How to Become a Designer

You’ve made the decision that, when you grow up, you want to be a Designer. Or you may already be grown up and want to change careers to a creative one in design. That’s all very well and good, but what steps do you take next? What do you do to get yourself from where you are to finding a well-paying position in some branch of the design field? This article should help you bridge the gap between wanting something and getting yourself firmly set on the path to your dream career.

What is a Designer?

A designer is a person who comes up with designs—plans, drawings, schematics, renderings, and prototypes—of just about anything you may encounter in today’s world. Everything from a shampoo bottle to the outsides of airplanes had to be designed before they could become tangible realities. The designer is often the person who comes up with the idea for something and then comes up with the plans for it. Designers are idea people and creative types who possess the ability to see things that don’t exist (yet).

Designers come in as many shapes and sizes as the objects they design. You’ll thus encounter everything from Floral Designers to Mechanical Designers and Graphic Designers to UX/UI Designers. Each field requires specialized knowledge, but the threads connecting all of them are a creative spirit and artistic ability. Much designing today is done on the computer, using CAD (computer-assisted design) software, but the good old-fashioned ability to draw is still an essential tool in most designers’ toolkits.

Read more about what a designer does.

What Tools Do I Need To Get Started?

The first requirement for becoming a designer of basically any variety is knowing how to draw. No one is saying that you have to be the next Rembrandt to make it as a Game Designer, but you do have to be able to translate visual images from your head to paper. Drawing is a talent, but it is also a skill that can be learned: you may not be great at it, but there really is no excuse for saying all you can do is draw stick figures. Like most things, it requires some discipline to learn to do competently. You should learn to work in multiple media since you never know what may come in handy in your career, although advanced skills like mastering oil painting probably won’t be necessary as you rise through the ranks of UX/UI Designers.

The odds are that if you want to be a Designer, you already know how to draw, and a love of the process of creating art has led you to the idea of a creative career. Artists usually first learn that they’re good at making art in elementary school, although you most likely won’t get the kind of training you need in most middle and high schools these days. Thus, extra art classes while you’re a teenager are a worthwhile idea: you have both a talent to be nurtured and a craft to develop.

Pencils, charcoal, and different kinds of paper are essential for becoming a designer, but they’re not everything you need to get started. As a professional Designer, you’re going to be expected to be able to work with creative software even more with traditional artists’ media. Thus, the sooner you start learning to use the programs that make up the Adobe Creative Cloud, the better off you’re going to be. True, not every design field relies as heavily on Photoshop as graphic design does, but it’s always good to know your way around these most basic programs. If motion design is your goal, you’ll need to know After Effects and Premiere Pro. If you want to go into game design, you should learn to start using Unity, And if your eye is fixed on industrial design or architecture, you should start learning AutoCAD as early as possible. Once you’ve targeted which design field you wish to pursue, you should learn the software that goes with it the soonest you can. You won’t be employable until you do.

The good news is that many secondary schools offer training in these types of software, some of it quite extensive. You can thus begin to learn the digital part of your craft while you’re still a teenager. You’ll probably want to have access to Adobe software at home, too. Adobe makes it available by subscription (the basic Photoshop plan is about $20 a month, although there are countless permutations available), and a computer that’s able to handle graphic design software, which means a fast processor, plenty of memory, and even more storage to accommodate large projects. That’s not quite a recipe for a huge supercomputer (a laptop with a large screen should suffice), but it admittedly is more computer than you’d need if your ambition were to write the Great American Novel rather than become the next Great American Artist.

Steps to Become a Designer

How do you become a Designer? You can’t just walk into a Hiring Manager’s office and demand a position as Game Design Lead because you want a job that will entitle you to play video games all day. It’s a lot more complicated than that. The following guided tour will show you how your career path will likely run.

Determine Your Goal

The first step towards getting to be a Designer is deciding what kind of Designer you want to be. You’re likely to be someone with some artistic talent who feels like a career that lets you make art might be more interesting than accounting. The problem is how to do that without ending up starving like Van Gogh (minus the mental illness and the absinthe.) You could always become the next Salvador Dalì and make a mint from your artistic production, but that’s not exactly a sure career bet. You’re better off having a Plan B in terms of a design career that will allow you to capitalize on your talents and receive a regular paycheck in exchange. You’ll accordingly need to do some research into all the types of design careers that exist. That should help settle you on a goal, illuminating the path you’ll need to take.

