Designer Skills:

You can’t just roll out of bed one morning and decide you’re going to be a designer. You’ll need some authentic soft and hard skills to make a career of it. First and foremost, you will need artistic talent, but talent alone won’t suffice. Neither will an education in design be enough to make you a successful professional designer, although going to design school is a vital step towards a career. You’ll need a macédoine of soft skills to go with that, although some of those you can develop once you’ve started working. You’ll also need an impressive online portfolio, some work experience before you approach big companies for jobs, and, on top of all that, the ability to demonstrate that you possess the requisite skills for making a career of designing things. That may seem like a long list, but design is a specialized career to which not everyone is suited. This article will explore the hard and soft skill sets required to make a designer.

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.

Hard Skills 

Drawing

Leonardo da Vinci was able to sketch out helicopters and paint the Mona Lisa. To be a designer, you don’t need to paint the second coming of The Last Supper, but you do have to be able to create something with a piece of paper and a pencil. If your client says: “I see this flying thing with rotating blades and a capsule underneath for people to sit in…draw me something like that, " you’ll have to be able to pick up a pencil and sketch a helicopter. Yes, ample software is involved in design these days, but nothing will replace the ability to draw at least moderately well. Of course, it’s liking to draw that probably is leading you towards a design career, so it’s very likely a hard skill you already have in your pocket. On the other hand, if all you can manage to draw is lopsided stick figures, you might consider going into a different line of work.

Adobe Creative Cloud Software

Much design today is created using computers. Computer-assisted design can do some astonishing things that can’t be done with an HB pencil and a block of 80-pound paper, and you certainly can’t expect to get hired for a design position if you don’t know how to use the computer to create drawings. There are advantages to working digitally: consider only how Adobe Illustrator creates vector graphics that are infinitely scalable without any loss of quality or detail. Pride of place amidst such software goes to the Adobe Creative Cloud, a program suite covering many aspects of artistic creation. 

At its center lies a triptych of programs you will return to repeatedly: Photoshop, InDesign, and Illustrator. Photoshop allows for manipulating and editing photographic images of all kinds, InDesign is the typesetting program, and Illustrator allows for creating drawings, including the vector graphics mentioned above. Graphic artists, in particular, will need to know all three of these programs intimately. On the other hand, Motion Graphics Designers employ a different range of Adobe programs, especially After Effects and Premiere Pro. Other designers may depend on additional software (see below), but knowing your way around the Adobe Creative Cloud is essential to any design career.

Other Software

Only some things can be drawn on the computer using Adobe Creative Cloud. Anyone needing to create schematics or blueprints will have to be able to use some kind of computer-assisted design (CAD) software, such as AutoCAD. These programs have replaced many manual draftsmanship functions, and they have to be acknowledged as being able to draw plans in far more detail than was formerly possible. AutoCAD even has extensive 3D capabilities that make it possible to turn out plans, blueprints, and schematics in three dimensions (try and do that with your trusty HB pencil) and even to print them out using a 3D printer. Not all designers need to use AutoCAD, but it is essential to other types of design work, and there’s no way to make your way in those fields without being able to use it.

Another software design tool that has emerged in recent years and risen to considerable prominence is Figma, a prototyping tool for user experience (UX) and, even more, for user interface (UI) design. Web Designers can also use it to create web pages. Based in the cloud, Figma facilitates collaborative work by teams and has supplanted Adobe’s roughly equivalent XD tool. (In one of those ironies of business, Adobe then set about acquiring Figma for a king’s ransom, although, for the time being at least, Figma will remain autonomous and not be subsumed by the Adobe Creative Cloud.)

Although coding is not necessary for many design jobs, there are exceptions. Game Designers, as mentioned above, require considerable coding ability, while Web Designers also need to be able to work in HTML, CSS, and JavaScript to build webpages. Strong arguments can be made for all designers to know their way around HTML’s hundred or so tags. The knowledge is hardly onerous to pick up, and it can sometimes be useful. And, of course, the more you know about creative software and computer-assisted design, the stronger a candidate you’ll make for any designer job for which you apply. 

