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What Does It Take To Become A Graphic Designer?
There are a number of influences that can determine how long it takes you to become a graphic designer. Not all of them would be applicable to all, but we figured we’d provide as much as possible so you can see how long it would take you to become a graphic designer.
The various considerations include how you want to train, your existing ability level, the amount of time you will devote to the process, and the duration of the work hunt. We’ll go through each of these aspects in more detail now.
1. How Did You Want to Learn?
One of the best things about being a graphic designer is that there isn’t only one path to practise. In reality, there are several ways to learn. For the time being, we’ll break down how long any of the three key pathways to becoming a graphic designer—university/college, self-teaching, and bootcamp-style courses—takes.
The first stop is university. Many graphic designers join the field after earning a graduate degree. A university degree is, of course, a well-established, conventional path to being a graphic designer, but how long would it take to become a graphic designer this way? Depending about where you are in the country, it could take up to four years. Undergraduate degrees in Graphic Design last four years in the United States and three years in Australia and the United Kingdom. They may, however, be longer. In the United Kingdom, for example, taking an Art Foundation course before pursuing a career in graphic design adds a year to the period it takes to become a graphic designer.
Another choice is to train yourself to be a graphic designer. In recent years, there has been a growth in the number of designers who have learned themselves all of the skills and experience needed for a career in the design industry. And the internet has just sped up the process! How long would it take to learn to be a graphic designer if you train yourself? So, how long is a length of string? When you are self-teaching, it is difficult to predict how long it would take to become a graphic designer. It is highly reliant on the tools and methods you use to educate yourself, as well as the amount of time you will devote to teaching yourself. We’ll go into more detail on this later in the post.
Courses like ours are a great place to practise graphic design and become a graphic designer in a limited period of time. How long has that been going on?
When you graduate, you’ll get a diploma stating that you’re a graphic artist, as well as an important portfolio to help you find a career. This is significantly better than the university path and is expected to be faster than self-study as well!
If you will see, the choice of how to practise graphic design has a significant impact on how long it takes to become a graphic designer.
2. The Present Degree of Expertise
Your present ability level is another crucial aspect that can influence how long it takes you to become a graphic designer. This refers to the existing graphic design experience.
Don’t worry, your present ability level will not impact whether or not you will become a graphic designer; it will just affect how long it will take you.
If you’re a total newcomer, first and foremost, welcome! You’re in for an entertaining and interesting experience. As you have just read, there are many opportunities to discover what you need to know to become a graphic designer. Starting your graphic design education from scratch involves studying the Design Concepts and other basics of the graphic design method before jumping into the nitty gritty of programmes like Adobe Creative Cloud.
Of course, if you are a total novice, it may take a little longer to become a graphic designer so there is more to understand. This is particularly true if you have chosen to self-teach. It is also necessary to note that becoming a novice does not always imply that being a graphic designer would take a long time—as previously said, course like Blue Sky Graphics’ will get you started as a graphic designer in as little as an year.
If you already have some design experience, the journey to graphic design stardom might look a little different. If you have a degree but find like your abilities aren’t up to par or that you have any holes in your experience, self-education might be the way to go.
If you realise just what you need to work on, it should just take a couple months to get back on track.
However, if you believe that anything is desperately missing, it might be worthwhile to retrain from the ground up. This is where a quick course like Blue Sky Graphics will come in handy—you will get all the experience and expertise needed to serve as a professional graphic designer in three months full-time or nine months part-time if you choose to stay working at the same time.
3. How Much Time Will You Commit To The Process?
The most critical factor to remember when determining how long it takes to become a graphic designer is the amount of time you will devote to researching, training, and practising all of your latest abilities and experience.
It’s not as easy as taking up a pad, as it is for every artistic discipline—there are lessons to master and hours to put in to get there.
As you have already read, the various paths to being a graphic designer are on completely different timescales which necessitate very different degrees of feedback.
As a consequence, you can think twice about how much effort you should and choose to commit to being a graphic designer.
For eg, whether you want to pursue graphic design at university, it is very doubtful that you would spend the whole day studying how to be a graphic designer. It will be slower paced, and there will be periods outside of class where you will be left on your own devices. This is a decent path for certain people to understand, but not for others.
Self-study is perhaps the most time-consuming choice, based on how much time you have to commit to the process. If you devote all of your attention to studying and training, you should be able to become a graphic designer very soon. However, this alternative also implies that you can pick up a book or learn a curriculum anytime you have a spare minute, implying that the journey to being a graphic designer can eventually last however long as you want it to.
