How to Get a Career as a Graphic Designer
If you have a natural eye for beauty and don’t mind spending most of your time working on a computer, then you should consider working as a graphic designer. What’s great about this field is that you can be entirely self-taught and get a job as long as you can show your talent. This is also a field where you can work independently and decide who you work for and when. If this is something that interests you, here’s how you can start a career as a graphic designer.
Learn the Basics
Start at the root. Learn how to use programs like Adobe Photoshop and Premiere and look for courses that will teach you some of the basic principles of graphic design. This will give you an idea of whether you actually like graphic design and have the skills for it.
Look at Official Classes
Next, we suggest you start looking at actual graphic design programs. Most companies will require that you have at least an associate’s degree. This will qualify you for assistant positions. For most level-entry positions, you will need to look at a bachelor’s.
If your goal is to stay independent, however, then you don’t necessarily need to aim for a college degree and instead can enroll in a serious course that will give you the foundation needed to start working. It would be nice if it gave you a credible certification too.
Get the Proper Gear
You cannot be a graphic designer if you don’t have a machine powerful enough to do graphic design. And we emphasize power here since you will need a machine that has both a great graphics card and a great CPU.
In most cases, you could get away with a run-of-the-mill CPU, but most of the graphic design programs are CPU heavy and you’ll be using multiple of these heavy programs at once. You can make some compromises with the graphics card, but you need at least a CPU with a clock speed of over 3 GHz with eight cores and 16 threads.
If you want a machine that will handle the workload, you should check out these graphic design desktop computers. They have everything you need to run most programs smoothly and come in many sizes and prices, so give them a closer look.
Start Building a Portfolio
You should start working on projects as soon as possible and post anything you feel is good enough to represent you as a designer. Sign up with a service like Squarespace or Wix and choose one of their portfolio templates. Add some of your best work and update as you get better. You should then start pitching your services on freelance sites like Upwork or Fiverr. This will allow you to earn some income while working on your skills and build a reputation for yourself that will help you get hired independently or by a firm.
As you can see, starting a graphic designer career is not that complicated. It’s all a question of acquiring the skills and qualifications needed and putting your name out there.
