Top 15 Graphic Artist Skills to Succeed in Your Career

Top 15 Graphic Artist Skills to Succeed in Your Career

Over the years, the graphic world has made some giant strides thanks to the regularly invention of graphics design through technology and individual contributions of experts in the field.

This has allowed clients in need of graphic works to have more options and possibilities to be satisfied with what they want.

Who is a Graphic Artist?

A graphic artist is someone who is tasked with creating works of art for specific projects. He/she creates works of art that will be used for completing some projects.

Let us see in detail the different skills and qualities you will need to be a good graphic artist:

Graphic artists need the following skills and qualities for career success:

Creativity
Social media presence
Networking
Good work ethic
Dependability
Time management
Project management skill
Photography
Versatility
Print layout mastery
Conversion techniques
Good color instincts
Communication skills
Web design skill
People skill.

Creativity

This shouldn’t be a surprise to you. To be a giant in the graphics world, your creativity must improve and somewhat come to the fore.

You have to be different and offer something different from what others in the same field with you can offer digitally and graphically.

To be creative, you have to be able to understand what a client really wants and know the best design you can produce to suit the clients demand.

This is what makes a difference in your career as a graphics artist. Being a graphic artist requires lots and lots of creativity.

It is just like a movie actor, sometimes creativity of a movie actor is known when he/she understands what is required of him/her in particular and goes a bit beyond what is written in the scripts.

He/she gives that role more flavors to suit the audience. This applies to you also to understand the demand of the client and give the client something different from what is conventionally obtainable everywhere.

Social media presence

Being a graphic artist does not in any way alienate you from the happenings around the world.

In fact, you can get lots of jobs on contract through social media interaction.

There are possibly two reasons you should have a social media presence as a graphic artiste:

The first is that through social media presence, you learn from some other people in the same graphics world as you distance notwithstanding.

Through this, you learn new graphic skills which may not be obtainable where you are at the moment. This helps you improve.

Secondly, through the social media, you can get more clients interested in your work.

In the world right now, distance is no longer a barrier to how many contracts you can get.

Social media has made it so easy for you to get in touch with potential clients who may be in need of your skills.

Networking

Through the social media also you get to know a lot of sites where you can improve your skill through connecting with more professionals in the field.

This improves you overtime and gives you an edge over others in the field who may not have access to the source of knowledge that you have.

Networking is simply working with other professionals in the graphics world.

The truth is that no matter the height you have gotten to in the graphics world, there is still a lot for you to learn.

There are some software packages you may not be aware of that you can learn about if you keep in touch with other experts in the field.

Now, when you connect with these experts, you share ideas with them and work as a team.

Working as a member of that team will help expose you to more avenues to excel in your job as a graphic artist.

So, this means you have to be a good networker in this regard.

Good work ethic

Even as a graphic artist, understand that the jobs you have or you are looking for has to be handled with care and accomplished on or before the expected time.

This means that you handle it as a project and work towards perfecting the job in no time.

Through good work ethics, you learn to do all within your powers to deliver an excellent work within a short period of time. This is not easy to accomplish but something you can accomplish with a good work ethics.

This is important to you as a graphic artist.

One good work ethic you should know is time management.

Time management is a good work ethic you should work with all the time. In managing your time, cut down on activities that may distract from accomplishing the job in time.

Hope you know that clients want their job to be delivered near perfect and at the right time.

Dependability

The work you do for your client demands that you are reliable in your dealings with them.

As a graphics artist, it is expected that you can be trusted with projects handed into your hands with the expectation that you will deliver an excellent job.

Dependability also entails that you are capable of delivering the project within the speculated time.

The job given to you requires that you deliver the job at the expected time and not to give excuses why you would not deliver the job at the right time.

So, to succeed in your job, you have to show yourself dependable as well as reliable in the eyes of your clients.

You have to establish the integrity of doing exactly what you are expected to do within the speculated time given to you by the client.

Time management

When you have the opportunity to handle a client’s project, you have to know that the probability of you getting such project again is largely dependent on your ability to deliver the project at the expected time agreed between you and the client or your employer in case you are working for someone.

Before taking up a graphic work, be sure that you are able to complete the work within the speculated time else try to inform the client and explain why the project may not be completed at the expected time.

Let your excuse be genuine and not portray laziness.

To manage time, you have to plan the course of the project and prioritize each stage.

You take the project stage by stage and make sure you carry it out according to how you have planned it. This will help you not waste time unnecessarily.

Project management skill

The work issued to you by the client or your employer is a project which you must see as such.

So, in the light of this, since you are handling a project, you need to have the requisite project management skills in order to carry it out successful.

One of the well-known team management skills to have is teamwork. Some jobs may require that you work with a group of people.

You have to find a way to integrate them into the job and monitor the activities of the members of the team.

You engage them in active planning and designate job duties to them.

In doing this, you will have to be a project manager at that point. You are to ensure that jobs designated to team members are well executed within the specified time.

