Today, graphic design means: design, coding, printing, updating, button pushing, and my favorite add on: copy writer.
Anybody working for us wishing to be "just" a designer is going to be left behind.
There's different sides to this. I've seen designers come out of high school and they have a firm grasp on design principles, great art direction, they're excellent web developers and work equally well with print design. I've seen 19 year old kids design a site, build the site, build the CMS for the site, and then the identity for the entire brand with the site (not in that order). It's amazing. The start-up generation right now is killing it pretty hard.
But I've also encountered so many "designers" that have come out of universities with inflated egos that can't survive in the real world. It's shocking to me that so many designers out there have no illustration skills or real sense for how to create art for their designs. They're just used to pulling from stock art or passing it to an illustrator. Weird.
That is in no way a knock on going to college or not going to college.
Couldnt agree more. Im old school and for the last two days Ive been with pen and paper sketching a cartoon town for what will eventually be a Flash website. I know, I know... I hate Flash too but its what the bosses want. So when the whole thing is drawn up I'll be handing it over to a 'Web Designer' to put it all together - just how it should be done!
"So, what do you do?"
"I'm a graphic designer."
"Oh. So you do websites?"
"Well, no. I'm more of a print designer."
"Oh. So can design me a website?"
Do you take it from hand-drawing to Illustrator (or any other vector-based program)?
Or is that part of what the Web Designer does?
common mate Give the youngins a break buddythey will take over and be better than ever mwahaha LOL im 17 so im not in you 16yr old 6hr coursee ! & I make a living of website markitingIt's funny, when I started college to learn all I'd need to know about design, I had no idea all these sub-categories were out there...print designer, web designer and whatnot.
And even though I'm quite young and coming up in the age where it seems like every sixteen year old kid and their mum has Photoshop, plays with it for six hours, and calls themselves a "graphic designer"...I still feel like I like the old way of things better.
Say, for web sites...the designer creates the content, and hands it off to the guy who builds the site and writes the code.
It's amazing that now we can be a jack of all trades, what with technology becoming so widely available and more powerful each year. The downside is the masses of under qualified people who think they are designers, who will "design" things for much less than what a professional would charge, and they're flooding the market with that crap.
But as long as I can illustrate, and enjoy taking on a challenge, I'll enjoy design. The day it becomes work, I'll walk away, and find something else to do.
Oh, and this right here-this was funny.
Yep.
"So, what do you do?"
"I'm a graphic designer."
"Oh. So you do websites?"
"Well, no. I'm more of a print designer."
"Oh. So can design me a website?"