Designer Related Career Paths

“Designer” can mean many things in different contexts and covers a number of career paths, not merely the one that you choose for yourself. There is actually ample room for pivoting from one design career to another, as skills overlap between most of the individual fields. There are also some non-designer careers that bear more than a passing resemblance to design fields per se. Read on to discover more about these expanded options.

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.

Other Types of Designer Careers

Graphic Designer, UX or UI Designer, Industrial Designer, Motion Graphics Designer, Fashion Designer, and Game Designer are all examples of design careers that, while requiring specific skills, aren’t as incompatible with each other as all that. You can switch certain design horses in midstream with comparative ease, as many of the more basic design skills are just that, skills every Designer has. Above and beyond basic artistic ability, these constitute a common denominator that runs throughout nearly all design professions.

If you’ve learned the Adobe Creative Cloud programs to be a graphic designer, your knowledge can carry over not only to web design but to some aspects of UX design, game design, and even fashion design. Photoshop, for example, is an extremely useful and powerful program that is used across the entire spectrum of design professions. Of course, you can’t just say you’re going to give up your Senior Graphic Designer position and open up your own haute couture atelier the next day, but switching from one design career to another is nowhere near as far-fetched as chucking a game design career to open a sushi restaurant.

Designer to Developer

Although the leap involved may sound like it runs from one pole to the other, there are marked similarities between designer and developer careers. The overlap is perhaps most visible between web designers and web developers, many of whom assume design roles as well as coding websites. Design training is vital for a web developer: InDesign helps you to create websites that are far more sophisticated than what you can do with CSS and HTML, while Photoshop is essential for crafting the kinds of images you need to give a website visual oomph.

Jumping the aisle between Game Designer and Game Developer is also not impossible: Game Developers do more than just code and need to understand the concepts designers contrive. That’s not to say that you can jump from design to development just because you want to: you’ll still have to learn how to code, although quite a few highly successful games are written in higher-level languages such as Java so that less programmer-friendly languages such as C++ and C# are no longer essentials for game developers.

Video Editor

Whereas motion graphics designers routinely employ Adobe After Effects to create animations, the program has video-editing capabilities as well. Join your After Effects knowledge to a grasp of Premiere Pro, and you’ll be able to edit entire videos on your own. Video Editors are, once all the technology is stripped away, creative artists who combine images and video effects to tell stories. The gulf between the two careers can be bridged, as the tools are the same. Moreover, being a Video Editor gives you artistic control over your project in a way that being a Motion Graphics Designer doesn’t. Being an Editor is also an excellent way to launch yourself into an even larger-reaching career as a filmmaker. Whether you’re making brief YouTube videos or entire movies, you’ll be able to use your Adobe skills to create them.

Engineer or Architect

The flip side of the design coin is engineering. In overly simplistic terms, the Designer is the person who imagines the object, while the Engineer is the person who makes it work. Somebody has to equip the toaster with its system of heating coils and make the pop-up mechanism pop up. One of the tools in both the Designer’s and the Engineer’s arsenals is AutoCAD, the software that has replaced manual drafting and makes it possible to create blueprints and schematics with far more precision than was ever possible using pencils and T-squares.

Another avid user of AutoCAD for its drafting capabilities is the Architect, who is a designer in all but name. They’re definitely not engineers: architecture firms employ Civil Engineers to make sure that the buildings they’ve designed will stand up. While it’s more a leap than a pivot from Interior Designer to Architect, both careers do involve many of the same skills.

There is, however, a significant difference in the educational backgrounds involved. To become an Engineer, you pretty much have to have a four-degree bachelor’s of science in one form of engineering or another, while architects require a five-year bachelor’s of architecture. That makes a career switch from Designer to Engineer or Architect a little more complicated than switching from motion graphics design to video editing. 

How to Decide Which Career is Right for You

Finding the best design career for yourself is largely a matter of settling on what it is you want to design since your artistic and creative abilities can be channeled into any number of different fields. If you like making art and using it to persuade people, you’ve got the makings of a Graphic Designer. If you’re fascinated by digital products and how people interact with them, you’re probably cut out for UX and UI design. If animation fascinates you, you can turn to motion graphics design (and, one day, maybe into video editing.) Fashion and game aficionados can become designers with some application and the pursuit of the requisite hard skills. The good news is that there are careers to be made in all manner of fields and that you stand a chance of being able to make a career out of drawing what you like to draw. The not-so-terrible news that comes with that is that if you can’t quite get the stars to align for your first choice of career, switching to another design career is far from impossible, as the skills you acquired are very much the transferable kind.

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.