Is Design Right For Me?

Design is a career that can be very right indeed—for the right sort of person. More than anything else, it’s a creative career, one in which visual artists can make a living instead of burning their canvases to stay warm while waiting to be discovered as the next Picasso. Designing professionally is a practical way to apply your art skills to something that can create a steady income stream off which you can live. There are other factors to consider, of course, but you’re going to need some artistic ability to make it as a Designer of any type, even the ones that have moved almost entirely away from traditional artists’ media toward computer-assisted design. Creative people often have trouble finding a haven in a workforce that wasn’t designed by creative people for the benefit of other creative people. Design, in all its many branches, provides visually creative people with a chance to make a living that takes advantage of their special abilities.

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.

Why Become a Designer?

The principal reason for becoming a Designer of whatever type is that you’re visually creative and want to put those skills to work for you so that you can make a living from them. There’s some debate as to whether creative people are born or made, but the bottom line is that there are people who are creative and whose brains and souls are happiest when they can make use of their imaginations to produce things that didn’t used to be there. You can be creative and land in a well-paying, highly respectable but thoroughly uncreative job, but odds are that a job like that isn’t going to be right for you and is going to leave you, not just unfulfilled, but potentially thoroughly bored, unhappy, and miserable. Therefore, if you are creative, you may very well want to attempt to find a job that will allow some play for your creative abilities. Such a job is also going to capitalize on your talents, which is the best formula for succeeding in the workforce.

The field of design is exceptionally broad: every manufactured object was designed by someone at some point. Therefore, there’s a wide-open blue sky when you first consider a design career, although you’re probably going to be drawn towards designing one kind of thing more than others. If you spent your childhood drawing cars, you’re probably not going to want to get into fashion design. Because there are so many fields from which to choose, there’s a good chance that you can find a design career that will give play to your passions as well as to your creative abilities. (It may even give you a chance to play a little with artists’ materials while on the job, too.)

A further plus to some kinds of design careers – Graphic Designer in particular – is the ability to work freelance from just about anywhere. The more tech-oriented Designers, on the other hand, usually have to find work in cities with an extensive tech presence, although the choice for those is getting broader by the day, and you’ll find yourself with a wide variety of options beyond just Silicon Valley. (Montreal has more game studios than San Francisco or Los Angeles, for example.) There’s also definitely a living in design careers: a very good one for UX, UI, and Product Designers, but also a good one nonetheless for just about every other kind of Designer. And don’t forget: you’re going to be paid for making art. To a creative person, that may be worth foregoing a career path that leads to seven-figure salaries.

Read more about whether Designer is a good career.

Creativity

Design is a creative field. You’re probably not reading this if you’re not a creative person, which, in the case of designers, means that you’re able to imagine things that don’t exist (yet), whether it’s a new advertising image, video game, app experience, fashion accessory, or sketch for the first flying car of tomorrow. Science isn’t entirely sure whether creativity is something you’re born with or not, although a lot of research suggests that everyone has creative potential, and it just gets snuffed out in most people thanks to the way children are educated. Whether that is the case or not, the net result is that there are creative people and not-so-creative people, and studies show that the former are very much in the majority.

As a result, much of the world is geared toward people who aren’t overly creative. They’re the people that historically have branded the extraordinarily creative to be mad; creative people and their mysterious processes whereby they can imagine things that aren’t there aren’t always understood by the less creative. As a result, a lot of work situations aren’t tailored towards people with a lot of creative imagination, which means that creative square pegs have to cram themselves into middle management round holes or find jobs that allow them to be creative, to wit, a job as a Designer.

Creative jobs need creative people to do them, and creative people do better in positions that allow them to imagine things. So there’s a real fit there for the right sort of person. How do you know whether you’re creative? An easy answer is that you just know. Otherwise, you’re probably a creative type if your friends think you’re crazy (although that’s a necessary, not a sufficient condition; not all mad people are creative geniuses), if art or creative writing was your best subject in school if you’re happiest when you have a pencil and pad of drawing paper in your lap, or, maybe most of all, if you just like to make things up in your head and have wondered what non-creative people think about while they’re waiting for the bus.

If any of that sounds like you, you may very well find a career in some type of design or other to be a fulfilling way of making a living and spending half your waking hours.

Teamwork

Being creative isn’t the only skill you need to be a professional Designer in today’s workplace. You’re also going to have to have that oft-mentioned soft skill, teamwork, at your disposal, and preferably have it in spades. No professional Designer today gets to be entirely responsible for an entire project. Modern project management philosophies like Agile are becoming more and more widespread, and one of their essential tenets is that work needs to be broken up into bite-sized portions that are then shared with the rest of the class. If the project is the flying car of tomorrow, you may be put in charge of the headlights or, more likely, will be a member of the sub-team responsible for the headlights.

