studio1c

Through teaching college design, it became noticeably clear to me what skills and qualities graphic designers must demonstrate in order to be successful. The first two items on this list, without a doubt, are essential qualities graphic designers must have. Generally, these are things you either exhibit throughout your life or you don’t. No matter how many times those without [a creative eye and the ability to visualize something], won’t have the ability to translate the methodologies of design.

1. Creative eye – ability to recognize up and coming trends
2. Visualization - ability to visualize how something can look completed - prior to developing it; the ability to translate something you see somewhere else and apply it to print or web.
3. Drawing - when brainstorming, sketching is a wonderful aid to get what's in your mind down on paper. Important to be able to draw technical (isometric, orthographic, axonometric), for 3D mock-ups of packages or product design. Major plus if you can translate drawings into a program like Adobe Illustrator.
4. Typography – essential to strong design is a deep understanding of type hierarchy, proper usage of fonts, font families, how readers read type, typography as an element of design, and more.
5. Design and layout – utilizing their knowledge of the elements and principals of design, typography, image placement and more and translating that into a layout and desktop publishing program like Quark or Adobe InDesign.
6. Color theory – often the hardest for newbie designers to grasp is a clear understanding of color usage and association.
7. Logo design – designers will be called on to develop logos using a vector program such as Adobe Illustrator. Strong skills in researching competition, history, targeting, sketching, shape and color association, font usage and “thinking out of the box” are indispensable.
8. Photo editing and manipulation - ability to retouch, color correct, merge photos, special effects, prep for print or web usage, are all essential skills to master using a program like Adobe Photoshop.
9. Website development - a basic knowledge of a WYSIWYG web authoring program like Dreamweaver and the ability to edit CSS and HTML is crucial.
10. SEO – while not as important as the others, a basic knowledge of On-Page SEO is helpful when designing a site.
11. Marketing expertise – often customers will want to know how to market their business by using the products you are designing for them. Those who have the ability to think creatively as a consumer as well as how to best design the piece to entice their target market to use them instead of the competition stand to increase their earnings and marketability.
12. Printing techniques – working for a printer will build a designers understanding of color separation, pre-press techniques, multiple page formatting, bleeds, traps, printers marks, registration, padding, drilling, etc This helps designers understand how printing and binding may alter the design. Printers will need items in a specific size, format, resolution and prepped for the press.