Graphic Design Industry Role Descriptions

If you’re a recent college graduate or if you’re just now entering the workforce, you’ve probably looked at and applied for dozens of design jobs. You’re probably aware of most of the popular job titles in the design industry including everything from junior art director, senior art director, art director and beyond; but after reviewing all the descriptions for each, you might still be a bit confused as to what each position does and how these positions fit in to the office hierarchy. This is because job titles and descriptions are confusing. Responsibilities differ from company to company and can depend on several factors including size, type of company, and even the skills of the employees that work there. For this article, I spoke to several designers, art directors, and creative directors hoping to learn how these roles differ from company to company. What I learned was that each company tends to use their creative teams in different ways. It is my hope that by sharing what I’ve learned that I can help to better prepare you for your transition into the workforce.


The Junior, Mid-Level, and Senior Designer

When you first start looking for a job as a graphic designer, it’s likely that one of the first things that you will do is visit a website like Monster.com and run a search for “graphic designer.” Your results will vary but it’s likely that each of you will see several listings for junior, mid-level, and senior designers. At a glance, these listings might appear to be quite similar but in reality you may find these positions to be quite different in terms of experience and responsibility.

So what exactly are the differences? The terms junior, mid, and senior typically refer to seniority. Designers with many years of experience typically hold more senior level positions while designers with less experience hold more junior ones.

A junior designer, for instance, is an entry level position, usually a college graduate with exceptional talent. Junior designers typically require heavy direction from a more senior designer, or art director to develop a project to its conclusion.

Mid-level designers generally have a couple years of experience in the industry and although they still require supervision from a more senior member of their team, they are typically more than capable of completing most tasks.

The senior designer should be one of the most experienced members of the creative team. They should have several years of experience and should be capable of executing projects with minimal direction from an art director. In addition, senior designers should be able to manage their time as well as the time of more junior level designers. In addition, senior designers should have a firm understanding of all levels of production and be capable of not only contributing to the design of a project but also communicating with the client.
While all of this seems rather cut and dry, it’s not. The role of the designer can change depending on the size of the company. A smaller studio, for instance, might be more hands on, relying on more junior level designers to interact with clients and make decisions regarding the direction of a project whereas a larger agency may have stricter guidelines and a clearer division of labor.

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Design How-To: Working with Photos

The popularity of digital cameras, coupled with their relative ease of use, makes it easier than ever to incorporate images into documents. But unless you've spent some time developing a photographer's eye, chances are the snapshots you take are general scenes filled with lots of unnecessary background and filler. The central focus -- and message -- of the image is diffused.

But you can add impact to even the most mundane image by judicious cropping and placement in your page layout.

In this feature from "Before & After Magazine," learn how to crop images for focus and position them for unity in a page layout.

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What Does a Graphic Designer Do?

A graphic designer, also often referred to as a graphic artist, wears many different hats while using an equally diverse number of media to create numerous types of designs. Graphic designers work to visually convey a particular message or idea that has noticeable appeal and the respected profession is highly sought out for promoting and displaying a wide variety of products, activities, ideas, and communications.

Graphic design is used every single day in the world of advertising, including everything from books and magazines, health and personal care, food products, automobiles, clothing, computers, and just about everything else you could think of in between. Product packaging is a huge part of any type of business and requires the expertise of a graphic designer who understands not only the general marketing aspect of business, but also the client's main objective.

Working closely alongside the client, a graphic designer begins expanding upon an initial concept, asks pertinent questions as to the end goal, discusses budgets and deadlines, then agrees on the finalised design, fee and due date. Many designers successfully juggle more than one project at a time, allocating a certain portion of their time to each. Some duties of a graphic designer may include:

- Meeting or communicating regularly with clients to discuss the aspects and goals of a project.

- Staying abreast of the latest technologies in terms of computerised media and common design programmes such as Dreamweaver, Flash, Adobe Photoshop, and Quark Xpress.

- Designing a product from rough drafts, sketches and vague ideas while still knowing how to reach just the right audience.

- Demonstrating excellent proofreading skills while also showing high attention to quality and detail.

- Working with other professionals in the industry such as copywriters, photographers, marketing specialists, web developers and printers.

- Effectively managing time in order to meet deadlines while staying within budget constraints.

An experienced and knowledgeable graphic designer has the uncanny ability to take a general idea and turn it into a visually compelling product that garners not only attention but favourable results as well. Somehow they instinctively know when to use clean lines and muted tones and when to instead use vibrant designs with bold hues that grab your attention.