This calls for two skills on your part. The first is cooperation and teamwork in its usual sense: you’ll need to be able to work with the other designers taking care of the car’s headlights, and you’ll need to be able to sublimate your vision to the overall vision of the group. That can be difficult, especially for creative people who are prone to have more emotional investment in their work than less creative people do. It’s also not all. You’re also going to have to be able to adjust your brain to creating a part of a whole. You may want to design the whole flying car of tomorrow, but you’re going to have to retool your brain and limit your creative vision to the headlights. That’s not always easy since most creative types are also Big Picture types. To make a career as a Designer, though, you’ll have to scale your Big Picture visions down to what you’re assigned to create. You’ll just need to tell yourself that you’re going to create the best dang headlights ever invented. 

Handling Criticism

Hand in hand with teamwork comes the inevitably of criticism of your work. It may come from what may seem to you an overwhelming number of directions as well: you’ll have team leads telling you what they think of your creative labors, your fellow team members may be asked what they think of your work as well, and you’ll have non-creative people in managerial positions telling you what they think. 

As a member of a design team, you’re going to be subject to criticism, and it will be your job to swallow, stomach, and digest it, no matter how far above criticism you consider the products of your imagination to be. Being creative people, Designers can often be protective of their imaginations’ progeny and take any criticism of it personally. That’s a recipe for disaster in the workplace, so if you’re the kind of person who can’t tolerate any form of criticism, you might want to look for another type of career. Or start getting yourself ready for criticism, both the constructive…and the other kind.

Communication

Designers need to be communicators. Having a creative vision is one thing; communicating it to others is another. Part of that communication is taken care of by the actual work the Designer does – the sketches, drawings, and computer renderings of what you’ve imagined. Those have to be communicative by nature, and it’s the Designer’s job to make sure that they are.

That’s only one side of the communication coin, however. While work can speak for itself to a degree, sometimes (oftentimes) you will be called upon to explain what you’ve imagined or, at times, to defend your work tactfully in the face of criticism you may find to be unfounded. Designers are frequently called upon to make presentations of their work (to team members, to managers, and, sometimes, to clients themselves), so you should be prepared for a certain amount of public speaking as part of your job duties. Above all, you’ll need the ability to explain and put your vision into words. This may not come naturally to people who’ve learned to be expressive through images rather than text, but it’s part of the job.

Software

Artists’ media – paper, pencils, pens, paints, brushes – are most probably how you first learned to create art, and these things have their place in the contemporary professional Designer’s toolkit. You may well find yourself working with them, sometimes in traditional ways, like preparing graphic art for presentations, and sometimes in more surprising ways, such as having to create a paper prototype for your UX ideas.

Although, at least for the time being, those media aren’t going to disappear, they’re no longer the main focus of a Designer’s work. Just like seemingly everything else, most of a Designer’s work today is done on the computer, using specialized software, the understanding of which is absolutely de rigueur for anyone aspiring to the field. In the universe of visually creative software, pride of place is taken by the Adobe Creative Cloud, which comprises more than twenty different programs, the most popular of which are Photoshop, InDesign, and Illustrator. Photoshop is for a lot more than doctoring up your vacation photos, InDesign can be used to style entire books, and Illustrator puts a world of drawing tools and vector graphics at your disposal. Don’t think you can make a career in design today without knowing your way around at least those three programs.

Certain specific design fields have their own dedicated software: everyone from Mechanical Designers to Interior Designers needs to know how to use computer-assisted drawing software such as AutoCAD, while Fashion Designers have to understand programs such as CLO, and Game Designers need to know how to use game engine software like Unity. You’re not going to get to learn these programs on-the-job: you’re going to have to know them as part of your preparation for your career. Younger people today are used to doing everything with the computer, so they’ll probably be less bothered (and potentially excited) at making their creative work digitally. Paper and paints will never be entirely obsolete, but you can’t be a designer today if you don’t know how to use the software and online drawing tools employed by professionals in all walks of the profession today.

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.

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

• A career in design can be an ideal fit for someone with a creative temperament looking for a way to make a living making art.
• Designers need to know how to work on teams and to create parts of a whole. They also need to be able to accept and act on criticism that may not be expressed in the most diplomatic way imaginable.
• The ability to communicate with fellow team members, managers, and clients is essential for any designer.
• Traditional artists’ media have largely been supplanted by software such as the Adobe Creative Cloud in the workplace today. All designers today need to have a solid grasp of the software used in their field before they can start looking for jobs.
• You can learn how to use these design software programs by taking an in-person or live class with Noble Desktop.