Following a career path

Careers, Graphic Design

In my last post, I offered some sites to help find the right graphic design school. But the purpose of finding the right school is to earn a degree that leads to the career of your dreams. With graphic design, there are several different options for career paths that you could end up taking. I’ll only briefly discuss a couple and how they compare to each other.

Here are the most common careers:

  • Graphic Designer (Logo, Brand Identity)
  • Web Designer (UI/UX)
  • Art Director
  • Multimedia Designer

Although there are a lot more, I picked the top 4 most common career areas. The first is a graphic designer. The purpose of a graphic designer is often to work with businesses to help them either develop an identity or to help alter their current one to make it more modern. This usually involves logos, typography, and personality symbols such as the Michelin Man. Next is a web designer. Web designers work on user interfaces (UI) and user experiences (UX). Their goal is to make websites easy to navigate and to keep the viewer engaged else risk having them switch to another site. After that, we have an art director. Art directors lead a team of designers and are in charge of making design decisions for projects such as billboards, commercials, and printed materials such as book covers and magazines. Finally, we have a multimedia designer. The multimedia designer works with some of the same material as the earlier careers but have a lot more tools to work with. Multimedia designers work with more than just screens and print. They also work with creating videos and editing audio for different projects, typically in the television or film industry.

With this broad overview, you now know some options for potential careers along with the kind of material they work with. A great way to find out more information is to use social media such as Twitter to contact some people in those fields and ask them questions. There’s no better place to find information than directly from the source.

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Potential Schools for Pursuing Graphic Design

Education, Graphic Design

Although my degree is not explicitly in graphic design, it shares many similarities. Just like my University, several schools offer degrees similar to graphic design that will still help you find a job in the field. My degree is a Bachelor’s in Digital Media, which could be described as a combination of graphic design and programming. This degree is offered in my home state of Kansas at K-State Polytechnic. Along with K-State, I will be discussing schools that offer degrees in this field of study.

Finding the right school can be difficult. Take me, for example. When I graduated high school, I wasn’t sure what I wanted to study. I ended up going to a community college to get my general studies courses out of the way. This would allow me to focus on my degree related classes in my later semesters. Although this plan did work out for me by helping me find what I wanted to do, it prevented me from graduating with a Bachelor’s degree within the four-year typical timespan. This could be avoided by starting with the right college or university towards the beginning of your college career.

When looking for websites that help find colleges, I stumbled across an issue that might not be an issue for everyone. Several of the sites I visited had me answer several questions such as what my email was, where did I plan on going to school, what degree did I want. For some, this may be fine, however, for me, it was not. I wanted to see what schools offer graphic design degrees, but I had to jump through numerous groups to get there. Here are the websites I’d recommend when looking for a school. Study.com asks some similar questions to the other sites but not as many or as invasive of privacy. Within five minutes, they had already suggested five potential schools based on my answers. Another good option is collegchoice.net. Both options provide an extensive range of schools that can be filtered to fit your needs, such as location or current education level.

Although you may have found some potential schools online, you won’t know for sure if it’s the right one for you without a tour. This may be in person if the campus is close enough, but a lot of major Universities now offer digital tours that let you see the campus. You should also talk with some of the staff and current students to find out if the campus culture is the right fit for you. Where ever you decide to go, just know that it’s ok to change your mind on things such as college, or your degree. Just make sure you find the right fit for you, and it will all be worth it.

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