Up Your Ante To Join The List Of Elite Graphic Designers: Skills You Need To Master

It is a well-established fact that reading text alone gets readers bored. It’s some catchy pictures, infographics, embedded videos, visuals and graphics which ultimately rake up the visitors’ ...

It is a well-established fact that reading text alone gets readers bored. It’s some catchy pictures, infographics, embedded videos, visuals and graphics which ultimately rake up the visitors’ interest, keep them hooked to the page and ensure coming back to the page. Collating a lot of modern researchers, viewer engagement increases by 10% with a multimedia presentation on the website. Even better, information presented with relevant image increases 65% memory retention power of a reader.

Therefore, it is your duty as a graphic designer to spice up the content and make the page look desirable for the viewers. All jobs from advertising, print production to digital marketing, website production today need graphic designs that not just convey a message but communicate.

Here are eight skills that cannot miss your aura as a graphic designer.

1. Fountains of Creativity:

This skill begins to take groove long before one could get a degree in graphic designing. The very habit of looking at an object and re-imagining it beyond its outlines forms the core of a graphic designer’s imagination. This long-developed ability comes in handy when you get the brief from your client and it is now up to you to build miracles out of a corporate idea. Always remember, a graphic designer will use the same stock of designs with little tweaks but a great graphic designer will create a new graphic for every project.

2. Never Neglect Typography:

If you feel that typography is limited to font developers, it is time for you to come out of your graphic rock. Even though typography forms a very minute part of the design, it still plays a very important role even in this digital age. You should understand that the audience gaze goes directly to the font and the aura it emits makes it a minute yet a significant part of the design.

3. Adapt to New Software:

Without some photoshop software knowledge, your designing career is going nowhere. Not just being adept at one of them. Given the fact that new software is being developed everyday with features making designer’s lives easier, you need to keep track of them and start learning to operate them. Beware of the fact that your inefficiency with adapting to new designing platforms might amount being left behind in the race.

How to get this right: start off with the basics of all the Adobe Photoshop’s latest apps. Later, you can enrol for many free courses online to learn to operate the emerging software.

4. Master the Colour Theory:

Once again, here we address another very basic piece of knowledge which sounds redundant to most designers but experts will tell you how important it is. Colour theory is the practical knowledge of creating visual effects while mixing colours of a specific combination. This knowledge of mixing, juxtaposing, creating contrasts and colour pallets is invaluable. Again, the readers perceive colour with psychological notions. It takes a split-second for them to be positively or negatively impacted by the color you have used.

5. Touch-up on Web Designing:

Even though this sounds a little out of territory, web designing knowledge is relevant to many graphic designers. With a basic HTML or a CSS skill, you can go beyond the hood of the site like CMS to manipulate pages and the places the pictures will reach. Given that your designs will go on the website, you might have to change a few elements here, tweak a few things there in the design if it looks messy. If it does, you will have enough knowledge to change the placements.

6. Understand Layout Conversion/Optimization:

Layout conversion or Layout optimization is where the designer needs to know how to guide the gaze of the audience towards the goal of the page. The elements are to be designed and structured to make sure that they do not bombard in the visitor’s face. Space can neither be wasted nor can be cluttered with elements with jarring graphics. The information should be presented to form a path for the visitor and lead her to the target.

7. Be Familiar with Print Design:

Yes, you heard it right. Print culture is out of vogue and is a dying promotion but not yet dead. It is still alive and kicking. Being a graphic designer, one should be acquainted with printing press, plate forging, colour spacing, colour correction, colour separation, grid layout, master pieces and more. Why you ask? For, the authenticity of print never dies. What is in print, stays longer in the viewers’ brain. Even the organizations who find their origins in the digital space find a lot of relevance in print media through brochures, print advertising, merchandising and more.

8. Attempt Multimedia Designs:

Design will not have just images. It is usually coupled with some animations, documents, interface development, interactive infographics and programming language integration. Now to balance all these blocks, you might need to learn to use software that supports all these elements. Multimedia rich pages are sure to attract attention and retain it for longer periods. Better know how to juggle all of them without clashes.