Hello I’m new on the forum !
I’m studying Product Design in Italy and I would like to specialize in Graphic Design.
I was thinking to get a master degree in Digital Arts and Publications and in Web Designing.
I would like to make you a little interview:
In which country you work?
How is your daily job as a graphic design? And your week?
Which are your personal suggestions to a student for the future in this working field?
Are there some Design master degree which you think would be very innovative and requested in the future?
If (one day) my portfolio will be very good, will the master degree I wrote up there help me to get into the contemporary Graphic Design working enviroment?
Where do Graphic Designers usually work? Comapanies, art and design colletives, at home (freelance)… and?
Do you personally think there are more job opportunities as a PRODUCT designer or as a GRAPHIC designer?
Do you know some professionals or students I could speak personally with?
Thank you very much for your replies I will be very happy to get all your thoughts about from everybody: professionals and not. You can even answer to some of the questions if you have answers for all… well you are a genius
In the U.S., where I live, Master’s Degrees in graphic design aren’t especially common. I don’t know if the same is true in Italy. I went through my MFA program in graphic design about 20 years ago, so I’ll answer your questions from those perspectives.
Few companies here specifically require Master’s Degrees for graphic design. Having one, might even make those first entry-level jobs a little more difficult since a person with a graduate degree might be seen as overqualified and underexperienced.
I haven’t found my MFA to be especially useful, nor did I find the academic courses associated with it to be either practical or useful except from an academic point of view. It has, however, opened a few doors for me to more advanced positions in the field. I wouldn’t be at all surprised to see Master’s Degrees in design becoming more popular in the future as designers begin to seek out additional ways to make themselves stand out and appear to be more qualified to employers in what has become an oversaturated field.
Your situation is different from mine, though. Both my undergraduate and graduate degrees are in graphic design. You seem to be pursuing a Bachelor’s Degree in Product Design and wondering if a Master’s Degree would be a good compliment to your Product Design degree. I think those would be a much more useful combination of degrees than the ones I have.
Let me explain:
The combination of two different, but related kinds of degrees broadens your appeal to those companies that could use the skills that come from both. For example if you applied for a position at a company built around developing and marketing new products, I can see a degree in both product design and graphic design being complimentary to each other and seeming very valuable to the employer. It might also serve you very well in future promotions within that company.
On the other hand, those two degrees will have a tendency to make your education very specialized in the sense that not every company needs both a product designer and graphic designer.
Another potential problem is that all those years in school will not give you the practical experience needed to get those first entry-level jobs. It’s sometimes quite difficult to make the adjustment from academia to the real world, and those extra years of schooling can make that adjustment even more difficult unless the student makes a point of actually working as a designer (internships, part-time, etc.) while going to school or, perhaps, taking a year or two off and working professionally between the two degrees.
Thank you very much for accurate answer! I’m sorry I didn’t mention that I will get one interniship before the end of my first degree and another one after the degree (possibly abroad!). So I hope I will get in touch with my real job. After those interniships I will begin my master degree.
I would like to ask you: which could be the problems to get too much specialized? Could you please explain me why is that a problem for companies?
It will play to your advantage at companies that need both skills, which will give make you stand out over other applicants with only one or the other of those degrees.
However, if you apply at a company that needs only a product designer or a graphic designer, one of those degrees might be seen by the potential employer as being somewhat irrelevant. I don’t see that being a disadvantage, but it would be a shame not to find a position that will use both sets of skills. And finding the kind of job in which both skills will be relevant and useful might be a bit more difficult since those jobs might be less plentiful.
I’m not saying that this is a bad problem. Instead, being overqualified is something of a good problem, but it still can, in some ways, be something one has to consider.
