Designer Career Path

Are you interested in design as a career but have questions as to how a design career unfolds? Then read on: what follows will walk you through a sample design career path, from its first tentative beginnings through to the senior roles to which your abilities can lead you. It’s an interesting road that can be very fulfillingly traveled, especially by creative types in search of work that will allow their imaginations some play.

Getting Started

A design career begins, more often than not, in art class, where you get a chance to demonstrate both aptitude and a love for the process of creating visual art. That can begin at a very early age and inform a lot of your education. With luck, you’ll be encouraged to keep drawing and making art and enjoy it to the point that you start thinking you’d like to become an artist when you grow up, although an art history class or a little research on your part into Van Gogh’s career might scare you off the idea of decamping to Paris armed with nothing but your box of paints and plans to take the art world by storm.

That might get you thinking about what practical means there might be for you to be able to put food on the table while devoting your working energies to making art. At some point, you’ll become aware that there are several worlds of possibilities for Designers out there and that, yes, you can make a living drawing. No, you won’t get to draw everything you want, but there are careers founded on creating art, and perhaps one of them will start to appeal to you more than the others. Graphic design is the most obvious career path for a young artist to want to pursue, although video game fans might already want to design video games for a living, and budding fashionistas might decide that they want to design clothing. You should research the various fields in which Designers work and start figuring out which aspect of the profession interests you enough to try to make a career of it.

You’ll also have to continue developing your craft, which means a lot of drawing, and probably, extra art classes to help you to master traditional artists’ media. Times having changed radically in the past decade or so, you’ll probably also begin to want to experiment with drawing software, perhaps taking a class in Photoshop or Illustrator or maybe even putting together your own animated films.

Another step on the path is talking to people who work as professional Designers. You can learn quite a bit by talking to those who are actually doing what you’re contemplating doing yourself, and they can advise you about what you can do to lay the groundwork for a career. That can help you decide on whether to go to college, what other types of other schooling you can consider, and perhaps even offer you an internship or a part-time job in some menial but educative capacity.

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.

Internships

In many design fields, the irritating paradox of having to have the experience to get a job but having to get a job to get experience rears its noisome head. One way of bridging the gap between school and a first “real” job can be an internship. These can, at times, be as competitive as a job to land, but they can be extremely helpful in any number of ways. They’ll give you a taste of what work as a Designer will be like and may even cause you to make up your mind that you want to pursue something else. (That knowledge is worth a few months’ work.) In addition to that, and perhaps most importantly, an internship will help you to build your portfolio and give you real-life projects to show to prospective employers. That’s not to say that projects you’ve done in school don’t belong in your portfolio (any designer starting out will have them), but a portfolio project that stems from real-life work is going to be all the more interesting to someone looking at what you have to show for yourself.

Some internships actually pay a small stipend, although the traditional understanding of an internship is that you’re bartering your valuable time for invaluable experience. Another way of garnering experience worth considering, although it, too, doesn’t pay actual money, is by volunteering your services. Since that can be done on your own time, it’s more affordable than a full-time internship, and there are people out there who’d be more than happy to have a trained Designer do their business cards for free.

Entry-Level Designer Jobs

The thing that develops among Designer positions as you move along your career path is autonomy. As an entry-level Graphic Designer, for example, you’re going to be given assignments that are likely parts of a whole and probably not the most glamorous parts, either. Someone has, for example, to do the retouching grunt work with Photoshop, and that’s usually someone standing at the bottom of the corporate ladder looking up. You’re still going to be asked to design things; it’s just that you’re not going to be the one masterminding the visual half of an advertising campaign.

This is roughly the case with UX or UI designers as well, although their task list is more computer-oriented. Researching, wireframing, and prototyping are all very much on the daily menu for entry-level UX designers. Their UI counterparts do many of these same tasks (research is left to the UX people, however), as well as designing such things as navigation, menus, buttons, fonts, logos, and icons.

In game design, Designers fall into two primary categories, System Designers and Level Designers. The former create the minute-to-minute player experience, while the latter are responsible for creating the worlds in which games take place. In either case, especially when a very large team is working on building a game (these teams can easily number a thousand people spread across everything from engineering to marketing), the novice designer is going to be given seemingly insignificant things to design, as every single thing in a game has to be designed by someone. Thus, at first, don’t be surprised to find yourself designing cabinets or other background items that most players probably won’t even notice. (There’s perhaps some consolation in the fact that players would notice if those things weren’t there.)

