 What's up, guys? Today we're gonna talk about your graphic design career, what type of jobs you can get in the industry, how much money do they pay, and most importantly, which one's right for you. Let's go. What's up, guys? Today we've got a great lesson. I'm really excited to help you try and craft your design career. A lot of people come to me and they say, okay, I'm doing this degree or I'm studying graphic design. I went to university and studied graphic design myself or you might not be going to university, but you might want a career on graphic design and it's such a broad term. People are like, oh, what type of jobs can I get? So in this video, I'm gonna talk about, I've worked in quite a lot of different types of jobs within graphic design. I'm gonna talk about which ones make you money, which ones are good for hobbies, which ones have easier career paths, and hopefully a lot of information that no one else or everyone else is a bit too scared to teach you. So jumping straight in, let's, the first thing, the most important thing for you, if you're looking for a career in graphic design, is to get on LinkedIn right now. I've been on LinkedIn for about five years and I don't know, every single job offer in the past five, six years I've had through LinkedIn. LinkedIn is a place, it's actually growing. The content's getting a lot better on LinkedIn at the moment and it's a place to promote yourself as a designer. But create yourself a profile. Doesn't matter if you have no connections, add me as your first connection to get you started. Just search for my name. I accept everyone who adds me. And what you can do is start building out your profile and then any work that you do, start adding it into there and maybe send out a couple of status updates, any work, post it in the message feed. LinkedIn's probably the best place now. It's kind of like Facebook was 10 years ago where there's loads of people on there and a lot of them are recruiters looking for people to find jobs. That's solely where they go and there's not enough content on there. So you can't go on Facebook posting it, go out to 10,000 people with a hashtag of design. But on LinkedIn you can. So LinkedIn is where you're gonna get job offers from. So we might talk a bit more about it in a sec, but this is my profile. I think I've got like 20,000 people on LinkedIn now over 10 years. I just add everyone, anyone who's interested in design. I add all my work experience in there. I search for, so if you're looking for a job, I'd search for recruiter. And then I'd go down and add anyone who looks like recruiters, the word that they use for like headhunters. And I'd add anyone that looked like they were recruiter for a design company that I wanted to work for. So that's, and then you can just talk to them and then that's mostly how you get a job. Or you can even email art directors and get some work experience, which is my number one other tip for if you want a job, do some work experience first. I did work experience in Vogue. I was lucky enough to get a placement there. But because I went around the company and made connections in other magazines, I managed to land myself a job in Wired, basically with no competition, because they knew me and I was the first person in the door. Let's just take a look at this. So I was Googling graphic design jobs on Google and taking a look at what people ask. So these are the type of jobs that you can get and we'll go through a few of the ones that I think are relevant. So what I do at the moment is I'm a UX UI designer and that's a graphic designer who works on the web and builds websites. So if we have a look over at Behance, I'll show you some of the stuff that we do. You can just type in any search term in here, but UX, you'll see, here's some UX projects here. And what we do is we do all the visual styling for websites, but also how users use the websites and there's a lot of psychology involved. So a lot of our design is low fidelity. So that means that it's just, there's not even any colors in it or detailing it, a lot of it is thinking. And UX and UI is a type of graphic design and it's probably the most viable career path at the moment. It's certainly the most well-paying and the reason for that is because if you make a change on a website, when you're working in UX and UI, you could simplify a process or change the color on a button. That could have a dramatic impact on the business's revenue. So say you worked on a website for a bank and say, you change the color of a button from green to blue, psychologically, that might do something different to the user. I've got another video talking about the psychology of colors, but if you understand that and then you might get, instead of one person clicking for you, you might get free and then that could over a billion people, that could like dramatically impact the business's revenue. So UX and UI is the most commercially viable and the way I see it at the moment of getting into graphic design. It's not the only way. So we'll talk about a few others. So there's Art Director and Creative Director and they can be applied to loads of different things. So let me just find Magazine Design. So I started my career in Magazine Design in publishing. So you could be a designer for a book or a print magazine and you work in Adobe. So we use Adobe programs in pretty much every field here. So a Creative subscription, Creative Cloud subscription. I think I pay a fair £1 a month for mine in the UK. It's well worth it because you'll, if you just get into graphic design, you've got to experiment with all these different programs or even just get a free trial. But Magazine Design is working in design. They need to know about typography. They need to understand photography to a certain extent. And it's quite a rewarding job because you actually get to see what you design. Like you probably design a magazine three months ahead, but when it finally gets delivered and you get to see it in print, it's probably the most satisfaction I've had in my career as a designer. At the moment, you know, when you're designing websites, you don't really get that satisfaction because everything's on screen. Whereas when you design in print, it's, you know, it just feels real. And Creative Director and Art Director are, so you start off as a designer and you'll be designing page layouts. Then an Art Director, what might be in charge of five or six designers and they'll have the overall vision for the website. So they might decide to choose the typography or the color scheme or they might have more of a say