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Graphic Design and Web Design Courses in Maidenhead
Blue Sky Graphics is a top graphic design school. With our online courses, you will graduate with extensive knowledge of design philosophy, technological skills, and an outstanding design portfolio, which are essential for any creative career.
In our graphic design course, you can learn from seasoned instructors in several ways. We keep our lectures short and simple at Blue Sky Graphics, allowing plenty of time to practise your new skills and to grow your design eye.
Typography and Printing
The right style is key to choose — whether a clean sans serif typefaces such as Helvetica or a script written by hand. Through each design, typography gives character and plays an emotional role.
We teach typography and typing since it is a motor in all modes in visual communication.
Colour Theory
The development and implementation of a specific colour scheme is a big part of the response to the brief for graphic designers. Think about the influence of brand colours (e.g., blue Facebook, violet Cadbury, red Coke’s) and how those colour combinations convey a mood and feeling instantly.
We teach students how to effectively evaluate and use colour to carry all their portfolio projects to the next level.
You need to use the programme Adobe (InDesign, Illustrator, and Photoshop) to use graphic design. We also discuss what designers need to learn about the manufacturing process, paper configuration, and methods of printing.
The industry standard for designing professional graphics is Adobe InDesign. It is a Holy Grail designer when it comes to multi-page papers. InDesign uses resources such as main pages and paragraph forms, from press advertising and brochures and coffee table books.
Adobe Illustrator is the leading creator of vectors, so you don’t have to be an “illustrator” to manage it. This helps artists to produce a wide variety of artworks, including maps, company logos, symbols, and complex illustrations, which are clean and crisp in all sizes.
Adobe Photoshop is a system about which you might have learned and even tried. It’s an unusual picture processing, photo touching, and composing software, providing all the tools you need to manipulate skilled images. Photoshop is limited by the imagination only, from digital graphics to colour separation, graphical and web-based design.
If you already know the design software, our graphics design course will enhance your knowledge and teach you dozens of new shortcuts and tricks to increase efficiency.
In-house Agent or part of a Marketing Team?
If you set up a career as a graphic designer, you have to determine whether you want to pursue a career with an advertisement or design agency or become part of an internal marketing team. There are significant variations between the two, each with its shortcomings and strengths.
The main difference between the two is that you know the ins and outs of the company if you work for an in-house team. You are part of corporate culture and may focus solely on directing the overall narrative of the business. You can be very experienced with other items in more conventional fields (such as detergents or baby food). You should have more details on how the projects you are working on are carried out. You should also deal with budgeting issues.
In the meantime, you deal for a larger variety of goods in an enterprise of several different firms. You must extend your expertise to a wide range of industries fairly. You are always the “fresh eyes” an organisation needs. This should be remembered that some companies are specialised in different categories of clients, but you can see a broader range of items and issues than you may find in the internal team.
Freelancing
Full-time freelancers also start as moonlights. Some used their talents during school to earn a few extra bucks, build up a portfolio and reputation for many years until they were eventually plunged into a full-time freelance designer. There is a range of things to take into consideration when freelancing. Someone is used to a steady rise in instability. Freelancers experience both festivities and famines at the start of their careers as they acquire more customers.
This is also important to be mindful that while freelancing is an excellent career opportunity, it has a fair share of intensive preparation, long nights, and creative problem-solving. Many people lead amazing lives as digital nomads; they work from anywhere in the world. Several self-employed freelancer companies have chosen to take charge of their lives and jobs by being independent. You can learn how best you can work as a freelancer and develop your career.
If you can manage the pressure of drumming up customers, handle contracts, pay your quarterly taxes, and build your brand, then it is perfect for you to freelance. If you need to promote and secure a market atmosphere or are unable to sell yourself to potential clients, it might not be a successful step for you.
Salary Summary and Labour Market Status
The first point is that calculating the salary of a graphic designer is not an exact science. For certain government-controlled or affected occupations, such as military, civil service, or teaching, pay bands are strictly regulated, and you can be sure what you will get for a specific job.
By comparison, graphic design wages are almost entirely fixed in the market. So prices depend on such factors as the current state of the economy, the current demand for graphic design skills, and the number of people entering the workforce.
The good thing, though, is that graphic designers are already in strong demand.
The increasing digitalisation of our society and culture means that any organisation knows that it has to be a design-led business to thrive, thus increasing the number of graphic design jobs required to be filled.
When more businesses fight to recruit the best graphic designers, average salaries look good, and we expect them to keep up. Initial wages for first-time employees are well comparable to other occupations; for example, the average graphic design wage for young designers in the UK stands at £21,961.
In short, every work in graphic design, including your first work, will pay you enough to make your lifestyle reasonably comfortable. There is a lot of potential here, with rapid salary growth as you advance to a senior designer in mid-weight ranks and incredible wages for design directors until you establish yourself in the industry.
Are You Being Paid Enough?
The most straightforward and most realistic way to ensure that you are being paid the correct sum for your graphic design wage is to equate it with the other positions being advertised. When you start searching, you will realise that even in your city, the range of salary varies greatly. And the level of experience is one of the critical factors.
A few big bands typically categorise graphical design workers. The first and least experienced designer is a new artist. It is usually a job for a designer who is straight out of college or a course in graphic design like Blue Sky Graphic and doesn’t have more than a background of independent study, internships, college work, and maybe additional work with an artistic aspect like an artist.
A student usually graduates from a straight ‘graphic designer’ with a concomitant salary boost in the same business or a new one within six months to two years. However, some of the best graduates often play a role in graphic design, especially if they have developed their training through an intense, industry-oriented training course such as Blue Sky Graphics.
While the field of design has become more nuanced, over the last few years, graphic design disciplines have become highly specialised. Specialised visual design styles include:
UI designer: creating user interfaces for phones, blogs, TV channels, game consoles. Typically you work with UX designers who help transform your ideas into usable code.
Editorial designer: focused on layouts for books, journals, etc.
Packaging designer: focused on the development of print-ready packaging designs
Motion designer: focused on making short, quick animations based on graphic design, blogs, television idents, TV credit pages, music images, videos, etc.
Environmental designer: based on physical space graphic design, for example, meeting rooms, shop interiors, museums, public transport.
The wages for each type of designer will vary drastically. For instance, if you are a publisher, don’t assume that your salary will equal that of a UI designer, as in general, this type of job will pay much more.