How to Become a Designer in 3 Months

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.

Can You Really Become a Designer in Three Months?

A great deal can be done in three months. That includes acquiring the skills required for a design career. You should have some artistic ability before starting, and it will help immensely if you’re able to draw, but learning how to operate the software that contemporary designers use in their daily work routines can be done in a period of time equal to the gestation period of the speedy cheetah or the slow loris. Therefore, if you set yourself to the task with the proper degree of commitment, yes, you can develop the abilities required to gain employment as a Designer in 90 days.

Those three months, in all fairness, don’t include the time it will take you to land a job in the field. That’s another process, which can take a week or can take quite a bit longer than that. You also can’t expect to master Photoshop or AutoCAD fully in that period of time (you should be realistic), but you can learn enough about the software to operate it with confidence. (If you were learning a language in three intensive months, you’d likely be able to get along just fine where the language is spoken but probably still not be able to express abstract philosophical concepts in the language.) As a working Designer, you’ll continue to learn about the tools with which you operate professionally, both in terms of de facto on-the-job training and your ongoing professional education. As the software evolves, you’re going to have to evolve with it.

To become a qualified designer in three months, you’re also going to need to find a good school that can teach you what you need to know in so small an amount of time. This isn’t the time to consider a self-paced “on-demand” class: you’re definitely going to need a human teacher to keep you on track and, when necessary, crack the whip. You’re also going to have to be able to devote most of your energies to learning so much in so little time. It’s not an assignment for the irresolute, but if you have the determination and sticktoitiveness, you can do it.

Do I Need a Degree to Become a Designer?

As a general rule, designers are people with four-year degrees. These degrees are often specialized, such as a bachelor’s degree in fashion design for those who would be Fashion Designers or a bachelor’s in graphic design for budding Graphic Designers. Often coming in the form of a BFA (bachelor of fine arts), these are pre-professional degrees for people who’ve made up their minds about what they want to specialize in, although more general degrees in design are available. There are also Bachelor of Arts degrees in art, which cast an even broader net but can be corralled into a career in design.

Although HR Directors looking for designers generally look for candidates with bachelor’s degrees, there are cases where the four-year degree rule doesn’t apply. Some people have built design careers on associate’s degrees. There are also quite a few schools that offer fast-track pre-professional certificate programs that cover much of the material taught in four-year programs, with an emphasis on the technical side of design. In rare cases, you can even be a self-taught designer and finish your education on the job, although there unquestionably are surer methods for establishing yourself in a design career.

Read more about whether you need a degree to become a designer.

Steps to Become a Designer in Three Months

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 the path to your career is likely to 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 as though 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 return. 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 which should then illuminate 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 the Designers whose ranks you intend to join need to know. There’s a lot more than drawing ability involved, although that’s almost always a piece of the puzzle. You should certainly draw, draw, draw, and, if you can, draw the kinds of 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

Many people learn the skills they need for a design career at one of the in-person or live online IT schools that specialize in teaching students career-specific and job market-targeted skills. The schools offer both individual classes and intensive courses in the software capabilities required in today’s work environments. The latter, often termed bootcamps or certificate programs, allow you to assume a role in a tech field without the benefit of a college degree, as they teach not only what you need to know but also what HR Directors regularly seek in prospective hires.

Quite a few of these schools offer free video seminars that 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 Desig n, Intro to Adobe Creative Cloud, Intro to Figma, and Get Started in Motion Graphics. Any one of these will provide a foretaste of the subject matter and be a handy way to investigate a number of different avenues as you search out the one that’s right for you.

Next Steps

Once you’ve been through your paces and learned the skills a Designer needs, you’ll be almost ready to confront the job market. There are still some steps you’ll have to take, not the least of which is putting together an online portfolio to show what you can do. Your school will see to it that you have at least one portfolio project by the time you complete your studies. The rule of thumb, however, is that a beginner’s portfolio should accommodate at least three projects, so you’ll have to put in some time using your skills to create content that shows you off to your best advantage.

You’ll also need to start assembling a network of contacts who could conceivably help you land that job of which you’ve been dreaming. Much more networking these days takes place online than it does at cocktail parties, on platforms such as LinkedIn, and it’s an important step in today’s job-search process. It may seem like so much bother, but it can be useful both now as well as once your career has started gathering momentum.

You should treat your job search as a full-time job, an interim one, but full-time nonetheless. Stranger things have happened than people finding a job in a week, but you should be prepared (emotionally and financially) for it to take longer. Stick to it, leave no avenue untried and no stone unturned, and, if those three cliches aren’t enough, don’t forget hockey great Wayne Gretzky’s dictum that “you miss 100% of the shots you don’t take.” You’re going to be sending resumes out and getting not so much as a rejection email in return, and you’ll find yourself rephrasing your cover letter to suit a particular situation more times than you’ll be able to count, but it’s all part of what is, admittedly, one of the more uncomfortable processes you’ll have to face in your lifetime. Nobody looks back fondly on trying to land their first job. Don’t expect to be the first, but do expect that all your hard work getting thus far will pay off and that you will become that which you set out to be: a gainfully employed Designer.

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.