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).