Digital Designer Related Career Paths

Digital design is part of a large family of careers that fit under the umbrella of design. The enormous diversity within the professional design community is not only beautiful but also means that Digital Designers often work alongside designers with very different skill sets from their own. Each role carries with it unique knowledge and abilities, but there’s also plenty of overlap from one design career to the next. 

As a result, it’s possible to transition from one design field to another after starting your career. While not part of the design, some information technology and content creation jobs are similar to digital design and can be ideal for mid-career pivots. If you’re considering changing to a new career that shares commonalities with digital design, read on to explore your options. 

What is a Digital Designer?

The simplest way to describe a Digital Designer is as a visual media creator who emphasizes interactivity. These designers are distinguished from other classes of designers by their focus on how people experience their designs. Rather than focusing solely on what their designs communicate visually, Digital Designers spend considerable time perfecting components like information architecture and accessibility. To improve user-friendliness even more, digital design projects often include prototyping and preparatory phases that include demographic research. 

Digital Designers are best known for their digitally generated graphics, animations, and visual effects, but many Digital Designers also create full-scale websites and apps. If one type of project piques their interest more than others, a Digital Designer can specialize in a unique aspect of digital design. Some Digital Designers highlight primarily digital projects, while others work exclusively on preparing interactive print designs for marketing. 

Because digital design is an umbrella term that includes many different design niches, most digital design professionals collaborate with a team. Their team may include fellow Designers, Project Managers, Product Designers, and IT professionals. 

Signs Digital Design Isn’t the Career for You

Don’t get it wrong—digital design is a wonderfully exciting field to be a part of, but it may not be a good fit for everyone, and that’s okay. It may be that digital design is a dream while it remains a hobby, but turns into a nightmare as a career. It’s easy to jump into a digital design career simply because you enjoy it, but this isn’t really enough to go on. Digital design may not be an ideal path for you if the following ring true:

• You prefer to create static designs rather than dynamic designs that people interact with.
• You’re not good at anticipating how people will react to a design.
• You prefer to have a consistent routine in your daily work over a variety of projects. 
• You don’t enjoy creating on a rigid timeline. 
• Your attention span for projects is very short and is best stimulated by quick projects that require minimal planning. 
• You only find fulfillment in design when given complete creative freedom.
• You aren’t prepared to regularly change your designs based on feedback. 

If these statements resonated strongly with you, there are still many similar fields that can scratch your creative itch at work (some may even do so more effectively). 

Design Instructor 

For the right person, teaching is a challenging, yet incredibly rewarding career. Rather than designing for a living (as most other designers do), design instructors teach aspiring designers how to create great designs. Most often design instructors specialize in a particular design field, such as digital design, motion graphics, or graphic design. Depending on their qualifications and aspirations, a design instructor may teach at a variety of levels ranging from K-12 to university. In addition, many design instructors teach certificate courses at vocational schools like Noble Desktop or offer on-demand training on platforms like Skillshare. 

While you may be tempted to choose this path purely because you enjoy helping people, becoming a teacher isn’t for the faint of heart. Working with a range of different students with different backgrounds and motivations can be as challenging as it is rewarding (for some temperaments even more so). 

Skills needed to become a design instructor will vary depending on the specific role and teaching format. Common examples include classroom management, emotional literacy, lesson planning, and video editing.

Web Developer

Web development is frequently mistaken for web design (a subset of digital design), but has unique characteristics that make it amenable to certain personalities. Like Web Designers, Web Developers take professional responsibility for the creation of digital interfaces including websites, apps, and even software. However, while Web Designers focus mainly on how these interfaces look and feel to users, Web Developers provide the functional architecture that makes an interface run. 

Rather than using design tools to optimize user experience and aesthetics, Web Developers use coding tools to create the structural mainframes upon which Web Designers build. As a result, it’s not uncommon for Web Developers and Web Designers to work side by side on the same projects. Some professionals also learn and practice both skill sets. 

If you’ve always thought of yourself as a right-brained creative and steered away from coding as a result, take another look. You may be surprised by how much creativity comes into play in web development. These days, learning to code is more accessible than ever before, particularly if you start with beginner-friendly coding languages like HTML, CSS, or Python. You can develop these skills in preparation for a career by attending a web development bootcamp.

Video Editor

Whether for entertainment purposes, education, social media, or marketing, video content is all the rage these days. Becoming a motion graphics or animation professional is enticing, but these certainly aren’t the right roles for every video enthusiast. These roles can be creatively laborious and intensely competitive. If you’re looking for a video-oriented job that can provide steady work with less competitive entry requirements, video editing is a great option. 

Using video production software and other industry skills, Video Editors turn raw video footage into cohesive narratives. In addition to cutting and rearranging footage, an editor may add special effects, audio, and motion graphics to complete the video. Start learning video editing today by joining a class like Noble Desktop’s Video Editing Certificate.

