What Degree Do You Need to Become a Designer?

Once upon a time, people attending college who wished to start design careers could get a liberal arts degree in just about anything. You didn’t even need to take a degree in Art History. The idea was that you’d have a basic education along with your artistic skills (polished separately) and that the two would qualify you to become a commercial artist. That is no longer the case, and undergraduate programs that have become increasingly career-specific have replaced the traditional liberal arts model. Thus you pretty much need a degree (usually a Bachelor of Fine Arts, BFA) in some form of visual art. That’s the type of degree for which employers are looking today, as most design fields tend to presuppose a bachelor’s degree as a basis for getting hired. As with all rules, there are exceptions, and, both historically and today, people have made careers in design without having attended college. It may not be as easy finding work without a degree to vouch for your abilities, but with the help of an exciting portfolio and some hustle on your part, it can be done.

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.

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.

Common Degrees for Designers

• BFA in Graphic Design
• BS in Computer Science
• BS in Human-Computer Interaction (HCI)
• BS in Fashion and Textile Design
• BS in Fashion Merchandising and Apparel Design
• BFA in Fashion Design
• BS in Software Engineering
• BFA in Interior Design
• Bachelor of Architecture

The above is a list of some of the degrees that Designers have used as springboards to their careers. As you can see, the idea of a liberal arts foundation has yielded almost completely to professionally-oriented degrees.

While a lot of Designers have one of the above-listed degrees, not all do. Some hold associate’s degrees (sometimes in design-related fields, sometimes not), and some hold high school diplomas. The figures skew highly in favor of four-year degrees (2021 figures show that 62% of employed graphic designers have bachelor’s degrees), but if 62% of all Graphic Designers have bachelor’s degrees, that means a full 32% of them don’t.)

Tips for Starting a Designer Career Without a Degree

Hiring Directors hell-bent on hiring designers with college degrees probably aren’t going to have their minds changed by one applicant with a GED and a stunning portfolio, but the good news is that not all hiring directors are as hell-bent as all that. As an aspiring designer, there are three things that are going to get you hired for a job: education, experience, and your portfolio. If education isn’t a card you can play (for whatever reason), you’ll have to rely on the other two to get a Hiring Director interested in what you have to offer.

Experience may sound like an insoluble paradox: you need experience to get a job, and you need a job to get experience. While that’s true, this particular Gordian knot can be cut with a little patience and a fair amount of hustle. There are ways of garnering design experience without getting a job with a big company right off the bat. One of the easiest ways is to find an internship that will give you a chance to work (minus the paycheck, of course.) Equally as remunerative but equally as capable of garnering you valuable experience is volunteering. You can also become a mini-freelancer and find small jobs with small local merchants and, even if need be, family and friends. This is where the hustling part comes in. Not everyone is good at it, but it’s a good skill to develop early, especially if you have your eye on a freelance career at some point.

A portfolio today generally takes the form of a website, and if you want to land a job without a degree, you’re going to need a website that will knock the Hiring Director’s proverbial socks off. The good news is that pretty terrific things can be done in terms of creating a portfolio with some good visual taste (you already have that), some basic computer skills (like HTML and CSS), a small outlay of capital, and a relatively user-friendly platform for building websites, from which there are many to choose. If you don’t trust your computer skills, you can always bring in someone to help, perhaps in exchange for you doing a piece of design work for them (that’s the hustle part again.) And, of course, you’re going to need content. Good content. The best content you have to show. At least three projects’ worth, perhaps a couple more than that if you feel you have more range to show off.

There is a third base that you’re going to have to cover if you want to break into design as a career without a college education behind you. That’s the technical knowledge that designers simply must have in order to do their jobs today. You can teach yourself to draw, but teaching yourself Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator, let alone Autodesk’s AutoCAD well enough to use on a professional level, is probably not something that you’ll be able to manage on your own. You will thus need some schooling that targets exactly those skills. There are schools that are designed precisely to provide adults with the IT skills that they are going to need to start new careers. At least one of these should be a good fit for those seeking to break into graphic design without the usual four-year degree.

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

• The conventional wisdom is that you need a four-year college degree to start a design career.
• Graphic Designers generally get BFA degrees in Graphic Design. Other types of designers have specialized degree programs, most of them BFAs in some form of applied art or BSs in computer-related fields.
• Although a college degree is the most usual route to a design career, you can break into most design fields with a combination of experience, a great portfolio, some technical training, and a healthy amount of hustle.
• You can receive the training you need to start a career as a Designer from Noble Desktop, a New York-based school that offers instruction both in-person and online.