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What skills are important for a future graphic designer to have to become most marketable when finding a job?

I'm a sophomore in college taking a variety of graphic design classes as well as courses required for graduation. I'm trying to figure out what skills or possible college minor to choose in order to allow for the greatest range of career choices.
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Cuong’s Answer

Like Darryl said, your skills set as designer will be beneficial to jobs you'll be applying to.


Nowadays, designers are expected to understand how to do web-related work. Taking classes relating to HTML and CSS will be very helpful in the job market when marketing yourself as a designer.

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Sarah’s Answer

Hi Samantha,

From my experience, your portfolio is going to be your biggest asset when looking for a job out of college. Making sure that you have a wide range of work to show with solid creative rationale is something you can focus on as you near graduation. I would also recommend attending career fairs where you can speak to different companies about opportunities, and portfolio shows where you can showcase your work. Taking internships while your studying will also give you good exposure to the demands of the graphic design world. That will also give you a chance to speak to hiring managers directly and find out what they look for in candidates.

If your college offers classes in Design Thinking, I would definitely recommend that. You will learn about how to apply the designer's brain/thinking process for effective problem-solving.

Best of luck to you!
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Darryl’s Answer

Hi Samantha,

Great question! In today's job market, virtually all graphic designers are expected to be familiar with Web-based solutions and mobile design. That doesn't necessarily mean you need to know how to write code, but it certainly does help. A basic familiarity with HTML and CSS will be a big boost to your marketability!

Luckily, there are lots of relatively painless ways to get a good foundation in coding and responsive design. When I was first starting out, I took lessons on lynda.com to learn how to build Web pages. These days, everything from mobile apps to interactive books and blog sites offers solid (and often free) instruction on basic HTML and CSS. Even if you hate math and dread the prospect of learning code semantics, I strongly encourage you to give it a shot.

The reason you want to familiarize yourself with coding is so you'll understand whether or not your beautiful design ideas can actually be implemented under the real-world constraints of limited time, budget, and/or resources. The better you understand how banner ads, e-cards, websites and the like are built, the easier time you'll have in presenting thoughtful, efficient solutions.

I hope this information is helpful to you, and I wish you the best of luck with all of your future endeavors!

Darryl recommends the following next steps:

Subscribe to a professional e-newsletter such as http://www.webdesignernews.com/ to keep current on the latest trends and technologies.
Explore a seminal website such as A List Apart for loads of great history, rationale, and advice: https://alistapart.com/
Visit a local library or bookstore to browse through issues of Communication Arts, Print, HOW, and whatever else catches your eye.
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