Determine the Skills You Need

Having settled on the aspect of design you wish to pursue, your next task is to determine just what it is that the Designers whose ranks you plan to join need to know. There’s much more than drawing ability involved, although that’s almost always a piece of the puzzle. You should certainly draw, draw, and, if you can, draw the things you hope one day to draw professionally. Nevertheless, computers are being used more than drawing pads in most design fields, and determining what sort of computer knowledge you’re going to be expected to have when you start looking for a job should be at the top of your list of things to research. 

Learn the Necessary Skills

Once you know what you need to learn, you should set about learning it, and the earlier you start, the better off you’ll be. You don’t have to begin to learn Photoshop when you’re a teenager or start making animation or simple video games while you’re drowning in the chaos of adolescence, but if you do know what sort of career you want to pursue, by all means, start learning the software you’re going to use as a professional.

The place most people learn the skills they need for a design career is college, where programs like BFAs in graphic design include the practical training you’ll need to begin a career once you’ve graduated. Those interested in game design can take computer science classes while studying for a degree in fashion design will teach you to sew, sketch and use the computer to create garments. Undergraduate degrees are increasingly focused on career training, and thus, if college factors into your plans, you should seek out a program that will prepare you for the job you want. On the other hand, if college doesn’t enter into your plans (or if college is already behind you and you’re contemplating a career change), there are other ways of acquiring the skills you’re going to need to make it as a designer, most especially the in-person or live online IT schools that specialize in teaching students the career-specific and job market-targeted skills that are required for designers.

Many of these schools offer free video seminars that can give you a sense of what actual classes will be like. Noble Desktop, a New York-based school, is among the institutions that provide complimentary video tutorials in a number of design fields. These include a general introduction to design, Get Started in Design: Graphic, Web, UX/UI & Motion, along with more specific seminars, such as Get Started in Graphic Design, Intro to Adobe Creative Cloud, Intro to Figma, and Get Started in Motion Graphics. Any one of these will provide a foretaste of what the subject matter is like and are a handy way to investigate a number of different avenues as you search for the one that’s right for you.

Build a Portfolio

Very arguably, the most important tool in landing a job is going to be your online portfolio. Before you can assemble one, you need things to put in it in the form of projects that showcase your abilities. Most schools will help you develop portfolio projects, but there’s nothing to stop you from accelerating that process by working on projects of your own, either as sample exercises or as actual real-world projects you undertake as part of an internship or for such clients as you can scrape together.

What should go into a portfolio? The rule of thumb is at least three projects that show off as much of your range as possible. If they can be real-world projects rather than student exercises, so much the better. If you have more top-notch work than that, you can include it, but don’t overburden your portfolio with endless student designs for the flying car of tomorrow. You don’t want to overwhelm the people who view your portfolio: you want them to focus on the best of what you have to offer.

Network, Intern, Hustle

The next step is probably the most difficult, as it introduces the variable of other people to the equation. There’s more to getting a job today than just graduating college and metaphorically pounding the pavement in search of gainful employment. Networking, which can be done virtually using platforms like LinkedIn, is essential, as it can get your foot in doors that might otherwise remain closed to you. And there’s always the chance that your contact X knows Y, who knows Z, who might be able to let you know about a job opportunity. It takes time and effort to network, and it may seem to you that it’s never going to pay off, but it’s an inescapable part of the increasingly byzantine process of starting a career in today’s market.

Quite a few entry-level design jobs call for two years of experience, which is indeed as ridiculous as it sounds. How do you get experience without a job? It can be done. You can land an internship, which will remunerate you with valuable experience (but with little or no money), or you can do volunteer work, where the price of your services can compensate for your lack of experience. You can also sell your services to the local pizza joint by convincing the owners that they need a new menu and that you’re the person to design it. Or, if fashion is the field you’re trying to break into, you may be able to find a community theater needing a costume designer.

The key ingredient here is maybe the most critical intangible in getting a job: hustle. Some people are seemingly born endowed with the quality (they made money buying and selling baseball cards when they were ten), and some people have to get over their natural shyness and learn it. Bear in mind hockey great Wayne Gretzky’s famous dictum: “you miss 100% of the shots you don’t take.”