Graphic designers may work for themselves on a freelance basis or may be employed full time by someone else, whether it be a small organisation or a large corporation. If self-employed, a graphic designer must work diligently to market themselves and their skills in order to build their portfolio and client base as well as making continued learning a large part of their career.

The CSD, the Chartered Society of Designers located in London, offers a number of programmes providing graphic designers with the opportunity to pursue continuous professional development, or CPD for short. Designers can learn the latest in illustration, typography, corporate identity and interactive media design for websites and computers.

When working for a design firm or similar entity, the opportunity for advancement is definitely there in this exciting and ever changing field. Within just a few short years, one may progress to senior designer, obtain a management position such as creative director, or even venture out on their own or create a partnership with another like-minded designer.

Derek Rogers is a freelance writer who represents a number of UK businesses. For the very best in innovative Graphic Design Services he recommends Hampshire-based Studio Republic.



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Interview: Graphic Designer Stephen Doyle

National Design Award–winner Stephen Doyle talks to Departures about the future of design.

The first project Stephen Doyle’s fledging firm took on in the mid-1980s was designing the cult magazine Spy. Since then, Doyle Partners’ work has included branding and logos (Martha Stewart, Cooper Union), editorial art (The New York Times, The New York Review of Books) and book covers (Vladimir Nabokov’s Pale Fire, Stephen Colbert’s I Am America). In his spare time, Doyle builds intricate paper sculptures out of lines of text cut from books like Kafka’s Trial and Machiavelli’s Discourses, and last year he was honored at the White House with a National Design Award. Lately his studio has turned to architectural collaborations, working on design elements for Heritage Field, a new community park opening this fall in the Bronx (on the site of the former Yankee Stadium, which was torn down last year). And then there’s the exterior of the new shark tank at Coney Island’s New York Aquarium, set to open in 2015.
You seem to approach your subjects with what one might call the “euphoria of ignorance.”
Absolutely. To think your way out of a problem, you have to surrender to possibility and potential and imagination; otherwise it’s too overwhelming.

And what does ignorance afford you?
With my clients I often use the word “naïveté.” You have to think, What is it like for the user? How is someone who is uninitiated in this kind of thinking going to respond and react? We get to deal with things on a very human, personal level.

How do you go from Heritage Field and baseball parks back to designing covers for books by [Russian émigré novelist and Lolita author] Vladimir Nabokov?

It’s all about storytelling. Sometimes film actors come back to Broadway just to practice their craft. So to do an occasional book cover, like the stories of Nabokov, where I try to make the type come alive and tell a story, that’s where I get my kicks.

What’s the connection between design and storytelling?

Design is all about storytelling. Design is communicating with an audience through images and language and color and type and scale and nuance and subtlety and texture and tactility. Design is all those things and how they affect our senses.

What, to you, are the iconic images of American design?

The funny thing that springs to my mind is being in a Russian town called Saratov, on the Volga River. Horse meat was on the dinner menu, and afterward we were served four sticks of Wrigley’s gum on a silver tray. First the horse, then the chewing gum. I can’t get that image out of my mind: being in such a distant place and having something so familiar, so American, so iconic as a stick of gum.
The other thing, and this one is a little sad, is the Saarinen TWA terminal at JFK. When it was built, it expressed such optimism, such futurism, such buoyancy of spirit. Now JFK is a mess, worse than airports in some third world countries I’ve traveled to. These days we don’t have that same kind of gesture toward the future. I’m sad that New York hasn’t built any bridges in quite some time.

So that could be a design in the future—would you be interested in helping with that?
Just as long as I don’t have to do the engineering. Where are our big civic gestures? The optimism of building a bridge. We seem to be missing the chance to reimagine how we live.

Designing Heritage Field

The new Yankee Stadium, which opened in the Bronx in 2009, was built on land once occupied by a city park, so when the old stadium was torn down, in 2010, its site was set aside for a new park, opening this fall. To the design of Heritage Field, as the park will be called, Doyle Partners has added subtle yet powerful touches to tell the story of the stadium’s heritage. Done in blue threads of artificial grass, an outline showing the exact position of the original baseball diamond will be sewn into the turf. The site will also have binocular-style viewfinders showing 3-D images of historic events that took place there—Nelson Mandela’s 1990 visit, the 9/11 memorial—while other dates will be commemorated on hexagonal paving stones. “We’ve infiltrated the space with storytelling,” says Doyle.

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2014 Logo Trends Report

If home is our first place, and work is our second place, then mobile screens have definitely become our third place. Smart phone use has increased from 21 percent in 2010 to more than 63 percent today, and with 83 percent of all Americans online regularly, that percentage of mobile users is bound to keep edging up.

