How to Become a Designer Without a Degree

The received wisdom is that most design careers require a four-year college degree, generally a BFA in some form of visual arts or, for the more technical design fields, a BS in some aspect of computer science. Like most received wisdom, that one is based in reality, albeit in a reality that has its exceptions. Assuming you have the right training, you can break into most design fields without a college degree, although it’s going to take some persistence and a dazzling portfolio. But it can be done. What follows here will explain this particular path less taken and how you can negotiate it. 

What is a Designer?

A designer is a person who comes up with designs—plans, drawings, schematics, renderings, and prototypes—of just about anything you may encounter in today’s world. Everything from a shampoo bottle to the outsides of airplanes had to be designed before they could become tangible realities. The designer is often the person who comes up with the idea for something and then comes up with the plans for it. Designers are idea people and creative types who possess the ability to see things that don’t exist (yet).

Designers come in as many shapes and sizes as the objects they design. You’ll thus encounter everything from Floral Designers to Mechanical Designers and Graphic Designers to UX/UI Designers. Each field requires specialized knowledge, but the threads connecting all of them are a creative spirit and artistic ability. Much designing today is done on the computer, using CAD (computer-assisted design) software, but the good old-fashioned ability to draw is still an essential tool in most designers’ toolkits.

Read more about what a designer does.

Can You Really Become a Designer Without a Degree?

Anything being possible, yes, you can become a designer without a degree. And you’ll find that it’s easier than getting nuclear fusion to work. You should, however, be aware that you’re bucking the trend of Designers having bachelor’s degrees and that you will probably be ruled out a priori by some Hiring Directors, but enough of those have sufficiently open minds to look beyond diplomas to the other qualifications on your application.

The same applies to people who hold college degrees in fields other than visual design or the other fields from which Designers are generally drawn. Here, you at least have a four-year degree of some sort to show for yourself, which does count for something, but it doesn’t answer the question most Hiring Directors have, which is whether you have the artistic and tech skills you need to be a working Designer.

There are three things that matter more than anything on an application for a design job: education, experience, and portfolio. Getting a job without a college degree makes the first a problem and casts an even stronger light on the latter two. In today’s world, where the idea of a liberal arts education is nearly extinct, the reason for a college degree is to acquire skills that are necessary to succeed in the workplace. You go to college to get a design degree so you can learn not only to draw but also to use the software programs that form part and parcel of a designer’s routine craft. Logically speaking, if you can show evidence of being able to do that, you should be on a comparable footing with college graduates, as, ultimately, Hiring Directors are more concerned with skills than sheepskins.

That does mean that you’ll need skills comparable to those people with college degrees possess. You’ll need to know both how to draw and how to use programs such as Photoshop, After Effects, or AutoCAD. In other words, you’re still going to need an education. It just needn’t come from an accredited university, and it needn’t take four years to complete. It’s not even that hard to find; indeed, you may find the number of schools that offer exactly this kind of career-targeted training to be bewildering when you first start researching the subject.

Steps to Become a Designer

Becoming a designer isn’t as simple as walking into a Hiring Manager’s office and demanding a position as Game Design Lead because you want a job that will entitle you to play video games all day. It’s a lot more complicated than that. The following guided tour will show you how the path to your career is likely to run.

Determine Your Goal

The first step towards getting to be a Designer is deciding what kind of Designer you want to be. You’re likely to be someone with some artistic talent who feels as though a career that lets you make art might be more interesting than accounting. The problem is how to do that without ending up starving like Van Gogh (minus the mental illness and the absinthe.) You could always become the next Salvador Dalì and make a mint from your artistic production, but that’s not exactly a sure career bet. You’re better off having a Plan B in terms of a design career that will allow you to capitalize on your talents and receive a regular paycheck in return. You’ll accordingly need to do some research into all the possible design careers. That should help settle you on a goal which should then illuminate the path you’ll need to take.

Determine the Skills You Need

Having settled on the aspect of design you wish to pursue, your next task is to determine just what the Designers whose ranks you plan to join need to know. There’s a lot more than drawing ability involved, although that’s almost always a piece of the puzzle. You should certainly draw, draw, draw, and, if you can, draw the kinds of things you hope one day to draw professionally. Nevertheless, computers are being used more than drawing pads in most design fields, and determining what sort of computer knowledge you’re going to be expected to have when you start looking for a job should be at the top of your list of things to research. 