Interior Designer

Like digital design, interior design hinges on interactive designs. Interior Designers mix aesthetics and functionality to create living spaces that people will want to spend time in. While they rely on many of the same design principles as Digital Designers, Interior Designers typically use very different tools. Often, Interior Designers use a combination of paint, wallpaper, furniture, and physical objects to add dimension, character, and function to a room. However, they may also use AutoCAD and design software to pre-design a space before doing any of the heavy lifting. 

Fashion Designer

Though some clothing is entirely utilitarian, fashion design seeks to combine function and aesthetics to offer wearers enjoyable, yet useful clothing and accessories. Despite the industry’s roots in historical methods and tools, today’s Fashion Designers work with both physical and digital tools to create products. In addition to navigating the complex arena of fabric, sewing machines, and everything it has to offer, designers now use software such as Illustrator to draw out their initial designs, create patterns, and produce machine embroidery. 

Copywriter 

In some ways, writing copy is just a stone’s throw away from creating a digital design for a client. While Digital Designers take charge of visual and interactive design projects, Copywriters are responsible for writing text copy that people interact with without even knowing it. The articles that appear on educational blogs like this one are written by copywriters, and the same can be said of taglines, advertisements, product listings, and social media posts for companies around the globe. 

Everyone learns to write in school, but it takes a specialized acumen to create high-quality for someone else’s business. In addition to speed, great Copywriters can streamline information easily and don’t need to rely on outside tools for spelling and grammar. The best Copywriters usually also have a knack for digital marketing skills and will automatically adapt to their writing for new changes in search algorithm indexing. 

How to Decide Which Career is Right for You

Settling on the right career is always harder than people tell you. If you’re a creative person, you’ve likely been hearing messages about what career is right for you all your life—messages such as:

• Do what you love. Money doesn’t equal happiness.
• Choose a career that offers financial stability. Then you’ll have more resources to be creative in your spare time.

These (often conflicting) messages aren’t always as helpful as they’re intended. The truth is that everyone you ask will give you different advice, and their advice might not take into account your unique values. If you haven’t yet sat down and figured out what your core values are, take a moment to do so. Knowing whether you care more about creative freedom or financial security, for instance, can make it significantly easier to choose a career. 

In addition to evaluating your core values, ask yourself the following questions to learn more about your work preferences:

• Which of your skills/topics fulfill you? 
• Which of your skills are strengths?
• What is your ideal work-life balance?
• Do you have any accessibility needs?
• Where do you prefer to work? Do you feel comfortable working in a social environment with clients and/or colleagues? Or is remote work ideal?
• Are you prepared to move to a new location for a job?
• What is your preferred pay range?

From there, take some time to learn about careers you’re interested in. In addition to considering aspects like salary and job responsibilities, learning about what it’s like to work in that role on an average day. Then look at your answers from the questionnaire above and see if any roles stand out as potential matches. 

You can then assess which skills you may need to acquire in preparation for your new job. If you’re still having trouble identifying which roles would be most fulfilling, you may want to join a class to test the waters. Either way, you’ll likely need to attend several months of bootcamp training to fill knowledge gaps. 

Learn the Skills to Become a Digital Designer at Noble Desktop

Want to learn design in a supportive environment? Noble Desktop offers highly-rated design classes covering a range of digital design topics for students at all levels. In addition to shorter classes, you’ll find a variety of career certificates that provide comprehensive training, complete with one-on-one mentorship and professional experience opportunities. Start your journey now by signing up for training live online or participating in face-to-face classes at the school’s NYC campus. 

With the hands-on training you’ll get in the Digital Design Certificate, preparing for a digital design career isn’t hard. Even if you start with no experience, you can learn the UI design and graphic design skills you need to launch your career in a matter of weeks. Instead of sitting through dull lectures, this program will teach you practical skills through activities and projects. In addition to mastering tools like InDesign, Illustrator, Photoshop, and Figma, you’ll gain the expertise necessary to apply design principles for truly stunning results. 

Learn the skills to make websites and apps that are truly user-friendly in UX & UI Design Certificate. Working with a team, you’ll create your own interactive digital interfaces from start to finish, resulting in work you can proudly display in your portfolio. Rather than focusing only on aesthetics, you’ll learn how to research your target users and prototype to improve accessibility. This course also includes a job preparation segment designed to help you workshop your resume and create the perfect portfolio website. 

If websites are your jam, you can make it into a career by joining Noble Desktop’s Web Design Certificate program. Work toward an impressive portfolio with hands-on assignments that will help you learn a combination of design, coding, and software skills. Quicker than you know, you’ll acquire a versatile skill set that includes UI design theory, Figma, WordPress, HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. Before you’re through, you’ll also have the chance to build a high-quality portfolio website with help from your expert mentor.