9 Trending Graphic Design Skills One Must Acquire in 2024!
Just think about a career that allows you to do a lot of creative activities and pays you well! Almost every business needs to hire one of these professionals in their team. Guess the job role? No wonder it’s a graphic designer!
The graphic design landscape of 2024 continues to transform at an excessive pace. If you want to stay in the race and conquer this highly competitive landscape, holding the potential graphic design skills is your most significant strategy.
Whether you have years of experience in this design field or just looking to begin your professional career, empowering yourself with these trending graphic design skills will unfold the doors to huge career scopes and guarantee 100% job success.
In this blog post, we have carefully created a list of 9 of the most-trending graphic design skills that one should acquire in 2024.
Table of Contents
Graphic Design Skills Every Designer Needs To Know
If you are a beginner who wants to start a professional journey or a designer with years of expertise looking to boost your graphic design skills, here are nine things you should consider!
1. User-centred design (UCD)
The major mantra to success in today’s graphic design world is to place your audience first! The designs are made only for users, and you have to keep certain things in mind while creating robust and visually appealing content for your audiences. User-centred design skills or UCD methodology are associated with elements such as prototyping, user research, and iterative testing. You must prioritize the preferences, needs, and demands of your audience first while building alluring designs to convey your message and communicate with them with those designs.
You should first thoroughly research their identity, their interests, and the ways of interaction they prefer, and then you can continue customizing your designs to meet their demands and interests. It’s not about creating just a good design like a logo, flyer, or website; it’s about building a design that matches the demands of audiences and conveys your brand message successfully. The UCD, as a prime graphic design skill, helps you create insightful designs that resonate with your audience.
2. Get Expertise in Illustrator, Photoshop & InDesign
If you have expertise or proficiency in Adobe Illustrator, PhotoShop & InDesign, You must kick-start your graphic design career now! We are not kidding!
Expertise in these three areas or advanced designing software is very important to creating your own design identity, and you just can’t avoid it! You can’t overlook the fact that the majority of recruiters are searching for designers who have the expertise in handling these three programs. Every 7 out of 5 jobs have the urgent hiring of designers who are well versed in Adobe InDesign, Illustrator, and Photoshop.
Photoshop is highly recommended for its advanced photo editing tools, offering features like colour correction, saturation, contrast, image resizing, brightness, and image cropping. Adobe InDesign is one of the most popular desktop publishing software that helps to create magazines, posters, books, flyers, and more! Illustrator can equip you with making logos, animated images, and image illustrations.
No matter how popular or big the company you are currently working for or want to get hired, all they follow are these graphic design skills regarding these three trending design software. This further highlights the basic skills required to become a successful graphic designer.
If you want to become a graphic designer in this highly competitive domain, my advice is to learn these basic programming skills before sending your resume to any recruiters. These skills serve as the baseline for designing skills, marking the eligibility criteria for job applications!
3. Proficient in Branding
If you want to stay ahead of the design curve, having proficiency in branding is the key! To work harmoniously with clients or employers, graphic designers have the task of building or managing business branding. If you are working with a specific brand, you must know their USPs! As a graphic designer, you must have the skills to understand the basic link between branding and visual design.
Through successful branding, a graphic designer can establish and convey a remarkable brand identity, whether for a product, person, or service! The brand conveys the message of the business by highlighting the attention-grabbing impressions and images, stating, “This is the main motto of my business.”
Graphic designers are highly involved in this process of creating a strong brand identity through building design materials. So, if you want to stay stable in this highly competitive career curve, you must acquire graphic design skills for branding ASAP.
4. Typography Skills
Typography is another major graphic design skill that helps make the use of words in a way that can raise the emotions of the targeted audience while conveying the right brand messages. If you can create the right typography, it can make sense and raise the emotions of audiences. And, if you fail to generate accurate typography, the customers or audiences will get distracted, leaving a bad impression on your brand! As a budding graphic designer, you should have knowledge of different font and text families to get an understanding of their alignment for different contexts.
You must be highly skilled in tasks from choosing the most suitable fonts, sizes, and colours for a real-client project to typography anatomies such as leading, kerning, and tracking. Have you ever noticed that there are fonts called sad and happy fonts? The fonts add aesthetic features to the design and make it visually appealing.
