Graphic Designer LinkedIn Profile Guide & Tips

In general, job materials need to be judicious in what they include since hiring managers will be looking over applications relatively quickly. They will want to see only the most important information during the initial stage of the review process. This process means that prospective designers will need to find other ways to communicate important information that doesn't consume physical space in their application materials. One way to do this is to develop a professional LinkedIn profile where you can aggregate important information without overloading hiring committees. These profiles will function as a mini-professional webpage. They will allow you to include a link to this profile in your other job material to let interested hiring managers explore your professional online presence.

How to Make a Graphic Designer LinkedIn Profile

A LinkedIn profile is a useful place to store and aggregate important work, education, and contact information for prospective employers to view when they feel necessary. The ultimate goal of a good LinkedIn profile is to treat it as a repository for all the important information and job qualifications that won’t make it into job materials because those materials need to aim for a certain level of conciseness. However, a LinkedIn profile also needs to be built with certain functions in mind, and you shouldn’t treat it as a dumping ground for everything that doesn’t make it into your resume. Below are a few things to consider including in your LinkedIn profile.

Introductory material

Like a resume, a LinkedIn profile should include your personal and contact information. Here, it can be a bit more expansive since it isn’t consuming important space on a resume or a cover letter. It also gives you an added opportunity to include a short profile description that details your interests and commitments as a Graphic Designer, which would be difficult to include naturally within a cover letter or resume. It also lets you include a short, catchy headline or introductory line to grab a viewer's attention without feeling forced or inauthentic because the structure of the LinkedIn portfolio lends itself to this kind of introductory material.

Professional Headshot and Banner

Given the structure of a LinkedIn profile, the first thing that a prospective employer will see is your cover photo and banner image. The eye will be drawn to these two items, so it is very important that they look professional and they communicate what you intend that they communicate. This doesn’t mean that they need to be uninteresting, but you should remember that hiring managers are going to be making split-second inferences about you based on the material you present, and even if they don’t do it on purpose, it will affect the way that they think of your materials. This means that you will want to be thinking deeply about the kind of images that you use in your profile.

Narrative of your own work as a Designer

The LinkedIn portfolio should also include a summation of your history, experience, and desires as a designer. Much like the cover letter, this is a chance to put your work into context and explain what motivates you as a designer or what kinds of design projects you have the most passion for. Since cover letters need to be reasonably short, tailored for individual jobs, and focused, they tend to require a level of targeted, focused rewriting for each job. The LinkedIn profile can be more general and it can more directly explain your overarching philosophies, interests, and practices. Here is also a good place to explain and narrativize your own history in a way that doesn’t come across as overly apologetic.

Detailed Work and Educational history

In most cases, when building a resume, you’ll want to include the most vital and important work and educational experiences to avoid giving your prospective employer too much information to understand what is important. This is not a concern on a LinkedIn page and you should use this space to include all of your relevant work experience and educational history. If you have attended a training seminar or you did a freelance project at some point in your career, you should put it here. This is also where you can put your full educational and work history.

Relevant Links to other Professional Webpages/Profiles

Your LinkedIn profile should also be a place where you aggregate other important aspects of your online professional presence. If you have a portfolio webpage, you should include the link here. If there are important webpages or projects you’ve worked on, you can link to those. Anything from professional accolades, to other profiles, to links mentioning your design history. You may even link to something like a professional Twitter account or a freelance Facebook page, presuming it provides relevant information to your reader.

5 Graphic Designer LinkedIn Tips

Building a Linkedin profile can be challenging for new designers since it looks like so many other social media platforms. However, there are unique aspects to its design and your portfolio has a very significant and specific function, meaning that you can’t design it as if it were any other online profile. You’ll want to craft your profile with a number of specific goals in mind so that it helps, rather than hinders your job search. Below are a few tips for designing an effective and evocative LinkedIn profile.

Tip #1: Maintain a Professional Appearance

Your LinkedIn profile should communicate to your viewer that you are a professional designer who knows the audience of their profile page to be potential employers and professional colleagues. This means that your profile shouldn’t look overly casual and be treated like a FaceBook page. For example, you’ll want to be sure that your cover photo at least mirrors the style of a professional headshot and that all of your introductory material is presented in the kind of tone you want your boss to read.

