Starting Your Career as a Graphic Designer

Michael Fleishman

• Publisher: Allworth
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781621534129
• Topic: Design
• Subtopic: Graphic Design

The ultimate source for beginning professionals, working professionals looking to make a change, and entrepreneurs wanting to go out on their own, this friendly guide details every business aspect of commercial graphic design, including how to: • Create a portfolio • Make initial contacts • Develop a financial plan • Set up an office • Acquire supplies and equipment • Price your own work • Market on the Web • Nurture a growing freelance business • And much moreIn a market-by-market survey, the author devotes entire chapters to selling one's work within every venue, including magazines, ad agencies, book publishers, greeting card companies, small business, and Web sites. This is the most useful book on the market for honing the business skills of freelance illustrators and graphic designers.Allworth Press, an imprint of Skyhorse Publishing, publishes a broad range of books on the visual and performing arts, with emphasis on the business of art. Our titles cover subjects such as graphic design, theater, branding, fine art, photography, interior design, writing, acting, film, how to start careers, business and legal forms, business practices, and more. While we don't aspire to publish a New York Times bestseller or a national bestseller, we are deeply committed to quality books that help creative professionals succeed and thrive. We often publish in areas overlooked by other publishers and welcome the author whose expertise can help our audience of readers.

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SECTION I

STARTING OUT

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CHAPTER 1

SO YOU WANT TO BE A DESIGNER?

A beginner should have an image in mind of what he or she would like to be in ten years, and then never waver from that.

—Fred Carlson

Be realistic; not too dogmatic; set goals and benchmarks, but stay flexible in your approach.

—Allan Wood

BY DEFINITION

A graphic designer orchestrates type and visuals to communicate, sell, provoke a response, inform, or educate a mass audience. Bob Bingenheimer defines it this way: “Graphic designers are professionals trained in communications problem-solving through the use of typography, symbols, and images; they are schooled in information technologies. Design means organization, and arose out of the need for an interface between aesthetics and the industrial age. The modern designer develops communications materials based on knowledge of the aforementioned typography, images, symbols, as manipulated through those information technologies.”

Type and image are still the core of graphic design no matter how we look at it, but this is merely the top of something more than the flat promise of a traditional “good read.” Designers today provide the push and play of interactive information and animated content for eager readers, hungry for more (or at the very least, different) than the static page—or image—may offer.

For some, the preceding definition may be too dry and clinical—a somewhat uninspiring way of describing something far more shimmery. For many, a designer’s very mission transcends standard, textbook interpretations. Allan Wood smiles here and quotes that prodigious designer, Willy Wonka, (who, in the movie Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory quotes from Arthur O’Shaughnessy’s famous poem, “Ode”: “We are the music–makers / And we are the dreamers of dreams.”)

“Designers,” says Wood, “facilitate a creative process and collaborate with our clients to help manifest their ideals. We engage and communicate with our client’s audience through visual language. In essence, we create cultural artifacts—no different from ancient Greek or Egyptian artifacts (the only difference is that our focus is not religion, but consumerism).

“Our work at its most basic level,” Wood says, “reflects the cultural views of the times. At its height, design reflects and creates—and at times, challenges—the cultural ideals of the times.”

Design, either by definition or through perspiration, should be both pragmatic and inspiring, for as Mr. Wonka also says, “There is no life I know to compare with pure imagination.”

INTENDED MEANING

You might never have thought you’d grow up to be a “designer.” Perhaps your teachers and high school guidance counselors—maybe even your parents—told you that “you can’t make a living in art.”

Phillip Wilson is here to tell you—well, he’ll tell you from his home in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania—that this simply is not true. “The Design business is a business like any other business,” he says, “and good people will make a good living at it. But you must be prepared and know your craft inside and out. You have to take it seriously as a career and not ‘play’ at it half-heartedly.

DOING IT ALL

As this book is the sister volume to the forthcoming Starting Your Career as an Illustrator, let’s address a topical question: is your perspective that of a designer or an illustrator?

“The great thing about being a designer,” says Brian Fencl, “is that you don’t have to choose what you want to be—illustrator, photographer, designer, etc.—you can set up a business where you do all of it.”

And one of the key ingredients in becoming a do-it-all designer is being a problem solver and a divergent thinker (what Fencl labels as “creative intelligence”). “You need to be a life long learner,” he says, “the technology is so fluid, sometimes the right answer to a design problem is via techniques or media you haven’t mastered (yet).

“When these foundations are learned at a deep level, you have creative people prepared to work, contribute, adapt, and innovate.”

Although he can surely speak of his own illustration skills, Jason Petefish has hired his share of illustrators to work for him on projects in the past. He’s quick to confess that he’s not what he calls a “bona fide ‘arty-type’ illustrator” and assesses that there are totally separate skill sets involved.

Petefish specifies that both design and illustration fall under the general topic of “visual communication,” but says, “The illustrator is not necessarily a ‘designer,’ and on a design gig, it may be the designer who hires the illustrator.” He’s not saying that illustrators are subordinate to designers. Hardly—they’re more like copilots on the same bombing run.

“Many excellent illustrators hold their own very well without being hired by a designer or creative director,” he says. They are skilled in both design and illustration.