The Job Search

After all that, you’ll be ready to start your job search in earnest. And to make a full-time job of it. It takes effort even to find an entry-level job these days, partly because the market is competitive and partly because the job-search process has become much more complicated than it used to be. This is where you monitor job postings, use your network, and polish your portfolio until it gleams. Yes, it’s a lot of work, and some of it is tedious (there are only so many ways to rephrase a cover letter before you want to scream), and you need to be prepared for a lot of rejection. Some people get jobs in their first week of searching, and others for whom it takes longer. Be prepared for it to take longer, and be ready to be sending out dozens of resumes into the darkness of the internet without getting so much as a rejection email.

That may sound hopelessly pessimistic, but such are the realities of landing your first job. The secret is not to take rejection personally and to believe in your abilities and training. Your hard work getting this far will pay off eventually. You just need to stick with it. There will be a lot of rinsing, repeating, and rephrasing of that cover letter, but with good credentials, a great portfolio, and some hustle, your dream job should be within your reach.

Designer Career Path

A designer’s career path can be a straight road on an upward grade, take a few turns along the way, or, at one point, veer off in its own direction. To give the metaphor a break, you can work up in a big firm, move from company to company (switching jobs every three years isn’t considered abnormal), or break out on your own and start freelancing.

The basic designer career path begins with a four-year college degree. Entry-level positions across the broad design field tend to have people working on small (and not the most significant) parts of a whole project and working very much as part of a team. As you continue to more senior jobs, you’ll gain authority and autonomy until you reach the position of a leader whose vision the team will work on to make a reality. (You’ll also be managing the team, with all the emails and reports that go with that.) As the job title says, you’ll be designing something all the way through your career; you’ll just be designing more interesting things as you proceed down (or, rather, up) your professional path.

There are exceptions to the above pattern. Although a four-year college degree is the most usual route to a design career, you can break into the field without a bachelor’s degree, assuming that you possess the hard skills (especially knowledge of design software) that any professional designer must have. Many designers in various fields (including, but not limited to, many Graphic Designers) work as freelancers rather than for one given firm. They gain a lot in freedom, albeit at the cost of a steady paycheck. It’s a trade-off many are willing to make.

Read more about the typical Designer career path.

Why Become A Designer?

There aren’t many careers out there that allow for the play of the imagination. Creative people, whether born or bred, often need to create to stay sane and could find themselves highly frustrated and unhappy in non-creative jobs. Not everyone gets the luxury of matching their temperament to their vocation, but you owe it to yourself at least to try to see whether you can make a career of your creative energies.

The main reason for seeking to make a career as a designer is that you’re artistic and want to have a career that’s artistic. Of course, drawing is not all fun, but you still get to use parts of your brain that accountants don’t get to employ in their daily tasks. Design may not be a get-rich-quick kind of career, although Designers are, for the most part, well enough paid: something close to $65,000 is a figure that Indeed quotes for a mean “Designer” salary in the United States, although a figure like that is too broad really to get a feel for what the different types of Designer actually make. Some high-tech design roles (like UX) can make for salaries that just skim the six-figure range, and, as a general rule, the more technical the design job, the higher the pay. Even if you go into a branch of design that doesn’t pay as much as UX, a creative person may well find that not getting rich quickly but getting to spend your day creating images and objects is a highly desirable compromise upon which to build a professional life.

Read more about whether designer is a good career.

Learn the Skills to Become a Designer at Noble Desktop

If you wish to become a designer, Noble Desktop, a tech and design school based in New York that teaches worldwide thanks to the wonders of the internet, is available to give you the education you need to get started in this exciting field. Noble teaches certificate programs in numerous aspects of design and the technology that makes design possible in the contemporary world. These certificate programs offer comprehensive instruction in their topics and will arm you for the job market in whichever aspect of design interests you.

Noble has certificate programs in graphic design (the Adobe trio of Photoshop, InDesign, and Illustrator), digital design (the main troika of Adobe programs plus Figma for UI design), UX & UI design, and motion graphics. All these programs feature small class sizes in order to make sure that each student receives ample attention from the instructor, and can be taken either in-person in New York or online from anywhere over the 85% of the Earth’s surface that is reached by the internet (plus the International Space Station.) Classes at Noble Desktop include a free retake option, which can be useful as a refresher course or as a means of maximizing what you learn from fast-paced classes. Noble’s instructors are all experts in their fields and often working professionals whose experience is invaluable when they mentor students in the school’s certificate programs 1-to-1.

Noble offers further design courses that are briefer than the certificate programs. You may also wish to consult Noble’s Learning Hub for a wealth of information on how to learn to be a designer.