Is your interest matching with what you are doing? What are the trending design skillsets? Here is something best I could extract from my visual design career experience.
I often find the newcomers in my field getting confused matching their interest with the various design roles & skill sets, and till the time they realize, they have gone too long to restart their career. This article may throw some light on design career opportunities and help you in setting up your goals accordingly.
In 14 years of my career, I have gone through various kinds of roles from DTP operator to visual designer and have seen a drastic evolution in the design industry trends. There are so many new roles in the current market now-a-days and some of the old-school roles now don’t / rarely exist. I have tried to list down a few of them with a little briefing. Please refer to them from a skillset perspective only, they are not designations/hierarchies.
Artists
Some designers from the 2010’s decade and before must have seen such openings in newspapers. Mostly ad agencies who worked on print media used to hire commercial artists to design brochures, pamphlets, logos, banners etc.
Graphic Designer
You can call it a new form of the role ‘artist’. Graphic design is one of the most demanding multi-specialty fields in the IT world. A graphic designer would need to work on a diverse set of requirements which includes – infographics, static banners, illustration & other graphics, diagrams, newsletter designs, social media campaigns, multimedia presentations and may need to work on print media stuff as well! Graphic design jobs have often remained a threshold that has opened bigger opportunities for many of the designers. I can list out many of the well known personalities who sometimes have worked in this role in the initial phase of their career.
So to summarize, this role can create a strong foundation for the positions you are aspiring for in the coming future. What you need to do is just keep improving on the required skill sets.
Web Designer
This is a kind of hybrid role where designer is expected to have some frontend coding knowledge also ie. HTML CSS along with their design skills. As I mentioned above, this is a little old school role and now rarely exists in the crowd of new technologies and trends. Many organizations are now very conscious about their design outputs with following proper user research & usability techniques and want a dedicated designer for the same who can focus on these values.
Visual Designer (as known as User Interface Designer also)
While graphic designers’ job is to create static pages and focus on graphical part primarily, visual designers need to think from a continuous user interaction perspective. Visual designers are expected to create the lively interfaces that can talk & convince their users and guide them to take the necessary actions. In short, if the graphic design is one time communicating the message, visual design is a continuous conversation with the users. This could include websites, mobile applications, multidevice portals etc. Visual design is nothing but an essential part of user experience design.
Visual design is creating the usable, understandable and actionable interfaces.
UX Designer
Most of the newcomers start their journey by keeping ‘ux design’ as their utmost goal, due to the increasing demand, research opportunities & attractive CTCs. User experience is a continuous research & development process to provide users a better experience of the site or technology. User experience designers are the ones who have the expertise in designing such user friendly products. Doesn’t matter weather they belong to which educational background.
User experience is a continuous research & development process to provide users a better experience of the site or technology.
Just like visual design as we’ve seen above, ux includes many sub processes like user research, prototyping, interaction design, ux writing, user testing etc. Although most of the organizations look for a full stack ux designer who can single-handedly work on all these processes, large companies like Google prefers to have a separate expert for each. Some companies consider UX & VD as two primary parts of the design process and hire designers accordingly.
So this is something how I could best extract the journey of a ux designer from my experience. There can be so many other design streams parallel to this track like 2D/3D animation, product design, VFX and video editing etc. but it’s better to hear from their experts only.
I would be more than happy if my experience could help enlightening newly arriving talent in my field and could help them to take appropriate steps towards their goals.
Your thoughts on this article are welcome!
Wishing you all the very best for your future.
Hi, this is a comment.
To get started with moderating, editing, and deleting comments, please visit the Comments screen in the dashboard.
Commenter avatars come from Gravatar.
I have recently started a site, the information you provide on this site has helped me greatly. Thank you for all of your time & work.