“If you, the designer, wears the ‘make-the-client-happy’ business hat,” he says, “you might certainly oversee a project’s illustration. ‘Good’ visual design subjectively means tasteful skills and the marketplace will be the ultimate purifying arbiter of quality (or lack of)—especially the higher up you go.”

“You know, the head of an in-house design department—we’ll call them Fizzy Cola (FizzCo for short)—once told me that it doesn’t matter how much good packaging design costs,” Petefish says. “$100 . . . $150 . . . $200 an hour—it didn’t matter. FizzCo would pay it—if, of course, they ‘approved’ the initial design contract, which was based initially on a mature designer’s portfolio. And that, obviously, was based on excellence as determined by their incredibly high design standards.” Here, Petefish smiles and adds, “In other words, prove you’ve been working in the field successfully.”

So Petefish has been in business long enough to understand how illustrators and designers get hired, which he insists is remarkably simple and actually more arbitrary than scientific. “It’s a combination of: (1) who you know, (2) who you can ‘get to,’ (3) the need of the person doing the hiring, and (4) what they want,” he says frankly.

“You have to want it more than anything else. It has to be as important and as necessary to you as the air you breathe,” Wilson says. “You have to be dedicated and disciplined. As to your work ethic—putting in whatever hours it takes to do a job and do it professionally; to do every job on time and with the utmost attention to the requirements, quality, and detail. . . . There will be no room for slop.”

Rigie Fernandez never thought he would be a designer. As a kid raised in the Philippines, all he wanted to do was draw from (and dream up characters for) Filipino comic books. Artists like Levi and Joey Celerio (huge comic illustrators at that time in his homeland) inspired him to pursue his passion for drawing.

His father motivated and helped Fernandez to follow his muse. This eventually led to Fernandez obtaining a degree in Fine Arts. So why become a designer? “It fuels the same passions I had when I was younger,” he considers, “to create all the things that I imagine and share it with the world.

“Labels—‘freelancer,’ ‘independent’—are not important to me,” Fernandez says, pausing to consider. “But it’s important to clients. Why? Even though freelancing is not new, there are still clients who prefer to give their projects to a company instead of ‘freelance’ designers. This is why freelance designers must work on their personal branding, establish their credibility, and improve their client-handling and communication skills.”

Working under today’s model, designers like Fernandez will tell you that you should be a jack-of-all-trades and master of something. Not everyone will be able to “do it all.” But being knowledgeable in certain areas of expertise will definitely help and offer a distinct advantage. “Strive to become an authority in a certain field,” Fernandez says, “be it print, web, or video. Know a thing or two in the other fields. Gone are the days where a designer is only doing print.”

Play it smart. Networking and collaboration are perfectly acceptable if some part of a project is not your specialty. Collaborate with developers on the back end development if you have to; cozy up to project managers to supervise an assignment (allowing you to focus on what you really excel at—design).

“You need to be up-to-date with the latest trends,” Fernandez says, “but the task becomes easier when you collaborate; and these days you don’t even need to be in the same location physically.”

POS/NEG

Some decisions often come down to simply looking at life’s two-column ledger: the left is labeled “plus,” with the tag “minus” on the right. The vocation of design is a demanding job. You’re going to hustle. You’ll work extended hours, and the buzzword here is “more.” More hours, yes, but theoretically you can do a wider variety of better (read “more creative”) assignments (or at least do more of the type of work you want to do) with the potential to earn more money in the process. More. More. More.

FOLKS JUST LIKE YOU (LIFE IN THE TRENCHES)

FLOW WITH IT

Stephen Michael King lives in a mud brick house on an island off the coast of Australia, and has, in his words, designed, illustrated, and written a whole bunch of books. About seventy-two was his count when this was composed.

King will tell you that this prolific career has been based on trusting his intuition and following his heart. “Not too many business principles have purposely entered my life,” he says, “but I’m reliable, always meet a deadline, and aim for a personal creative truth in all my characters and designs.”

He’s a self-professed “go with the flow” kind of guy, who has a happy track record of keeping big publishers rather pleased—his repeat customers seek him out for his hand skills and that old-world view of putting something beautiful out into the world for people to find. “This joyfully naive concept means that I’ve lived a life where I can accept fallow periods, similar to a farmer at the mercy of good and bad seasons,” King says. But he also celebrates that he’s had a bumper crop for some fifteen years now. “The seasons have been kind to me,” he says, “I’ve been booked out roughly two years in advance on all jobs.”

King told me that he considers promoting himself more, but I fear there wouldn’t be enough work hours in his day to handle the resulting volume. And all this derived off minimal marketing from a wee, coastal Pacific isle. King also realizes that a full-scale program may very well distract him from his true passion: writing, illustrating, and designing.

Freedom, at last, or freedom, at least. Basically there’s no time clock to punch, and it’s your schedule. Providing you meet your deadlines and make your meetings, you decide when you go to work, where, and for how long. No toiling “nine-to-five,” unless you want it that way (or unless your client asks you to come in and work on their turf during their prescribed workday).

The flipside to this is that the steady paycheck may be history. Your money could come in dribbles or drabs, spurts, bursts, (or hopefully, and better yet) torrents. You will finally understand the true meaning of the terms “accounts receivable” and “accounts payable.” Boys and girls: can you say “cash flow”? What you knew as professional security at your full-time position is not...