Pursuing a creative career allows the youth to innovate, earn through their passion, interact more and develop a diverse skill-set. Creative and artistic thinking is a highly valued skill across industries. When combined with a recognised certification, practical working experience through projects and internships, and tactical real-world knowledge, these skills can offer lucrative earning opportunities.
Media, marketing, art, films and television, architecture, music, public relations, design and journalism and mass communication, are a few leading industries that employ talented creative professionals. Among these, learning design skills is one of the substantially preferred alternatives among youth as it combines creativity and technology and is highly in demand across recruiters.
Listed below are some popular skills in the design industry that will help you utilise your creativity professionally and start a successful career:
1. Graphic Design
Graphic designers combine different visually appealing graphic elements to create products that inform, convey ideas and build brand identity. This includes designing social media posts, posters, banners, brochures, magazines, illustrations, brand logos, pamphlets, and so on through software like Adobe Photoshop.
They usually collaborate internally with marketing, media, social media or sales departments and with external stakeholders to ideate, create drafts, determine the message, tone, personality, colour scheme, layout and other elements of the design.
After acquiring graphic design skills you will work on solving problems, creating awareness among the consumers, and communicating ideas visually using colours, texture, text, symbols, images and icons. You can work in roles like logo designer, photo editor, packaging designer, multimedia designer, publication designer and layout artist.
2. Video Editing
Video editors assemble, combine and edit raw video footage into useful advertisement, film, documentary or other forms of video. They follow a script or outline, choose the best footage shot from different angles, edit the clips, crop the frames and add elements like text, narration and voice-overs to create an informative, entertaining and visually pleasing final product.
They collaborate with videographers, directors, actors, set designers, light decorators, makeup artists and costume designers closely to bring their vision to life. You can skill up as a video editor by learning software like Adobe Premiere Pro and honing visual editing, transition and title adding, audio editing and green screen editing and exporting skills.
Colourist, film editor, TV studio editor, web video editor, event video editor and news video editor, are a few job roles that employ skilled and creative video editors in the design domain.
3. UI/UX Design
UI (user interface) and UX (user experience) designer roles involve building and improving the look and feel of mobile apps, games, websites or software.
UI design features elements like input controls and informational and navigational components with which the users directly interact. Whereas UX design involves creating wireframes, prototypes, user flows and mockups that make the customer experience simple and better.
Learners can either skill up for UI and UX design roles separately or can learn both. After mastering software like Adobe Photoshop and Figma, and concepts like typography, layout, visuals, 3D modelling and wireframing, you can apply for suitable jobs in UI/UX field.
As #practicemakesprogress, honing relevant skills and constantly practising through real-world projects will make you better at creating user-centred designs, design systems, collaborating with teammates and identifying and troubleshooting various UX problems.
4. Animation
Animators create and combine visual elements like digital images, models and puppets which when edited together, create a sense of movement. They create 2D and 3D content, stop motion and computer-generated animation for gaming, television, advertising, web video and film industry.
A field that involves a combination of artistic ability and technical proficiency, animation demands strong storytelling, artistic character development, attention to detail, design sense, cinematography and direction skills.
Software like Adobe after effects and CGI (computer-generated imagery) are the prerequisites for animation. You can skill up in animation concepts like composition, layering, keyframes, motion path, text animation, rotoscoping, motion tracking and cinema 4D integration, through online training or job oriented specialisations and build a suitable career as an animator.
5. WordPress
WordPress developers or specialists use WordPress to create websites, implement themes and plugins, manage content, integrate the site and manage security updates. They usually work with entrepreneurs and different clients and design attractive, user-friendly, easy to navigate and functionally perfect websites.
They collaborate with clients, marketing, product and design experts, understand website functionality, purpose and design, create reusable and transferable code, conduct website tests, troubleshoot issues and constantly monitor the website performance.
WordPress skills are personally useful too for starting your own blog, professional digital portfolio or website. Combined with knowledge of debugging tools and website architecture and aesthetics skills, WordPress skills can be creatively deployed across different industries.
Courtesy: Internshala Trainings, e-learning platform to learn new-age skills from Internshala