I’m currently going to school for web design/development. I’m doing this because the job seems future proof and it combines my love of art with my love of computers. However, I have recently begun to think about switching to a major in Graphic Design. My concern is job prospects once I receive my degree. So my questions are what types of jobs would I be looking at once I graduate and how is the job market, ie how hard or easy is it to find a good paying job in Graphic Design?
Thanks so much in advance and it’s great to be here
You’ll want to at least have some web design classes. There are so many Graphic Designers these days the market is flooded. So if you’re not really good or really into what you’re doing, it may show. Although the internet is making it easier and easier for the common person to slap up a website, there will likely always be a need for web design. People want too many custom things to have a template work for very long.
Thanks for your reply! What type of work (and there are probably many) does a GD do? Say I graduate and I need a job. How does that process go? Being in the military the last 20 years, I’ve not had that experience. I can say I’ve always wanted an art profession as I’m constantly drawing cartoons and such, so it is very much a love that I have for art and I believe I’d put my all into the work because I enjoy it so much.
Graphic Design is such a broad spectrum I couldn’t begin to cover all aspects. It depends on what type of work you’d like to do.
Branding, Logos, Environmental, Interior/Exterior, Packaging (boxes, bottles, labels, etc…), Printing (several types), Publication, Illustration, etc…
Do some digging into the different types and find what speaks to you, there’s no set staircase through the design field.
Also look into animation, which is separate from Graphic Design. If you’re constantly drawing cartoons it may be something that appeals to you and is a separate degree.
The degree plan I’m on now has JavaScript and AJAX as part of the curriculum. But as an arty person, that stuff so boring and above my head. That is the reason I selected my major to begin with, future job prospects.
Web design used to be my least favorite, but the more I dig into it the more I like it. Plus like 80% of my freelancing is web design so I had to start liking it, ha! You’ll find web design related jobs more abundant than anything else these days.
Honestly, there are far more graphic designers in school than there will ever be well-paying jobs for them. The whole field is totally oversaturated, getting hit with competition from crowdsourcing sites, and being commoditized as off-the-shelf, online, downloadable templates and do-it-yourself websites become more common.
If I were you, and if you’re not quite sure whether web design or graphic design is the best career option, as you said yourself, the web design option is more future proof and likely to slowly morph into a thousand different directions and options as technology changes. In other words, it’s a platform for the future whereas, graphic design as we know is much less certain.
Before diving into a scripting language, it’s lots more important to master HTML and CSS.
