Adobe Photoshop
Adobe’s suite has many great products, one of which being Photoshop.
The beauty of Photoshop is that it allows users to manipulate photos and graphics in a variety of ways.
This makes it a powerful skill to learn and is key to any graphic designer’s success.
Due to Photoshop’s many tools, filters, and effects, you have full control over your compositions, giving you endless creativity!
Additionally, it is an industry standard for graphic designers and image manipulation, making it a must-learn.
Adobe Illustrator
Another powerful tool in Adobe’s arsenal of design tools is Illustrator, a powerhouse for logo designs and illustrating.
But why is Illustrator important, especially if you already know Photoshop?
Good question! Illustrator has a few key features that make it powerful when used in tandem with Photoshop.
Illustrator caters more towards (have a guess), illustrating! Making it perfect for designing great-looking characters or logos.
Furthermore, the tools are designed with illustrators in mind, allowing .SVG files and exploring.
This ensures your illustrations look sharp, no matter how large or small the final piece is.
HTML/Web-Design
HyperText Markup Language (HTML) is a key skill for graphic designers.
Why? Because it is likely your graphic designs will need to be formatted for web display.
But how do you learn HTML? Lucky for you, there are plenty of methods!
These methods range from YouTube, Books, Online/In-Person Courses, to just getting stuck in and learning through documentation.
Digital or not, HTML and web design are valuable skills to learn in the digital era, and will help you enhance your CV!
UI & UX
User Interface/User Experience (UI & UX) are core to how information is communicated to users on digital platforms.
User interface design focuses on how the information of digital applications/sites is conveyed visually, in the front-end.
User experience focuses on the human interactions with the product/application, the flow of pages, and the overall experience of the user when interacting with the product.
As a result, it has become a must-learn skill for anyone in the field of graphic design.
Typography
The art of making typed letters looks nice!
Typography is another important skill for graphic designers to learn.
Chances are as a graphic designer, you will be designing for a company/body.
And chance has it that they will probably want to convey a written message with/within their graphic.
This can be easily done with playful typography, and will most certainly enhance your designs!
Final Remarks
These 5 key hard skills are important to learn if you want to either become a graphic designer or improve your design skills.
Please note: although there are alternatives to the Adobe suite (such as GIMP, etc), Adobe is the industry-standard suite.
For more information on design, please get in touch today.
In the meantime, check our graphic design Leicester services to find out how we can help.
