t have any, something that you can consider is a pro bono project in exchange of having it in your portfolio.
Be yourself
Following the example of the experts in your field, not just graphic designers, can be very helpful in giving you direction. Of course you want to avoid copying from others, the main goal is to get inspired by them to develop your own ideas and style. It takes time to build your career, but if you think about it since your first steps, it gets easier over time.
Choose the right software
If you use the right tool for your job, it will be easier of course. Adobe Illustrator is recommended for designing logos and vector art because vector art can be resized without compromising the integrity. Your project can be sized large or small without changing the crispness of the line because drawings in Illustrator are basically mathematical formulas, rather than painted pixels on the screen.
Photoshop is the other popular Adobe design software program and it differs from Illustrator in that it is pixel based, therefore, if you enlarger a Photoshop image too much it will become pixelated. Photoshop is therefore best suited to working with pixel based images such as photos and Jpeg images.
Another popular Adobe design program is InDesign, which is mostly used to produce page layouts, and organise text and graphics for things like magazines, catalogues and newspapers.
Keep on Trucking
Finally, but not less important, keep practicing and looking for the best result that you can get. The more you know about your project and your style, the more are your chances of producing an amazing work and have a chance to stand out from the crowed.
Get proper training
The best way to optimise your learning path is to learn from the experts, it will save your time and money. At New Horizons Ireland we provide a wide range of design classes led by our qualified and certified instructor team. Pay a visit to your Adobe page courses and chose the best option for your needs. We provide training for all Adobe products, such as Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign, Flash, Adobe Acrobat and more.
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