The fact that so many people now view the world through a window the size of a business card has spelled an inevitable change in logo design. It used to be that minute favicons had to be kept extremely simple: Now, as a rule, logos must be as well, but that doesn’t mean boring. Designers continue to push back and evolve the meaning of “simple.”

That logos have to be scalable has always been understood. But our perception of “small” has changed, in some cases “tiny” is being rather generous. Dimension and detail are necessarily removed so that these logos read properly on mobile screens. Designs have become more and more flat. Surfaces are plain and defined by mono-weight lines.

Of course, there’s a limit to this flattening out and removal of information. Designers and audiences alike need an escape from all things digital. They need a chance to decompress and take a deep breath in a place that provides shelter from information’s frantic pace. Everyone needs to step outside and bask in sunlight, not screen light. And so the pendulum starts to swing back.

People seem to be more and more drawn back to what is real, whether that is perusing handmade hats on Pinterest, exploring other cultures or our own family histories, or reconnecting with stories from mythology or our childhoods. By bringing back what is human-made, we gain a sense of control over the digital tide that threatens to overtake us.

Designers have responded to the mobile screen’s harsh requisites in a variety of ways, many of which are detailed in this year’s Trend Report. Artisan crafting is ever more important as evidenced by the “Hand Type” solution in abundance this year. Colors are brighter and lighter. Typographic solutions, which can be absorbed immediately with no symbolic interpretation, are ever more important.

Designers also have found ingenious creative workarounds, such as introducing long shadows to very flat designs, suggesting that dimension is still there. Logo designs may be reduced to line work (see the “Geo Wires” trend below), but now every facet of the design is visible. These designs are simpler, but now somehow more complex. In other designs, like this year’s “Pompons,” solutions are less reliant on exact, specific shapes, instead communicating with energy and emotion.

As with all things, it’s about balance. When anything pushes people too far one way, the natural reaction is to push back. Perceptive designers will always be able learn from watching the pendulum as it swings between people’s wants and needs, and technology’s gifts and demands. As Proctor & Gamble’s global marketing and brand building officer Marc Pritchard said, “Creativity without insight is worthless.” Today, insight means learning how to move design forward by turning digital limitations into communication advantages.

We also saw plenty of:

•     Mountains, both representing geographic entities as well as a metaphor for achieving great heights or reaching a summit of success.
•     Acorns a plenty, as a return to nature and the promise of potential and greatness from an auspicious beginning. These demonstrated planning for the future and as a reminder, the best time to plant a tree was yesterday.
•     Bees in every form, and a few hives as well. A versatile symbol of fertility, industry, dedication and teamwork. All the critical ingredients for a sticky reward delivered without a sting.
•     Digital controllers, whether for a game or otherwise, seem to symbolize the ability to manage any challenge at the push of a button or flick of the wrist.
•     Symbols are being adopted by consumers at an extraordinary pace, and many of these from digital devices or associations with that industry. Clouds, Wi-Fi waves, loading wheels and a rush of icons from our mobile devices are providing the analogies for the next generation of logos.
•     Faceting cannot be stopped as it continues to evolve. Since it first hit the scene in 2010 it has sprouted more offshoots than a hydra at a knife fight.
•     Flat, overly simple logos are giving realism a breather. Skeumorphic design is so yesterday. Unfortunately designers are breaking the surface tension by letting long shadows creep onto the faces of their work. So if we’re living in flat world, what’s casting the shadow?

The 2014 Trend Report

At the writing of this report there are more than 212,000 logo on the LogoLounge website, submitted from designers all over the world. The last year’s submissions, 24,500 in all, were examined for this report.

In studying these large collections, trends are noted. The intention of this report is to share with you what we see, not to make suggestions for what you should do. Often a trend we see may be an outgrowth of a direction identified in a previous report. Proof that the product of this industry is part of a healthy evolutionary cycle.

Perhaps the greatest value of these reports is to enable designers to map out the trajectory of specific styles, concepts, techniques and solutions. Once a chain of design evolution is identified, it is much simpler to forecast and design the next step in the sequence. We encourage you to visit www.LogoLounge.com where the last decade of reports can be viewed in their entirety. These resources and the trends identified here, combined with your unique interpretation and ingenuity, may fuel the beginning of a truly exceptional logo.

Special thanks to some of the world’s best identity designers for their generous suggestions that helped enhance this report, including Brian Miller, Brian Wiens, Adam Anderson, Stephan Smith, Ty Wilkins, Alen Pavlovic, Brett Stiles, Valera Namzov, Jeron Ames, Denis Ulyanov, Sherwin Schwartzrock, and others.

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