Designer Job Titles

Some famous writer or other once asked, “what’s in a name?” and, while roses smell sweet no matter what you call them, your title as a designer makes a substantial difference to the kind of career you’ll have and, ultimately, what kind of salary you’ll make. Whereas some job titles today may be hair-splitting, when it comes to designers, all the different labels are necessary, given that there are so many kinds of designers whose functions don’t begin to overlap. Where designers are concerned, there’s quite a bit in the name.

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.

Designer Skills

Design is a field that calls for a specific and highly developed skill set: it’s not a field you can expect to learn while on the job. To be a designer, you must possess the requisite hard skills to create designs on paper and computer. You, therefore, need to know how to draw a rough sketch of the thing you’re envisioning in your head, and you need to know how to turn your paper prototype into a set of computer drawings. That involves working in traditional artistic media and in such things as the Adobe Creative Cloud, the portmanteau name for Adobe’s creative software, which includes Photoshop, Illustrator, In Design, AfterEffects, and Premiere Pro. Other fields may require different software, such as AutoCAD, Rhinoceros 3D, InVision, Figma (useful for creating UX prototypes), and, for game designers, Unity or Unreal Engine. On top of that, talent as a draftsman can be extremely handy when it comes to architectural, mechanical, or interior design.

Above and beyond those “hard” skills, for which there is no substitute—you either can or cannot work with the requisite programs—designers require a set of soft skills that might not seem native to a creative temperament. The first is being able to work on a team since even Leonardo da Vinci had Leonardeschi to assist him in his workshop. The second is knowing how to accept and profit from criticism from team leads, managers, clients, and sometimes even fellow team members. That means being able not to take a critique of your creative “children” as a personal affront and to be able to subordinate your own vision to the overall needs of the project. That can be tricky for creative types. Equally tricky is having the ability to be creative on demand and to produce deliverables on schedule. You can say that you’re an artist and that inspiration comes when it comes all you want, but if you do, you’re likely to be an artist looking for a job.

Read more about what skills you need to be a designer.

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.

Graphic Designer

Graphic Designers probably require the best artistic “eyes” of all types of designers and keep closest to what they learned in art school. When people think “designer,” they’re likely to think of Graphic Designers off the bat, perhaps because they are closer to artists in the conventional sense than other types of professional designers. Graphic Designers (once known as Commercial Artists) still work with traditional artists’ media and software programs such as Adobe Photoshop, InDesign, and Illustrator. Graphic Designers are probably most frequently found working hand-in-hand with marketing departments since their visual campaigns are usually intended to advertise a business or a product. More often than not, Graphic Designers design in color and in two dimensions, although they can also be called upon to create such items as packaging and sometimes work on the products they advertise, especially when those need an extra bit of visual zing.

Mechanical Designer

Mechanical Designers are, in many ways, Graphic Designers’ polar opposites, as what they draw is about as far from conventional art as you can get. Their job is to create intricate plans of all manner of objects. Traditional artistic media rarely factor into a Mechanical Designer’s work. However, a number of famous painters, Turner being a good example, eked out livings early in their careers by working as drafters, back when the job still involved pencils, pens, compasses, protractors, and T-squares. Still, Turner’s architectural elevations don’t hang in Tate Britain. Another salient difference between Graphic and Mechanical Designers is that the latter has to work from Engineers’ specifications. At the same time, the former get to work a great deal more with their imaginations. The software used by Mechanical Engineers today includes AutoCAD, Revit, and Civil 3D. These can produce plans in more detail than is possible for the human hand, and their 3D capabilities would cause Turner considerable astonishment were he alive today.

UX & UI Designer and Product Designers

In contrast to Graphic Designers and Mechanical Designers, who create products for the real world, UX and UI Designers make virtual things with which people connect on their mobile devices or computers. Bring up any app you like to use: someone has to go through and manually design the interface, which, the creators hope, will make you want to use it (and, if it’s a commercial one, spend some of your hard-earned money.) The process of going from a bald idea through research to the design of the experience through working on the guts of the thing so that it works is a lengthy and collaborative one. Although UX (user experience) Designer and UI (user interface) Designer used to be strictly separate roles, a trend is emerging in some companies where the two positions are blended. The title Project Designer is also used more and more to indicate someone who tends to some aspects of UX or UI design, especially after the app has been released or the website has gone live.

