Being a Graphic Designer in the Modern World

First released over 20 years ago, Adobe InDesign is a graphic designer’s best friend and most valuable piece of software.

It can be used to create posters, flyers, books and magazines, amongst many, many other things—all those things that immediately spring to people’s minds when you say you’re a graphic designer.

You won’t find a graphic designer who isn’t both a master of InDesign and simultaneously constantly learning new tips and tricks on the programme. It really is amongst the essential skills needed to be a graphic designer.

Photoshop is the world’s most popular photo editing app.

• As a designer, you’ll be using Photoshop for editing and modifying raster/bitmap graphics (aka JPEGs, PNGS, and GIFs) for use in your designs—in simpler terms, it uses pixels to make images.
• The program can be used for things like cropping, color-correcting, resizing, and editing images and photos.
• It’s also used for loads more jobs that will be part of a designer’s repertoire from overlaying text onto an image to combining photography (yours’ or someone else’s) and graphics.

Adobe Illustrator is a vector graphics editor first released in 1987. Vector graphics are not made up of pixels, but instead are made up of paths and can therefore be scaled much more than raster graphics. While Photoshop deals with the latter, Illustrator deals with vectors.

The program can be used to create a variety of digital and printed images—we’re talking logos, charts, illustrations, cartoons, graphs, diagrams—basically anything that may need to be printed or displayed at different sizes or on different formats.