So you want to be a graphic designer in 2023?
In today's video, I'm going to show you what you can do to
learn graphic design, become a better graphic designer and the overall basics.
What do you need to do to get started?
Good graphic design is the ability to communicate well
with text and images.
Great graphic design is normally hidden. Just like the
chair that you're sat on,
it's an amazing design but you don't look at it and
think that's an amazing chair.
It just works.
So it's the same for graphic design.
We create everything from the advertisements that you see on
TV, the magazines that you read, the social media layouts that you see.
Everything is designed in a way to help a human understand or
use something.
So the first thing you can do is to learn skills.
Graphic design is about 90% in the brain and 10% in the
software that we use.
There's a lot of theory and principles that we need to
understand about design.
Principles as hierarchy, contrasts, weight, negative space, white space.
To learn the basics, you can find them online with the
5 graphic design principles.
To go further and deeper into this, you need to learn from books.
And there are plenty of books, but if you're a beginner,
here's a few to get you started.
Made by James: The Honest Guide to Creativity, Grid Systems.
This is an amazing book and it talks about how to use the grid and
why we use it.
If you didn't know, graphic design uses the grid to create
harmonious typographic systems throughout design.
That's why things look good and read easily in most layouts
that you see.
Typographic Design: Form and Communication, this book has
been around and there's many iterations of it and it can be
quite expensive as well.
But you will learn all the way from the history of typography
from when we started writing 5000 years ago to how we got to
where we are now.
What does typography do?
And it will give you a very nuanced view on the comparisons
between old type and new type in the day and age we are now.
It will also show you how to use grids and everything else.
But it's a very good book and I would highly recommend you read that.
If you want one book that can kind of talk about it all, then
this book, Thinking with Type, is an amazing one for you.
This will get you started to understand how typography can
influence the characteristics of graphic design, how it can
influence the work that you do.
Okay, the second thing I wanted to talk about is creativity.
You might be watching this and thinking I'm not very creative.
I wasn't born that way.
I've always said on the channel as a graphic designer for over
ten years, owning an agency, I wasn't creative before I did design.
I sort of had to work at it.
Think of creativity like a muscle, everyone is born with it.
But some people have larger muscles that can lift heavier
things because they've worked out or they keep that muscle in
check and they use weights.
Well, in order for us to become more creative and think outside
the box and to solve problems, which is the primary function
of graphic design and creativity within it, we need
to be practicing.
And we do that by going to the gym.
That means start designing things.
A great creative exercise is to mind map.
Think of an object such as like a cup.
Start writing connections with the cup, such as drink, handle,
teapot, oval, cylinder.
Then create connections between those connections.
Handle, handlebar, hole, a tea hole from a golf course.
When you're doing this, it actually forces your brain to
think outside of the box.
And that's all graphic design is.
We create what you see based upon connections.
And the more we do this, the easier it gets.
Also, you can do this with visual imagery as well.
This is called form storming.
The next tip for everyone, it doesn't matter if you've just
started or not, is to put down the computer and pick up a sketchbook.
Pencil and the sketchbook is the biggest weapon that you have.
The sketchbook allows you to come up with ideas and to ideate faster.
And it gives you more creative freedom to make mistakes and
happy accidents.
For logo design, it's imperative that you sketch.
It's the first thing you should do to get all those ideas out
of your head and to find even deeper and more nuanced connections.
You'll find after a period of time that you'll spend a lot
more time designing with a pencil than you do with software.
The software is the tool that we use to execute upon ideas.
Speaking of software, if you're looking for good software,
photographic design, then there are a few options.
But there's one primary one that I would suggest.
Adobe Creative Cloud.
They have apps like Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign.
Photoshop is a photo manipulating program where you
can manipulate photos, create amazing graphics.
You can create designs in there, but they won't be vector, which
means that they infinitely scale because they don't use pixels,
they use mathematics to work out the density of the shape.
Photoshop can be used for poster design.
It could be used for photo manipulation.
It can be used for mockups, for packaging design.
A lot of it uses within it.
Now, Adobe Illustrator sounds a bit strange, but
it's essentially used for vector artwork.
And again, vector artwork is very important design because
all fonts, if you've noticed, you can scale them up infinitely.
You can make them big or small because they're done with vector art.
Illustrator is the primary tool to use for vector artwork, like
logo design, icon design, and most of the stuff that you need
to be infinitely scalable.
In fact, most of the time you'll be designing an
Illustrator and then bringing into Photoshop as well.
The last software that is within the Adobe Creative Cloud
bundle is InDesign.
InDesign is where you create publishing material, like
magazine covers, layouts for spreads in like newspapers.
You can even create posters in there too.
Presentations.
Any PDFs that you want, you can create inside of InDesign.
It's essentially like a crossover between Adobe
Illustrator and Photoshop because you can bring in real
images that aren't vector, but you still have a lot of vector
work that you can put in.
The next tip is to work out your goals.
What do you want to do as a graphic designer?
There are many specialities in graphic design.
You can just be a general graphic designer and be okay at
a few things, but not good at one.
And you want to be good at something or something specific
within design to make a name for yourself.
For me, that is brand identity design.
But you have packaging design, editorial design, which is like
magazines and things like that.
Web design, logo design.
There are so many forms of grammar design that people
specifically do because they've niched down, which means that
they specialize in one area and get really good at that one area.
At first, I would just dabble in all of them just to see what
you would like to do.
Don't feel any pressure, just dabble, learn, see what happens,
and then go from there.
See where you like to go.
For computers, we use Macs generally because it's simple,
reliable, portable, and the Adobe apps work amazingly on there.
And most of the time their screen technology is
standardized to the phones and standardized to other Apple products.
So what someone else sees is what we see, which is what we
like for colour balance.
If you're a creative professional and you're making
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Head over to freshbooks.com/ willpaterson or click the link
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It's pretty huge.
So now that you've known a little bit about design, where
do you get resources from it?
Well, there are plenty of ways to learn and to get resources
to help you along your journey.
There are countless YouTube channels for graphic design
that you can check out, including my own.
If you don't know, I didn't go to university for design.
I read a lot of books and did a lot of work to get to where
I am now understanding graphic design.
University isn't for everyone, and that is just a fact of
today that you can learn anything online.
And this goes really nicely into my last point, which is to
always learn.
The big problem that we have nowadays is that when we get to
a certain point, some people feel like they can stop
learning, that they know it all.
You need to have a constant hunger to learn more because
graphic design is such a competitive field.
And not only that, you need to have good business skills.
So not just learning graphic design, but learning good
business skills of how to market yourself correctly,
where to put your work on a portfolio.
All these things are huge things that you need to learn
that you can learn from this channel.
Everyone is constantly learning, like it or not.
It just depends on what you are intentionally trying to learn.
So if you want to learn more about logo design, graphic design,
subscribe to this channel.
Go and check out the other channels that you see on
YouTube and get learning.
2023 is the year where it's better than ever to start
becoming a graphic designer.
Thanks for watching, and I'll see you in the next video.
Goodbye.