According to the classical understanding of the terms, a UX Designer works in broader strokes than, and upstream from, the UI Designer. The UX Designer is responsible for the research phase and then devises how the end users interact with the app. A UX Designer must know how to use design software but doesn’t need to know how to code. They may also be called upon to sketch paper prototypes of the apps on which they work. UI designers are more the nuts-and-bolts people, although some aesthetic choices may also filter down to them. UI Designers must also know how to make the app’s interface work. Prototyping software is essential for developing both user experiences and user interfaces. It includes such programs as Figma, Sketch, and Adobe XD, with the first-named the current favorite among many Designers.

Although Product Designers formerly designed products, the title is more and more being applied to a role that, to a degree, hybridizes UX and UI design, especially to refine a product once it has hit the market. There is a good chance that Product Designers may one day supplant the traditional UX and UI roles. They require the same skill sets as UX and UI Designers, although they need to be more detail- rather than blue-sky-oriented. However, strong arguments can be made for keeping UX and UI separate to ensure appropriately qualified candidates are recruited for both roles.

Game Designer

Given the enormous popularity of video games today, some players have thought about what it might be like to be on the creative side of the video game business and get paid for coming up with ideas. In fact, there are over three billion gamers worldwide, and the gaming industry has a value of nearly $200 billion. Of course, you can’t get hired by a big game studio and suddenly gain control of developing a game of your own design. Instead, you have to go through being a Junior Designer first and design the background cabinets and furniture that nobody looks at before you can design the cool stuff like characters and weapons. Every career comes with salad days, and game design is no exception.

Because it’s so many people’s dream job, game design is a challenging field to break into, but that’s no reason not to try if you have the skills, the creativity, and the passion. Video games are a highly collaborative business, so being able to work on a team may be the job’s primary requirement, although it calls for a substantial technical skill set as well. Game Designers employ an entire gamut of software, including everything from specialized game engines to coding in languages like C# or C++. Even with some Photoshop or Illustrator sprinkled in, you may need to draw as part of the job, especially early in development.

Finally, there’s what could be the coolest job of all: Lego Designer. This select group of people gets to play with Lego bricks all day and come up with the fantastic things you can build with that most creative of toys. Of course, in today’s design world, there’s some computer work involved in creating flowers, a Ford GT, or a typewriter using interlocking pieces of plastic, and someone has to have the less cool job of designing the instructions. You may also need to relocate to Denmark to take on the role, but there are enough adult Lego fans out there to fill any available design roles Kirkbi A/S (Lego’s parent company) might have available.

Set and Costume Designer

If you like giving play to your imagination and the smoke-and-mirrors world of theatrical make-believe appeals to you, you may be interested in becoming a Set and Costume Designer. Someone gets the exciting job of coming up with the environments in which plays are set and coming up with the clothes the actors wear. The tasks are collaborative, and you’ll have to work within a director’s vision of how the show is supposed to look. Still, there are also a lot of creative leeways accorded designers who can stamp their personal look on a production.

Set and Costume Designers work with traditional artists’ media and CAD software. Knowing how to sketch out a design is a sine qua non, but for Set Designers, so is learning how to use something like AutoCAD to create precise schematics of a set and how it is to be constructed. Costume Designers, for their part, employ many of the same software as Fashion Designers, so they need to understand programs such as CLO, MaravelousDesigner, or Browzwear. The field can be an exciting way for theatrical-minded types to put their creativity to use.

There are celebrated Fashion Designers who have dabbled in costume design (including Coco Chanel, Christian Dior, and Christian Lacroix, who expressed strong appreciation for the fantasy world of theatrical design), as many of the skills are similar. Theatrical costumes, although they allow for greater play of the imagination, still have sleeves, seams, and hems, and you don’t need to know how to sew to design, either. Thus, Fashion Designers can be a practical alternate hat for aspiring Theatrical Designers. You’re still creating clothes, and the chance of success is more significant, given that most of Earth’s inhabitants don’t go about naked.

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.