Traphography is the most integral part of design and is viewed as a major one among the other graphic design skills for those who want to flourish in their design career.
5. UI/UX Design
Are you already working as a graphic designer and want to stay competitive in this highly demanding industry? Then, UI/UX design skills are the ultimate option for you, and they can help you remain updated in the curve! Graphic designers are usually assigned the task of creating visually appealing as well as functional designs.
In some cases, graphic designers work with UX/UI designers, so learning the UI/UX skills will enable you to understand the intricacies and collaborate better with others. To start your UI/UX learning journey, you must learn advanced tools such as prototyping and wireframing first. These tools will enable you to develop the blueprint of the design before producing the final design.
You should stay the latest with your designs by following the design trends and offering a guarantee that your designs are not only intuitive but also catchy, engaging, and user-friendly. You can not ignore the part of the feedback collection that helps you filter your creative designs and build exclusive user experiences.
6. Print Design skills
You must pay attention to detail if you want to get into the landscape of print designs. Though the domain of digital design is rapidly emerging, print designing is still considered one of the prime graphic design skills. As a graphic designer, you should have the skills to understand how certain printing features such as crop, bleed, fold marks, ink restrictions, slug, transparency, and dot gains work.
Also, the designers must be proficient with the different file formats, stocks, colour schemes, paperweights, and more! Even though the demand for digital designs is growing, there is always a need for print designers who can make visually appealing designs for posters, book covers, magazines, and product packaging. If you want to boost your print design skills, you must have the latest knowledge of colour, typography, printing, and finishing.
You must be proficient in handling some major print design software such as Adobe InDesign and QuarkXpress to get huge success in this field. This helps you to get an understanding of resolution and colour management for high-quality print designs.
7. Animation & Motion Graphics skills
Motion and animation add life to any boring design and make them visually interactive for audiences. You can master this most trending graphic design skill to generate attention-grabbing visuals and a higher audience engagement rate. Learn how to add movements to designs with this specific ability, among other trending graphic design skills.
In the field of social media marketing, motion graphic designers are in high demand as they produce motion graphics or animated designs that help a static image steal the attention of audiences. Graphic designers with the skills to handle popular video editing tools such as Vegas Pro and Audacity are the ones who will get the opportunity to get hired by big employers first.
These motion graphic skills are developing creative motion designs with elements of space, time, and sound. If you pick motion graphics as your career path, you will get the opportunity to experience freedom and creativity.
8. Digital Design skills
Have you ever noticed that digital design is rapidly growing and gradually taking the place of print designs? If you want to stay current with the latest trends and industry standards, you must master digital design skills. You must have an understanding of the popular UI/UX design principles such as layouts, colour theory, and typography to produce the most creative and aesthetically pleasing designs.
Get expertise in digital design tools such as Sketch, Figma, Adobe Photoshop, Adobe XD, and more! Hence, the addition of these graphic design skills to your skill set is a must for achieving your career goals. You must have the ability to design assets like letterheads for newsletters and catchy banners for social media adverts.
In the end, highly skilled graphic designers are capable of converting and modifying their design work for the digital screen, highlighting their skills to add both digital and physical design.
9. AI/ Machine Learning
AI/machine learning can offer your graphic design skills a powerful acceleration in today’s tech-driven world. You can boost your AI skills to automate repetitive tasks such as producing design variations and assessing huge user data for overall understanding. You can also enhance your machine-learning skills to customize user experiences when creating design models.
You must have expertise in handling popular design tools with AI features like Canva and Adobe Sensei. As a graphic designer, you always have to be curious about designs and excited about new opportunities for different innovative design solutions. Learn to enhance the possibilities of these skills while knowing the limitations.
You can also join W3 Web School’s Best Graphic Design Course to boost your skills to secure your job and achieve huge success in your professional career in 2024.
Wrapping up,
You will be surprised to know about the rise in graphic designer jobs in 2024! Investing your precious time and efforts in these nine trending graphic design skills can be a profitable investment in your professional career as a graphic designer. By learning the essentials of graphic design and enhancing trending soft skills, you will be able to drive the rapidly transforming and most exciting industry of modern design in 2024.
Also, you can apply for job roles such as graphic designers, UI/UX designers, motion graphic designers, brand designers, print designers, and packaging designers after gaining the above-mentioned trending skills.
W3webschool
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