The route to becoming a graphic designer has always been to first get your design qualifications at college or university and then get a job (if you’re lucky) at a design agency where you would expect to work for several years before leaving for your account and form your own design agency, perhaps take some of your clients with you.
It is possible to take a different route to become a freelance graphic designer. The Internet has opened the field in recent years. Budding graphic designers hope to lean on while studying or Learn graphic design and designers who have recently qualified and still haven’t found work to find that the freelance graphic design jobs they paid for were few and far between. Now, however, there are several websites offering design jobs from around the world, and it has been possible for novice freelance graphic designers to pick up a bit of freelance work to start a career and move on.
No new designer is going to win contracts to work on Nike’s latest campaign or put together a design for GQ magazine. The route to such contracts is still through a degree and then working at the design agency. You will be able to find contracts to start your freelance career and start building your own design agency. The Internet and Internet job boards provide new designers with the opportunity to create a small portfolio and generate a small source of income. This, in turn, will allow them to step foot in the door for some of those bigger contracts.
Online job boards like Odesk or Elance are the best place to look for these types of jobs. There will be categories for web design and design, and these categories will have hundreds of designing jobs (every few minutes updating) for designers to bid on. The”Web and Programming” and “Design and Multimedia”, which will be of interest to design workers. Contracts on offer can range from a complete design brief for a startup including branding, letterhead, stationery, and ad campaigns to the most basic designs, say for a business card only. There is also room for specialization. If you want to focus on Internet-based graphic design, from websites to applications and software, then there will be a category for this. Likewise, you may just want to focus on company logos.
You know what you want to work on, you simply need to upload any examples of your best work for a portfolio, and then start bidding for jobs. You are starting at the bottom, and you will not receive feedback or reviews from job board users, you will probably find that you need to bid very low at first to compete with more experienced users. Although it has no comments, customers sometimes think it’s worth buying a new designer if the price is right. Do a brilliant job, and you will receive comments. Get feedback, and you will start to get more customers. Once you have clients, pat yourself on the back – you’re a freelance graphic designer!
When developing materials, most designers and coaches rarely think much about how they use images and graphics. They add them as a way to animate boring text.
On the contrary, as most graphic designers and artists know well, there is a complete vocabulary and language related to the use of images. This is something that is seldom included as part of conventional instruction design training. A pity, because it is a language that instructional designers and trainers would benefit greatly from knowing it.
If you interested in learning about the language of images, a starting point as good as any is understanding the five instructional functions for graphics. These functional categories are as follows:
Decorative images – used to make instruction more engaging and motivating. They generally do not have a strong association with educational content.
This statistic seems to support the view expressed in the opening of this article: that many instructional designers pay little attention to the importance of images and graphics. In light of this finding, it is probably fair to say that decorative graphics should be used with caution.
Representative images – used to make information more concrete.
Organizational Imagery – Helps students understand the structure, sequence, and hierarchy of information and helps people integrate that into their existing knowledge. Examples include charts, graphs, and screens that help people see relationships between items.
Interpretive Images – Used to help students understand difficult and ambiguous or abstract content. In general, they help to make the information more understandable. Examples include system models and process diagrams.
Transformative Images – used to make information more memorable. Its objective is to help students’ thought processes. They focus more on helping the student understand than presenting the content. Transformative images can be a little unconventional, and because of this, they are not widely found in learning materials.
In fact, the fact that something is visually composed does not necessarily make it more valid or easier to understand. A poorly designed graphic or visual could make learning as difficult as easy.
There are people who desperately want to get a graphic design job and start proving their worth along with their valuable ideas, but fail. Have you ever wondered why? Most of them, even after having a degree in graphic design, cannot get a good job in graphic design. However, good jobs are out in the open, waiting for you to take them the right way and start to save a lot of time, as many design firms and advertising companies require graphic designers for their progress. It is only a question of how you look for a job and how it increases its value.
In conclusion, we have all heard the phrase “an image is worth a thousand words”. And many people accept this wisdom without hesitation.