Like any other career, graphic design requires having a list of skills that allow you to get hired. Depending on a company, the list of such abilities will vary. However, they will all require several universal skills that candidates must have to ensure productive work.
Whether you’ve been in the niche or plan to enter the graphic design field, you need to know what to perfect first to become a sought-after specialist. Using an animation creator is just one of many things you need to know to become a better graphic designer. Take a look at the following five top graphic design skills to make you in demand.
Printing Design
Although the business has shifted to an online format, many things get printed daily. Banners, posters, flyers, and magazines are just a drop in the ocean endowed with a tangible format. It’s a graphic designer’s job to ensure these items are visually-appealing and accurate. Notably, specialists need to learn the ropes of two types of printing, digital and offset.
While these are different, they still rely on the same terminology, which graphic designers must know by heart. That is to say, make sure to know terms related to print production and printing. Even if you don’t print anything out, knowing what transparency, dot gain, and ink limits are and how to work with them will give you plenty of credit. Also, ensure fold marks, bleed, crop, and slug don’t sound weird to you. These are equally important terms in printing.
Other than that, it’s critical to know the ins and outs of papers. Suffice it to say, the choice of papers hinges on numerous factors, from content to the audience. Try to learn the paper sizes, weights, stocks, and embellishments.
Digital Design and Design Principles
Of all the fields relevant to graphic design, digital design has been demonstrating tremendous progress so far. It’s a fast-paced branch that entails two fundamental areas, User Interface (UI) and User Experience (UX). These elements go hand in hand, so learning the rudiments of them both is a must.
Knowing how to apply UX and UI knowledge is necessary, too. The best way to prove you’re well aware of those elements is to learn how to use software like Sketch for poster design or to create flyer designs. The latter is currently one of the best platforms for designing web pages and mobile apps.
No matter what you will work with, it’s crucial to remember five core elements that make a graphic design successful, coherent, and meaningful. These are contrast, alignment, balance, hierarchy, and repetition. Each mentioned touches upon essential elements that make the entire design professional, refined, and well-done.
Adobe Prowess
There is no alternative to Adobe these days, which is why brushing up on your Adobe skills is unavoidable if you strive to become a qualified graphic designer. Adobe encompasses various apps, with InDesign, Photoshop, and Illustrator being at the center of graphic designers’ attention. Every tool has its primary function that allows experts to create top-notch Infographic designs from scratch, edit visual elements, and work with graphic vectors.
Knowing your way around these things won’t be easy. Not only do you need to invest a good deal of time, but you should also secure solid hardware to let the mentioned tools work smoothly. Regardless, once you become a skilled user, your chances of landing a perfect job will skyrocket.
Typography
Typography goes far beyond choosing the font size to fit the image. It’s a complete craft, which you must be familiar with as a graphic designer. Make sure you know the nuts and bolts of typography, such as leading, alignment, and kerning. This knowledge will let you delve deeper into the font and other typographic components, as being a designer is much more than choosing attention-getting visuals. Among other things, your job is to invoke feelings and provide food for thought.
Social Media Design
With the burgeoning use of social media networks for business, more firms have recently required graphic designers to know how to work with such platforms. Social media apps are excellent venues for promoting goods and strengthening relationships with customers, so making business profiles stellar and attractive has become one of the graphic designers’ responsibilities. Having the skills mentioned above will undoubtedly come in handy with social media. But aside from that, you should know how social media networks operate, design-speaking: what visuals are prevalent and why, what formats to use for the best result, etc.
Incredible Supplementary Skills
Needless to say that those five abilities will suffice to become a better graphic designer. But it’s always good to bolster secondary skills that will make you agile and multidimensional, thus increasing your value. Of a dozen skills, pay attention to:
Communication: The ability to communicate with other departments and articulate your ideas will allow you to create remarkable designs.
Strategy: Good designers kick off their tasks with a strategy. It lets them streamline processes and complete assignments way faster and more productively.
Coding: Knowing basic coding principles will enhance communication with developers and help you generate design ideas and tailor them to a specific space.
Conclusion
While plenty of other skills to make you a more proficient graphic designer exist, it’s more important to focus on one element at a time and work on it until polished. So, start with any of the above skills, and once you learn them all, you’ll become an asset to any corporation.