on the cover. And then a Creative Director is, there's only one pair of magazine. There might be a couple of Art Directors, depending on how big the magazine is as well. Some magazines might not have a Creative Director, but certainly a Vogue. The Creative Director is the person who goes on the sets and looks at the photography and works with the, so if I was to have a Vogue magazine, the Creative Director will be the one who'll go on set. He or she will work with the photographer. They'll choose the right image. They'll work with the people in the business as well to say, you know, let's change this image. Let's, because you need to work with people inside. You know, the magazines make business decisions as well. So that all comes on the Creative Director. So that's certainly a way you can go. But you can also be, so let's take a look. So one other thing I wanted to show you was, you could also be an Art Director and create the director within an agency. So I used to work for Spring Studios and you'll find these agencies everywhere in every sitting. And what they do is, so Spring Studios doesn't just do websites for companies. It does photography. It does apps. It does basically every type of art that you can imagine. So if you're a new graphic designer, I'd say maybe think about going, or at least doing some work experience, maybe go and try and find your job in an agency. Normally the smaller, so if you make a personal relationship with someone at the agency, it'll put your well ahead and they're less strict on like the hiring guidelines and things like that. But at an agency, you'll be working on multiple projects at the same time. And you'll be working for big companies. So when I was at Spring, I did some work for Max Maurer. I'll just show you some of the work I did. So I did this at Spring. So I worked on the website for Max Maurer, but I also got to go on the photo shoots as well. So they had these amazing, it basically started out as a photography studio, but they had all, we did all the product shots. So not only did we do the graphic design for the website, we did all the photography that goes in it. But I was working on that project. I was working on a project for Canale, which is an Italian suit manufacturer at the same time. We did videos for them. A wider got to go on video shoots. So sometimes when you work with these smaller companies or not a big company like the BBC, you'll get to, you know, you might get to go on some of these photo shoots. So if you see an issue and interest in it, you might get to go along some of these lines. And within these companies, I was a senior designer. So there was a designer who I worked with, but then I also had an art director and then the whole place had a creative director who was the same one as when I worked in Vogue. So that's how I ended up in spring studios. He's one of the world's best designers and I learned a lot from him. His name's Robin Derrick. So you might want to check some of his work out. But, you know, you might want to do some of that. So I'd say if you want to be an art director or creative director, think about working in magazines and agencies. And the one thing I'd probably advise, if you're going to work in magazines, you're certainly not going to be a millionaire. I guess maybe because the design doesn't impact the revenue of the company as much. They certainly don't pay as well as web design, which is probably the best paying field if you're just solely thinking about money going into graphic design. It's a, they do some great salaries, especially if you go over to California. That's where all the big jobs are, but there's certainly jobs on bare land. And normally I think you get paid a little bit higher working directly for a client. So not with an agency, but with an agency, you'll get, you become a more rounded designer. So it's good to do for a little bit, I think. I think they both have the pros and cons. So what else can you do? So you could also go into 3D design. I wanted to show you some of the work my friend did, a university. So my friend's called Liam Keaton, and he's probably the number one 3D modeler in Google SketchUp in the world. So he's gone on to do some great things. He's just spoken at a conference in China, but yeah, we were best friends in university. So check out his website, robotsvsdinosaur.com. He works with Volvo now. So he does some great work for like designing. He uses 3D models to design like trucks. Like this is all his work. I think he was designing the graphics that go on the side of the trucks. Yeah, so there's some of the stuff he's doing for Volvo. But I got him some work for Wired Magazine back in the day. So he did some 3D designs that went on to... Went into the magazine, which is great. And if you go into like 3D modeling, you can also get jobs, like more commercial jobs, working for like real estate agents or designing houses and architectural type jobs. So this is all done in a program called Google SketchUp, and you can see it's actually quite architectural in some of his designs. But he's also done more fun stuff and he's done some work for games and... What's this? Ben Fika FC. Look at all that. Yeah, he does some cool stuff. But yeah, check him out. That's robotsvsdinosaur. So that's if you want to go, if you're interested in more Google SketchUp type of graphic design and you want to go into that, that's a cool poster that he's done. So let's have a look what else you can do. Yeah, you can go into film and editing. So I wanted to show you this website of a company I worked with. So this is called Territory Studios. I worked with them when I was in Vogue about 10 years ago and they did some animations for us. I just wanted to show you some of the work that they do. So you could work in Adobe After Effects. You could work in Adobe Premiere and do all this type of motion stuff. And then you could work possibly for a company like Territory Studios or the BBC putting together TV programs. This motion is a big form of graphic design. I think I do it for my YouTube channel but I also try and throw bits in to my day job. Sometimes when we present work, I might make a video, I might, I think it's a good skill to have. And I know it's a very rewarding career if it's something that you're interested in and you want to go in. There's certainly a lot of jobs in the Northwest of England with the BBC there if you want to go into something like this. But what they do is they do like introductions for films and you know the post-production, so there's some blade for other stuff that they did. So you know when