Creativity

Finally, there’s the matter of a sine qua non of a design career that’s both a hard and a soft skill: creativity. Although studies increasingly show that you don’t have to be born with a creative brain, the reality is that, for whatever reason, some people have more imagination and creativity than others. These people are suited to careers such as designers in all their forms. There are countless classes for unlocking your creative potential, but unless it’s unlocked, you can’t have a career as a designer. You need to be able to think things up that don’t exist and see them, even when other people (who are likely to be your supervisors) can’t. Whether it’s a talent or a skill is immaterial, you need to be able to see that helicopter in your head if your drawing or computer-assisted design skills are to be of any avail to you. 

Soft Skills

Teamwork

Designers generally work in teams: the objects they design are often complex and require the input of more than one designer. They are also likely to need the assistance of, to choose but one example, engineers who can help make those helicopter sketches into something that can actually be built (and built again using the same plans.) Yes, you can design in a vacuum, but in addition to being rather lonely, that’s also not how design works in most companies that are in the business of monetizing creativity. As a result, a designer needs to be part of a team, which involves working in a chain of command and designing a part of a whole in complex design projects that must be broken down among multiple designers. That means being able to share in a creative vision, even if it’s not originally yours, and being one of the Leonardeschi rather than Leonardo himself.

Accepting Criticism

Part of working on a creative team is accepting what is commonly termed “feedback,” which is a nice enough euphemism for criticism. With luck, the criticism you’ll receive on your designs is constructive: “that spinning blade is awesome, but it might be more effective if it were .005 mm narrower, don’t you think?”. Some supervisors and design leads do talk like that. Others will say something closer to, “that thing will never fly!”. Your job as a designer on a team is to accept the critique and reduce the blade's size. In some groups, you’ll get the chance to defend your design, but on some teams, you won’t, and in either scenario, you’re likely to lose the battle. You need to be prepared for criticism, accept it, and put it into action. This can be especially difficult when your creative vision is criticized, so you might as well start practicing accepting criticism in all its forms and developing the thick skin that goes with that.

Communication

Designers also need to be communicators. They need to communicate their vision (those things that don’t exist that only they can see) to their fellow team members and be able to communicate that vision when they pitch their ideas to clients, managers, and stakeholders. Above and beyond that level of on-the-job communication, a designer’s overall mission in life is to communicate. This is most obvious with graphic designers whose designs, whether billboard-sized advertising images or drawings showing you how to assemble flat-pack furniture, exist to share, elucidate, or explain. The goal of design is communication, and no matter how creative you are, you have to be able to communicate your vision to others. Otherwise, all you have is a pile of dead drawings.

What Other Jobs Require These Skills?

 “Designer” is such a broad term that switching the particular design hat you’re wearing can amount to a career change. Thus a Graphic Designer’s skills with the Adobe Creative Cloud can also be used as the basis for a web or fashion design career. You’ll still need to add to your existing skill set (web designers need prototyping software like Figma; fashion designers need to know how to sew), but you’ll have the creative and software abilities upon which to build. Or you can adapt your Photoshop skills to working with photographers, while AfterEffects skills can be rerouted from motion design to film production. And so on. Amidst the nebula that is the design field, there are endless possibilities for cross-pollination and transfer of transferable skills.

The entirely different but concomitant career that calls for design skills is that of the people who are responsible for turning a design into a thing: Engineers. There are similarities and differences between the types of brains best suited to each career, but a designer’s skill set can be highly useful for an engineer. The same is true for Architects, although, as with Engineers, quite a bit of additional schooling is required to get started in those professions (a bachelor’s of science in engineering or a bachelor’s of architecture.) Still, computer-assisted design skills are essential for either of these careers, as they are for ancillary positions in engineering and architecture offices.

Read more about further career paths related to designer careers.

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 is a career that calls for a specific professional toolkit.
• To become a designer, nothing can replace having a creative temperament and the ability to draw the things you can see in your mind.
• You’ll also require mastery of the software employed in your particular branch of the design field. These can include Adobe Creative Cloud programs, computer-assisted design software like AutoCAD and Figma for prototyping, or, in some cases, coding ability.
• Soft skills required to make a career as a designer include teamwork, the ability to profit from criticism of whatever sort, and the ability to communicate, both through your work and when presenting it.
• You can acquire the knowledge necessary to become a designer by taking an in-person or live online class with Noble Desktop.