6 Amazing Designing Tips That Your School Won’t Teach
Being a successful logo designer takes more than just raw mechanical skills. It is all about how you present those skills and about every external element which is essential for making your logo designs, a huge success. In this blog, we discuss some logo designing tips, no one talks about. These skills are super important but were not taught to you in the design school. The only way of acquiring these tips is by gaining experience in the field. Hence, today we walk you through a couple of tips which your average logo designer or design school would not teach.
Before going into any detail, every design school teaches the basic and advanced designing skills and hence that will not be our area of concern. In this blog, we focus completely on the external factors which have the potential to give you a head start in this genre.
Hence, these are some extremely essential logo design tips, which your design school did not teach.
Finding Work
Every institution teaches its students how to complete projects and how to do excellent work in general. But no-one actually teaches how to get that work, or how to get jobs in a specific genre. Especially in a highly competitive field like graphic designing, one should be extremely clear about their decisions. Everyone should have a plan on how to approach work after school.
In terms of designing, finding work is all about approaching clients and so on. This requires some amount of market research and excellent communication skills. A good logo designer should know how to market themselves and approach clients. Afterall, the most important bit of designing is finding the clients itself.
Finding job opportunities is a bliss thanks to new media and social media in general. Every designer is required to have dedicated social media pages for showcasing their artwork. These pages also act as mini portfolios where people can browse through specific designs and contact the designers if interested. Websites like Fiverr and LinkedIn take this to a next level where the designers can simply make portfolios and online resumes. These mediums have made the job finding process easier for both the employee and the employer.
Hence, we recommend you make a few social media profiles, dedicated completely towards your artwork. And you should also make your own portfolios on websites like LinkedIn, etc.
Accepting Commissions
Accepting new clients involves a lot of ins and outs. Various questions and queries about the commission doc, payment etc. arise in the designer’s mind and not clearing them might result in incomplete output or poor performance. A design school never clears you about when to ask these questions from the clients and when to draw the line.
Hence, if you expect complete transparency on the client’s side, we recommend you to always keep a line of communication active. Try to form a bond with the clients, it will not only make the designing a bit easier for you but will also allow more flexibility in the meeting sessions. This way, you will be able to ask questions, you are a bit skeptical to ask.
Managing Clients
Managing clients is by far the toughest bit of being a designer. Clients are of various types, from supportive to uptight, and managing them well is a must if you want a free-flowing business.
Designing in general depends completely upon perspectives, what might look good to you might look quite average to the clients. Hence, making a bond with them and communicating well will allow you to get a piece of their mind. This will allow you to think better while designing and will also make a bond with the clients, which will make client management a bliss.
Reliability And Consistency
As the title suggests, being reliable is a must in this field of work. Most of the time, the clients trust their designers into making good designs and this is a key factor which plays a huge role in maintaining that bond with the clients. If you are a team player, more and more clients will start trusting you into bigger and better projects. Reliability is key, especially in a genre where the clients are in the blue most of the time. A suggestion for being more reliable is to keep your customers updated with what’s going on with their designs. Including them in the process, takes some of the burden off your shoulders and makes the overall project easier.
Another factor which goes hand in hand with reliability is consistency. If you can only make one banger design out of five, your reliability will go down drastically. And less reliability means less projects and slow growth. Hence, keep the clients updated and take breaks between projects. Too many projects can also lead to fatigue which results in lesser consistency.
Soft Skills
40% of your business is controlled by how you present yourself and your artwork to the clients. Soft skills are a must in any field of work. And when talking about designing, pitching your ideas to the clients, and gathering valuable feedback requires excellent communication skills. Soft skills have the potential to step up your work.
Some might even say that soft skills are more important than your resume. If you have a way of talking clients into projects and making bonds with them, half your problems are already solved. And this clearly is not taught at any designing school.
Software Skills
Gone are the days of doodling and sketching on a canvas for making unique designs. Modern times call for modern techniques. Design software is clearly the future, they are fast, reliable, and most importantly accurate. Hence, if you are still using the traditional methods of designing, it’s time to make a change.
Switching mediums might feel weird at first but getting used to it will certainly be highly beneficial for your business. You will be able to complete more projects in less time. Managing your content and making edits in projects is also a bliss, thanks to modern technology. By developing software skills, you are ideally doubling up your productivity, not just in terms of projects, but your reliability and consistency as well.
Designing software will improve your accuracy which will help with the consistency and reliability issue. Most modern designing schools are switching over to software, but if you learned your artform on the traditional canvas, it’s time to make the move.
If you are completely new to the concept of design software, we recommend you start out with Designfier’s free logo design tool. This online software is completely free and fairly easy to use. The tools are self-explanatory and will give you a fair idea of how design-oriented software’s work in general.
In conclusion, this was our list of the things design school never taught you. If you are in the market looking for regular workflow and better projects in general. Consider applying to Designfier’s designer program. You can easily participate in logo design contests for better results and huge prizes. Also, logo design contests might be a medium to polish your new software skills. And it’s always nice to have a constant stream of work and income after you graduate design school.