you see all the computers swirling around in James Bond and all this 3D stuff, this is all done Adobe After Effects and this company specifically works in this but all films look for companies to do this type of graphics. So take out Territory Studio if you want some inspiration on, ah, they did some stuff with the Martian as well. So yeah, I mean this is so cool. Look at the type of stuff that they get to design. So you know some of the stuff that Liam did might be this but these guys might animate it into a big film. So you can see the crossover here in a lot of these fields. Then you might go into, so let's take a look at some illustration. So one of my pet projects was I love football and I put it together in magazine. I also worked and for every article I worked with an illustrator from around the world and got illustrations on. I just wanted to show you my favorite illustrator, his name's Stanley Chao. I worked with him when we did some football stuff but he's got his own style. This is all done Adobe Illustrator. He's got like this, I don't know, it's almost like, it's almost like a retro style but he did the cover for this magazine for me and people like Magazine Art Directors will work with illustrators. You know illustrators can get jobs doing quite a lot of different things and I know logo design is really popular. Let me just search for that again. But if you're an illustrator what I definitely advise you to do is get on Behance. So Behance is a place where I and certainly a lot of art directors go to find people to work with but they also go to have a, it's kind of like a portfolio for your own work but like a pet project and you can get it, you can get like a think Adobe on Behance, I'm not sure on that but you can like appreciate other work. It's kind of like a social media for you know for people's work and you can see what programs that they use. You can follow and find designers. You can kind of get ideas for styles that people are doing some inspiration on there. So check out Behance. One other bit of advice I wanted to give you was get your own website as well. So you can put your projects on Behance but just get a simple website where you can send people. So check out portfolio.adobe.com. It comes with your creative subscription and what you can do is you can just continue and then you can make a single page website or a gallery of work. You can choose like a layout that you want. So you might do something like that. And one of the, it's like one of these website builders like Squarespace or Wix or other ones but you don't want to spend, you want to spend your time doing the work rather than presenting the work unless you're going into web design. I think just keep things simple. So you see this, this has actually pulled in all my work for Behance because Adobe portfolio is, Adobe must own Behance but I have to put my work on there and then it's created this for me which is a, let's have a preview site it looks like. But you know, the amount of time and effort that you'd go to making your own website, get a Behance profile, stop building it up and then just get a Adobe portfolio and make a simple website. And then, you know, if I was looking for a designer I like a nice cream site. I'm super happy with this. I made that in like five seconds. But yeah, get yourself a LinkedIn profile and put your website on there. And then, you know, you can go into animation as well, kind of, you know, like illustration before but free, you could have really modeling animation like films like Toy Story, that might be another place you can go. So you can see there's lots and lots of, ah, the last one I wanted to show you can be a photographer as well. So that's another typographic design. So I did, I mainly focused on photography when I was in university. I, when I went to Vogue, I found out where the post-production and it was like down the road and I went and I was cheeky and asked for some work experience there. And this is one of the greatest photographers in the world. His name is Nick Knight. He does a lot of stuff for Vogue. But you see this picture here? I remember being in the actual studio when he came in and he was doing that. He was like drawing on it with a pen for the post-production guys to go in and Photoshop it. And that's, you know, it's one of his most famous images. But I remember that being quite a moment when I was 18, 19 into see Nick Knight. I wish I would have went up and talked to him, but just to see him come in and see him work and see how these actual images are made. That was great. Yeah, you can go into photography and go in and be like fashion photographer. Maybe don't do a whole bunch of things. Don't be a jack of all trades, be a master of one. Choose fashion, choose. If you want to go and do nature photography, go and do that. Be the best in the world at that. Go and do animal photography. You know, you might work with the BBC on stuff that David Attenborough does. So, you know, there's all these type of jobs. But for all of them, you're all going to get your job offers through LinkedIn. You're all going to need a website and you're all going to, you know, need to self promote yourself. And that's where YouTube comes in. So, get on YouTube. Doesn't matter if your videos are no good. Share your journey. Share learning the process. Share a day in the life. Share behind the scenes. And you'll start to get fans and by forcing yourself to present your work and talk about your work, it'll make you more confident when you go for job interviews. And you might even get some connections through there. So, I hope I've shared some information with you. Check out school.antonycomboy.com. I'll just quickly, I've got it somewhere up here. What I've got is, I've got a free course on there called UXUI Design Fundamentals. It's about an hour. You'll learn all the basics of web design, web development. I've got some website reviews and inspiration. So, if you want to learn more about what I do now, which is web design, check it out. Guys, I hope you liked today's lesson. Let me know in the comments which type of career you're interested in going in. Did this video help? Think about subscribing to the YouTube channel. I'm going to be putting out lots more content and be the first to know by ringing the notification bell and join the club. Check out school.antonycomboy.com. There's a free course on there. You'll learn all the foundations of graphic design or my premium contents going on there. There's a growing community. You can get certificate, put it on your CV. And until next time, keep designing.