In the same way, you don’t want it to be boring or appear as if you are trying to mimic an overly professional attitude devoid of personality. This can turn off prospective employers since it will both appear insincere and it will be immediately forgettable. This can be a difficult balance to strike. However, anyone with significant visual design experience should be able to understand the importance of striking a balance in the tone of the imagery that you are putting into the world.

Finally, this is a public profile. So all of the information will be visible. This means that you don’t want to include too much personal information on the LinkedIn profile that may inadvertently reveal things about you that you don’t want to be revealed, particularly things about details such as marriage or parenthood status, since employers are legally barred from asking about these issues during an interview. This is a series of personal choices, but it is something to remember when building a page. 

Tip #2: Complete the Profile

This may seem mundane, but employers who go out of their way to view a LinkedIn profile will notice if there are elements of the profile that are unfinished or incomplete. For example, it may immediately put off an employer to take the time to visit a LinkedIn profile only to find that there is no cover photo or headline. This looks to employers as if you aren’t putting in the necessary effort or taking the application process seriously. Since a LinkedIn profile isn’t a vital part of any given job application, you should consider that you don’t have to provide a link to an unfinished page. While you should work on building a strong, professional online presence, if it is incomplete or in development, it is worth remembering that no LinkedIn profile link is better than a link to a bad Linkedin Profile

Tip #3: Cultivate Networking Opportunities

One of the advantages of having a professional LinkedIn profile is that it can be used for networking purposes with other designers and associated professionals. This will help put you in contact with other professionals who can provide references and recommendations, offer helping job-finding tips, and direct you to employment and career opportunities that might sail under the radar. It will be important to make sure that you are using LinkedIn’s features to the best of your ability since it is one of the most important networking tools that people have access to on the internet.

Tip #4: Leave No Stone Unturned

One of the advantages of a LinkedIn profile is that because it isn’t a vital part of the initial job application process and it isn’t a physical object, there is a great deal less impetus on you to be judicious in what you include. If you’ve ever so much as been near a design project, it is useful to list it on your LinkedIn profile as a demonstration of your versatility. You can put it here if you have a skill that might not be relevant enough to list on your truncated resume. This goes double for soft skills you have experience with but don’t consider significant enough to list on your resume. LinkedIn can be treated as a personal, professional webpage that gives employers the full picture of your design experience.

LinkedIn is also a platform for long-form professional blogging and publishing. While not necessary, it is a good way to provide important snippets of your design philosophy and process that are too long, too specific, or too involved to make into your cover letter. Writing long-form content about your design process is also an excellent way to tell prospective employers how you work and what kind of work you do before a job interview. With the right framing and presentation, these sections can also be used to guide employers to ask (or not ask) certain interview questions since it may give them a frame of reference for your personal design philosophy.

Tip #5: Get Feedback

As with all the elements of the job search process, you may find it difficult to get right on your first try. This makes receiving professional feedback from instructors, teachers, and other expert designers an invaluable tool for putting your best foot forward in regard to a professional online presence. One place to get this kind of feedback is in a professional skills development course, such as the Graphic Design Certificate program offered through Noble Desktop. In these classes, students will be able to work directly with expert instructors. Not only will they receive hands-on training, but they will also get to participate in professionalization seminars. Among these seminars are one-on-one mentoring sessions during which students can get personal feedback on things like their LinkedIn profiles. 

Learn the Skills to Become a Graphic Designer at Noble Desktop

If you want to start a career in graphic design, the graphic design classes offered by Noble Desktop are an excellent place to start. Students can take all their classes remotely or in-person at their Manhattan campus. For students who want to start slow by just learning one popular design program, Noble offers an Adobe Photoshop Bootcamp, an Adobe InDesign Bootcamp, and an Adobe Illustrator Bootcamp. These beginner-friendly courses take just a few days to complete and will provide students with foundational design skills.

For those who feel ready to dive into a more comprehensive program, Noble Desktop’s Graphic Design Certificate might be a better fit. Students will complete hands-on assignments using popular design programs, including Illustrator, Photoshop, and InDesign. This program is ideal for those hoping to start a career as a Graphic Designer. Certificate students at Noble Desktop receive individual career mentorship, where experts in the design industry help craft resumes and portfolios and provide helpful tips for finding lucrative employment. 

If a class isn’t feasible for your current schedule, Noble Desktop has a host of resources on its website to help start your graphic design career. You can browse their collection of articles about Photoshop, Illustrator, and InDesign if you’re curious about how each program works. You can also review information about other design tools to see if another field might interest you more.