Best 6 Graphic Design Skills You Need To Be Hired

A graphic designer is a professional within the graphic design and graphic arts industry who assembles together images, typography, or motion graphics to create a piece of design. A graphic designer creates the graphics primarily for published, printed, or electronic media, such as brochures (sometimes) and advertising. They are also sometimes responsible for typesetting, illustration, user interfaces, and web design. A core responsibility of the designer's job is to present information in a way that is both accessible and memorable.

Graphic design skills are a hot commodity for creative workers who enjoy using the right side of their brain. Sure, graphic design jobs can be stimulating and fun, but they're also potentially lucrative. The graphic design skills needed to become a successful designer are many. From a good understanding of technical aspects to a thorough knowledge of how designing works, a graphic designer must know it all.

Below is the basic Graphic Design skills needed to get hired:

Adobe Creative apps: Experience using technology is baked into many graphic design skills. Knowing how to use Adobe's creative software specifically Adobe Illustrator, InDesign, and Photoshop is a base requirement for many graphic design jobs.

· Adobe Photoshop: Out of the 20+ Adobe Creative Cloud apps, Photoshop has to be the most famous one. Popular for its photo editing tools, it is used by graphic designers for editing and enhancing images and designs. Adobe Photoshop essentially uses pixels to make images and offers various photo editing tools like crop picture, color correction, image resizing, saturation, brightness, contrast, etc.

· Adobe In Design: This graphic design skill is about 20 years old and is relevant even today. It emerged as the most effective tool for graphic designers over the past years. Adobe In Design is a typesetting and desktop publishing software that replaced Quark on its arrival. The software may look slightly complicated at first, but with training, In Design can prove helpful and full of possibilities for graphic designers. It can aid graphic designers in creating books, magazines, flyers, posters, and other similar things. You can explore more about this software with online Adobe In Design courses.

· Adobe Illustrator: Illustrator is probably the 3rd most popular graphic design skill that recruiters look for while hiring a designer. The third of the Adobe trifecta, Illustrator helps graphic designers create digital images like logos, image illustrations, animated pictures, graphs, etc. Don’t know much about Adobe Illustrator? Don't worry, here are some online illustrator courses for you to explore.

The beauty of InDesign, Photoshop, and Illustrator is that they can be used seamlessly to create designs. For this reason, they rank highly in the essential graphic design skills list.

Creativity: You probably don't need us to spell it out for you, but let's drill this home: Creativity is one of if not the most important graphic design skills. After all, it's hard to come up with new ideas and innovative designs if you don't know how to tap into your creative resources. Having a visual eye is essential no matter what medium you work in.

Communications: Understanding what a client wants from a design is the key to creating a successful product. But, "in today's digital age, where everyone is so individually focused on their phones and electronic devices, a lot of people don't know how to talk to clients," laments Jankowski. Thus, being able to listen well, process feedback, and explain design elements without getting technical will give you a big advantage.

Typography: The typography in a design can establish brand identity, and well-trained graphic designers understand the science behind the design and utility of a font. The ability to make written language not only legible but also visually appealing is "more important today than ever". "These days, pretty much anyone can access every kind of font imaginable online, but someone who has been highly trained and understands how fonts are made and utilized is going to be a more effective designer." Being an integral part of communication, typography is one of the most important graphic design skills for those pursuing the profession.

Interactive Media: Interactive media is a catch all term for design products that actively engage a user through mediums like text, moving image, animation, video, audio, or video games. Expose yourself to as many different types of media as possible.

Delivering Presentations: Graphic designers are essentially storytellers. So, having the ability to take complex data and present it in a clear, digestible way to customers or clients will make you a more valuable employee. One of the most important aspects of being a graphic designer is being able to put across the idea behind your design. Be it in in-house presentations, with customers, or clients, a designer has to be well-equipped to explain their ideas and stand by their work, making storytelling a crucial graphic design skill. Important aspects like inspiration for the design, choice of color schematics and shapes involved, typography, etc., play the lead role in this storytelling, and all of these must resonate with the idea behind the design.

As a graphic designer, you know how important a clean, clear layout is to nabbing someone's attention. There are many graphic designers out there developing new designs every day. To get hired by good companies, you will need to be proficient in the right skill set, a portfolio that showcases your best works, and complete knowledge of the history of design and current trends.

All the best!