We’ve seen student after student create a successful design career after completing our graphic design course, making us experts in what skills employers are looking for. In this article, we'll break down the skills needed to be a graphic designer—the ones that an employer would be looking to help get you hired and succeed in your design career.
We scoured the different design jobs boards and looked at loads of different postings to find out what employers, whether the roles are studio-based, in-house or freelance, are looking for. We’ve broken these down into a convenient graphic design skills list—which covers all the technical know-how you should have in order to become a full-fledged Graphic Designer.
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What skills should a graphic designer have?
Like any profession, being a graphic designer requires a specific set of skills—that range from niche technical skills, programs and specific applications to more general creative and strategic skills. A well-rounded graphic designer should have a good grasp of these essentials skills as they will be pivotal in your day-to-day work.
Adobe InDesign
Adobe Photoshop
Adobe Illustrator
Figma (Digital, UI, UX)
Typography & typesetting
Design principles
Idea generation
Branding
Designing for print
Portfolio management
Non-technical skills
Technical Graphic Design Skills That are Needed
Adobe InDesign for graphic designers
First released over 20 years ago, Adobe InDesign is a graphic designer’s best friend and most valuable piece of software. Part of the Adobe Creative Cloud, InDesign is a desktop publishing and typesetting program that is used by designers the world over. It replaced Quark, which had faced intense criticism, as the industry standard when it was first introduced in 1999.
Although slightly baffling when you first open it up, once a designer is fully trained up in InDesign it opens a whole world of possibilities.
"It can be used to create posters, flyers, books and magazines, amongst many, many other things—all those things that immediately spring to people’s minds when you say you’re a graphic designer."
Dan Wilson, Lead Teacher at Shillington
Though, in all seriousness, you won’t find a graphic designer who isn’t both a master of InDesign and simultaneously constantly learning new tips and tricks on the programme. It really is amongst the essential skills needed to be a graphic designer.
Adobe Photoshop for graphic designers
Another part of the Adobe Creative Cloud (which if you haven’t already guessed, you’ll become very familiar with as a graphic designer), Photoshop is the world’s most popular photo editing app. It was first released 30 years ago in February 1990. But, wait? Photo editing? We’re not photographers! We know, we know—Photoshop is that and so much more.
As a designer, you’ll be using Photoshop for editing and modifying raster/bitmap graphics (aka JPEGs, PNGS and GIFs) for use in your designs—in simpler terms, it uses pixels to make images.
"The program can be used for things like cropping, colour-correcting, resizing and editing images and photos."
Amy Prus, Lead Teacher at Shillington
It can even be used to get rid of the sunburn from your holiday beach snaps. It’s also used for loads more jobs that will be part of a designer’s repertoire from overlaying text onto an image to combining photography (yours’ or someone else’s) and graphics.
Skills needed in Adobe Illustrator
The third and final part of the Designers Triumvirate that is Adobe Creative Cloud (there is other CC programs you can learn, but these are the essentials), Adobe Illustrator is a vector graphics editor first released in 1987. Vector graphics are not made up of pixels, but instead are made up of paths and can therefore be scaled much more than raster graphics. While Photoshop deals with the latter, Illustrator deals with vectors.
Don’t let the name put you off, you don’t need to have amazing drawing skills to use Illustrator.
"The program can be used to create a variety of digital and printed images—we’re talking logos, charts, illustrations, cartoons, graphs, diagrams—basically anything that may need to be printed or displayed at different sizes or on different formats"
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