Anyone else in Graphic Design?

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Anyone else in Graphic Design? What do find challenging about? How do you go about researching/learning outside class?

I work (in accounting) for a printing company that works on screen printed posters, bumper stickers, digital prints, vinyl graphics, banners.....etc. We also have a graphic arts dept. Customers bring in their designs or the art dept designs art for the customer. If you are learning and want to get a foot in the door, maybe you can start by working on the manufacturing end (screen printing, burning screens, finshing..etc) and this will give you an idea of how it all gets put together to get to the customer. We've had people that we've hired from local univeristies that started that way and worked their way up into the graphic arts dept. I hope this helps as I am only in accounting. Some of them are still in the art dept. and some
moved on to other companies that mainly do only graphic art.
I hope this helps.....Good luck!

I WAS in Graphic Design,but I changed it to Psychology because of my eyesight.


-SpaceCase

I fix network printers for a living...not sure how close that is.. I've got a few programs (Corel Draw, Photoshop, and the Gimp), and play around with that. Do some 3d 'art'...but I'm hardly a professional. I do respect graphic artists, though.

The most challenging part of my Graphic Design class is probably the amount of time we get to work on things. I'm a strong believer in that art (or creativity) isn't something you can force out of someone, but my teacher likes to give us a day to work on things I'd rather spend a week perfecting.

As for learning outside of class, the best way to probably do that is to read tutorials on different sites so you can familiarize yourself with all of the available tools. If you want to learn the basics of art (ie: what looks good in artistic terms), you can probably find books on art theory/appreciation in your library. Or if you don't have enough time just look at different things and ask yourself why/how questions (Why are this forum's colors blue and green? How come the street names are written in that font?, etc).

i took some courses at an art college, but never pursued it. in fact, i never did anything with my web development certification either lol

I got my BA in Graphic Design, though that had more to do with the fact that it was the closest thing to a digital art major at my undergraduate program.

TokenX is correct about short deadlines being a challenge. In my 100 level Graphic Design class (basically an intro class), the teacher gave us a project that had to be done overnight and handed in between 8:00 and 8:05 am the next morning, not before, not after. That kind of thing is a royal pain, but it does prepare you for the tight deadlines in the Graphic Design industry (or other industries for that matter).

An issue I personally had was being precise with some of the physical tasks we were required to do, such as a particularly fiendish project involving hand-cut white bristol board and rubber cement, where points were taken off for smudges on the white paper, stray bits of cement, and cutting errors (all that in addition to compositional and aesthetic considerations...). I had to wash my hands every time I touched something other than my materials to keep from smudging my work. Of course, this project had an important purpose: it encouraged us to pay very close attention to details, and details are what make or break a project.

One thing that will be very useful to you is getting your hands on (or getting regular access to) some of the industry standard software so you can practice with it in your free time. This will allow you to translate what you've got in your head into a final product without having to waste time fumbling around the interface, or being stymied by not knowing how to do what you want to do.

Hi,

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