This is the sixth part in an ongo­ing series of arti­cles that depicts my process to becom­ing a graphic designer. I will reit­er­ate that this is not a sure-​fire guide on how to become one, but merely my process which I am shar­ing to the gen­eral public.

More learning

This is a con­tin­u­a­tion from the fifth por­tion, because had i com­bined them the arti­cle would never be read through fully. They’re long people, I can’t help that. Well yes I can, but I refuse to censor myself. Here I will con­tinue to explain to the best of my abil­ity ques­tions that I had asked way back in the first part of this series. Let’s continue.

This is the fifth part in an ongo­ing series of arti­cles that depicts my process to becom­ing a graphic designer. I will reit­er­ate that this is not a sure-​fire guide on how to become one, but merely my process which I am shar­ing to the gen­eral public.

Don’t Freak out.

Now for the sec­tion that makes or breaks a would-​be designer. Real­iz­ing that you know noth­ing about design. Every­one hits this when they start, and it’s noth­ing to be ashamed of. Have you ever shown some­one some of your work and when asked why you did what you did, you responded with some­thing like “because it looks cool”? Believe it or not, this is not a valid expla­na­tion for art­work. Well okay, some­times it is but most of the time, this is the stamp of an ama­teur, or some­one who knows how to use a program.

Let me stress now that know­ing how to use a pro­gram in no way dic­tates your under­stand­ing of design.

This is the fourth part in an ongo­ing series of arti­cles that depicts my process to becom­ing a graphic designer. I will reit­er­ate that this is not a sure-​fire guide on how to become one, but merely my process which I am shar­ing to the gen­eral public.

Mess around.

In this sec­tion I’m going to be fairly resource-​heavy, and hope that it helps some people out. When I say ‘Mess around’ what I mean is lit­er­ally get your hands on some of the tools you know you’ll be using, and go to town. If you don’t know what tools you are going to be using, do some research. Check out those schools I talked about pre­vi­ously, and find out what soft­ware they’re going to be using. Dig around a little to see what others in the field tend to use. Since I’m trying to get into graphic design, I know that my pri­mary tools will most likely con­sist of the Adobe family, though I will also give an hon­ourable men­tion to 3Ds Max, Maya, and ArtRage 2 (if you want to have some really impres­sive paint effects).

This is the third part in an ongo­ing series of arti­cles that depicts my process to becom­ing a graphic designer. I will reit­er­ate that this is not a sure-​fire guide on how to become one, but merely my process which I am shar­ing to the gen­eral public.

Self-education in the workplace

I admit this part is prop­erly inac­cu­rately named, since it really bleeds into other posts that I will be making in the future. There­fore I shall clar­ify: this arti­cle relates to actions you can take to get your­self edu­cated while you wait for your school of choice to accept you, job-​wise.

This is the second part in an ongo­ing series of arti­cles that depicts my process to becom­ing a graphic designer. I will reit­er­ate that this is not a sure-​fire guide on how to become one, but merely my process which I am shar­ing to the gen­eral public.

Choosing a school

As stated, this is a dif­fi­cult sec­tion to write because a lot of this comes down to the per­sonal feel­ings of the person.. I’ll do my best, but in the end it is obvi­ously up to you. Having said that, I will pass on my own thoughts on the sub­ject, as they have been fresh in my head for a while now.

Recently I’ve made it an active mis­sion of mine to learn more about design. I’m not talk­ing about what colours go well together, or what Web 2.0 looks like when dis­sected into XHTML valid bites. These are a part of design to be sure and things that should be given at least a pass­ing thought, but not what I’m talk­ing about. One of my life goals is to become an honest-​to-​God graphic designer. Anyone who has talked to me in the past year or so will tell you that this was some­thing I’ve wanted to do. But going along with an ear­lier post I made, I’m trying to make it happen for myself. Hell, I will make it happen for myself. I’ve gone about this a couple ways, and I felt that I would share my schem­ing with the inter­net. Prob­a­bly not my bright­est idea, but what­ever. I’m a fan of open information.