Entry-level interior designers may find themselves sketching out elevations for clients based on the designs that are made up by senior team members, while those starting out in other design fields will likely find themselves creating drawings to others’ specifications. There are two ways of looking at such work: as drudgery or, much more positively, as a chance to draw for a living. You’ll also be honing your craft so that you’ll be able to assume responsibilities when they come to you in the next phase of your career.

Mid-Level Designer Jobs

Mid-level Designers perform many of the same tasks as those starting out in the field; the difference is that they’ll begin to be called upon to assume greater responsibility and begin making decisions that will impact the final product. Graphic Designers will work on creating concept drawings and creating entire presentations, while mid-level UX Designers might be involved in taking the research assembled by the junior members of a team and helping to act upon it and decide how it can be translated into design terms. 

Mid-level Game Designers get to create more significant parts of the game, weapons, for example, or maybe even get to work on non-player characters (NPCs). Big game studios have teams of highly specialized roles; as you move along, you’ll probably still remain specialized, but you’ll be specializing in bigger and better things. You’ll definitely have more responsibilities working on a smaller team for an indie studio and probably be getting closer to the bigger picture than you might if you were working for one of the giants in the field.

Senior Designer Jobs

As a general rule, senior-level Designers have more authority, autonomy, and responsibility as they assume charge of entire design projects. An in-house Graphic Designer would, for example, be responsible for the complete visual representation of the company’s brand. They are directly responsible to stakeholders and have to oversee the work of more junior designers, which, yes, does imply a certain amount of administrative work to go with the creative side. A senior UX designer’s job follows the same pattern as they work, not only with those in their department but also engineers and product managers. They form the nexus between their design department and team with the rest of the project on which they’re working.

The Senior Game Designer jobs continue with this pattern and, ultimately, progress to the position of a lead who comes up with the idea of a game and gets to oversee the execution of a personal vision from start to finish. As a general rule, responsibilities become more generalized as game designers move up the ladder, as you’ll be overseeing people whose jobs have a much tighter focus than yours.

Senior interior designers are the ones responsible for the overall vision of the space they’re decorating, while senior industrial designers also oversee the design process as well as often being the idea people at the start of the pipeline. (They will also be the responsible parties at the pipeline’s other end.)

Another Path: Freelancing

An alternative to working in a structured environment in which levels and authority are carefully delineated is working in one in which you take on all different jobs at once. The attraction of not having a boss is considerable for many people, although the reality is that every freelancer has a boss in the form of a client, to whose whims you have to cater if you expect to keep them as a client. But you do get to have an overview of the design process on which you’re working, and that has many attractions. As a freelancer, you get handed a job, and you get to figure out how to do it. Again, that’s very attractive, and there are brains that work much better when they get to manage the entire design process by themselves. That represents enough of a gain for many Designers that they are willing to forgo a regular paycheck and pay for their own dental insurance in exchange. Freelancers also have to keep an eye on the single-proprietorship business they’re running, which means managing everything from bookkeeping to social media as well as doing the all-important client work. They probably end up working longer hours and probably make a little less money than their opposite numbers at large organizations, but there are understandably quite a few people who are willing to make the sacrifice to be the president and CEO of their own design firm.

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.

Key Takeaways

• Design careers usually begin at a relatively early age, when you discover you possess some artistic talent and enjoy drawing enough to want to make a career of it.
• Designers require some basic art training that is best absorbed when you’re still a teenager.
• Internships and volunteer work can be a highly effective means of garnering the experience that, paradoxically, many design firms require for entry-level jobs.
• The career path for a Designer usually leads from small-scale part-of-a-whole projects and a fair amount of grunt work through to greater responsibility, more interesting artistic duties, and, eventually, to senior positions which afford control of the creative process the rest of the team is performing.
• An alternative to that career path is freelancing, which affords greater freedom and also greater risk. It does, however, make you captain of your own design ship, all of which becomes your responsibility, from charting a course to polishing up the brass fittings.
• Classes at Noble Desktop (in-person or live online) can prepare you for entering the world of professional design.