Photography

Being a graphic artist should not make you to be a novice to other skills like photography.

This is because in some cases in your job, there may be a need for you to incorporate photos in your designs. So, you have to understand how photography works.

It may not also be out of place to be an excellent photographer to augment your graphic artist skills.

This will likely increase your chances of landing more lucrative jobs. You have to be versatile to be able to attract more contracts to yourself.

Increasing your skills in photography is actually necessary for the advancement of your job as a graphics artist.

It helps you explore more possibilities and open avenues for you to deliver a more excellent job to your clients.

Versatility

Versatility means ability to do more than one task. To you as a graphic artist, this implies that you must not only be able to do what you are known for, but also be able to augment it with other related tasks that can help improve you.

In the digital world, you will be doing yourself a lot of harm if you are not versatile enough.

You need to have good knowledge of virtually anything that has to do with graphics that you come across.

Any app you can lay your hand on that deals with graphics is good for you.

You need to scout for more techniques and apps that can help you to be more advanced in your job.

This will lead you into mastering the use of apps that may not be conventional in the office or organization that you work with.

Print layout mastery

Your artistic skills won’t be complete if you have not mastered as many print layouts as you can.

Know different print layouts that suit different needs of the clients in regards to the project given to you to execute.

This is one good attribute of a good graphic artist.

There is no particular print layout that may suit all occasions or taste of the clients out there.

So, out of your creativity and wealth of experience, you use print layouts that are good enough to satisfy the graphic want of the client you are working for.

Also, through more questions and personal investigation, you should be able to know the print layout that is more suitable or applicable to more descriptions than others.

This is obtainable when you work with other professionals in the field.

Conversion techniques

Another thing to learn is the best conversion techniques you can use in the course of executing a graphics project.

There are various conversion techniques out there in the graphics world but there are some that are better than others.

First thing you look out in this aspect is which conversion technique is more in use.

Sometimes, when clients give you a project to execute, they have in mind the technique the format they want the project to be.

Anything short of this may not be acceptable to them.

Also, you need to know which conversion techniques are more portable than others.

It is just like when you are dealing with word processors, you know that pdf format is more portable than other formats because other formats are dependent on versions.

Same applies to graphic designs. Find more portable formats to work with to achieve faster and portable projects.

Good color instincts

Now, you know that print layout and conversion techniques are important to your graphic work, the next thing you need to know is the place of good color combination in your work.

Your work should embody a good combination of colors to make the work neat and good to the eye.

Now, you should be able to know basic color combinations. This will help in your graphics works to make it more presentable and appealing to the eye.

Understand the basic difference between primary colors and secondary colors. You have to note the difference and know how to use them.

Also, be sure that your color combination depicts the mood and theme of the design requested by your client.

This is very important, different colors depict different moods and because of that you have to be careful about your color combinations.

Communication skills

Working on an important project as a graphics job demands working with a well-informed team who are well detailed in their individual job description.

This means that the team has to be well informed about what is expected of them and the time frame needed to accomplish a project.

This boils down to the graphic artist being an excellent communicator within the team.

He/she has to be able to communicate with his/her team effectively.

He/she also allocates job to individuals in the team and monitors their progress.

Also, you as the graphics designer, you have to establish communication channels through which information can be passed to the team.

This will help the team to keep pace with time and ensure a smooth execution of the job.

Web design skill

As a graphic artist, it will be an added advantage to have good skills in web design.

Web design is a basic skill anyone into the graphic world is expected to have.

This is a necessary skill to enhance your chances of landing lucrative contracts.

The business world is tilting towards going technological all round and we know that in years to come any business that is not found on the internet may go obsolete.

This should make you know that you have to consider web design as a good enhancement to your graphics skills.

Learning web design will help teach you lots of things which may come as side attraction.

It helps you appreciate other skills related to web design too.

People skill

You may be tempted to ask what relevance people skill has to do with graphics designing.

But the truth is that there is a lot of connection binding them together.

As earlier stated, most graphic jobs need the contribution of more than one person to execute them and produce a great job.

To this effect, there is a need to have people management skills in order to be able to control and oversee the different contributions of the various individuals in the group.

This is to ensure that the inputs of the various team members are up to standard.

Also, you need people skill to make sure that the job is produced at the required time else it will not be a good record on your part.

So, when you are leading a group in a project like this, you need to work with them to make sure that expectations are met.

Graphic Artist Skills for resume

If you are writing a resume or CV for a graphic artist job, you need to have the skills or core competence section in it.

In this part of the resume, you will need to highlight some of the major skills and qualities that you have to enable you perform excellently as a graphic artist.

To make this section, you can apply the graphic artist skills and qualities provided on this page.

Conclusion

The job of a graphic artist is an ever changing one. Reason being that the technologies required to succeed in this career changes almost on daily basis.

In the light of that, the graphic artist needs to have most of the above skills in order to succeed in his/her job.