There are some essential skills that all wannabe designers have to master to achieve their dream. We’ve broken these down into a convenient graphic design skills list-which covers all the technical know-how you should have in order to become a full-fledged Graphic Designer.
Technical Skills
Adobe InDesign
- First released over 20 years ago, InDesign is a desktop publishing and typesetting program that is used by designers the world over. It replaced Quark, which had faced intense criticism, as the industry standard when it was first introduced in 1999.
- Photoshop
- Used for editing and modifying raster/bitmap graphics (aka JPEGs, PNGS, and GIFs) for use in your designs. It can be used for things like cropping, color-correcting, resizing, and editing images and photos. It’s also used for loads more jobs that will be part of a designer’s repertoire from overlaying text onto an image to combining photography (yours’ or someone else’s) and graphics.
- Adobe Illustrator
- Vector graphics are not made up of pixels, but of paths and can be scaled much more than raster graphics.
Non-Technical Skills
Creativity
- Every discipline that creates something new needs some sort of creativity
- Communication – effective visual communication of an idea or concept
- Strategy – develop a strategy for how you tackle a brief
- Problem solving – problem solving is a key part of what a graphic designer does in their day-to-day working life
- Master those graphic design skills and you’ll be well on your way to being a designer
Design Principles
Alignment, repetition, contrast, hierarchy, and balance
- These are five words that should be used on every design project
- When used in synergy, the Design Principles ensure maximum legibility and a readers’ comfort in any design
- Ideation (Moodboards, Idea Generation, etc.)
- It is the creative process of generating, developing, and communicating new ideas
- There are three types of research: research to understand, research of an idea, and research of visual language
- Thumbnails and moodboards are a fundamental skill for graphic designers
Branding
A brand, put simply, is a set of ideas a company or products stands for in people’s minds.
- There are five key parts to a brand’s anatomy: the brief, the brand strategy, brand values, brand ideas, brand identity and brand identity
- Tone of Voice
- Designers must ensure that the tone is consistent across platforms, relevant to the brand and its values and speaks to the right audience.