Learn the Necessary Skills

Once you know what it is you need to learn, you should set about learning it, and the earlier you start, the better off you’ll be. You don’t have to begin to learn Photoshop when you’re a teenager or start making animation or simple video games while you’re drowning in the chaos of adolescence, but if you do know what sort of career you want to pursue, by all means, start learning the software you’re going to use as a professional.

Many people learn the skills they need for a design career at one of the in-person or live online IT schools that specialize in teaching students career-specific and job market-targeted skills. The schools offer both individual classes and longer courses in the software capabilities required in today’s work environments. The latter, often termed bootcamps or certificate programs, allow you to assume a role in a tech field without the benefit of a college degree, as they teach not only what you need to know but also what HR Directors regularly seek in prospective hires.

Many of these schools offer free video seminars that can give you a sense of what actual classes will be like. Noble Desktop, a New York-based school, is among the institutions that provide complimentary video tutorials in a number of design fields. These include a general introduction to design, Get Started in Design: Graphic, Web, UX/UI & Motion, along with more specific seminars, such as Get Started in Graphic Design, Intro to Adobe Creative Cloud, Intro to Figma, and Get Started in Motion Graphics. Any one of these will provide a foretaste of the subject matter and be a handy way to investigate a number of different avenues as you search out the one that’s right for you.

Build a Portfolio

Very arguably, the most important tool in landing a job is your online portfolio. Before you can assemble one, however, you need things to put in it in the form of projects that showcase your abilities. Most schools will help you develop portfolio projects, but there’s nothing to stop you from accelerating that process by working on projects of your own. The more work you have to choose from, the stronger your portfolio will be.

What should go into a portfolio? The rule of thumb is at least three projects that show off as much of your range as possible. If you have more top-notch work than just three projects, you can include it as well, but don’t overburden your portfolio with endless student designs for the flying car of tomorrow. You don’t want to overwhelm the people who view your portfolio: you want them to focus on the best of what you have to offer.

Network, Intern, Hustle

The next step is probably the most difficult, as it introduces the variable of other people to the equation. There’s more to getting a job today than completing a course of study and metaphorically pounding the pavement in search of gainful employment. Networking, much of which can be done virtually using platforms like LinkedIn, is essential, as it can get your foot in doors that you might otherwise not know existed. There’s always the chance that your contact X knows Y who knows Z who might be able to let you know about a job opportunity. It takes time and effort to network, and it may seem to you that it’s never going to pay off, but it’s an inescapable part of the byzantine process of starting a career in today’s market.

Quite a few entry-level design jobs call for two years’ experience, which is indeed as ridiculous as it sounds. How do you get experience without a job? You can land an internship, which will remunerate you with valuable experience (but with little or no money), or you can do volunteer work, where the price of your services can compensate for your lack of experience. You can also sell your services to the local pizza joint by convincing the owners that they need a new menu and that you’re the person to design it. Or, if fashion is the field you’re trying to break into, you may be able to find a community theater in need of a costume designer.

The key ingredient here is the most critical intangible in getting a job: hustle. Some people are seemingly born endowed with the quality (they’re the ones who were making money buying and selling baseball cards when they were ten), while others have to get over their natural shyness and learn it. Bear in mind hockey great Wayne Gretzky’s famous dictum: “you miss 100% of the shots you don’t take.”

The Job Search

After all that, you’ll be ready to start your job search in earnest. And to make a full-time job of it. Finding an entry-level job these days take a good deal of effort, partly because the market is competitive and partly because the job-search process has become much more complicated than it used to be. This is where you monitor job postings, use your network, and polish your portfolio until it gleams. Yes, it’s a lot of work, and yes, a lot of it is tedious (there are only so many ways to rephrase your cover letter before you want to scream.) There are people who get jobs in their first week of searching and others for whom it takes longer. Be prepared for it to take longer, and be ready to find yourself sending out dozens of resumes into the black soul-sucking darkness of the internet without getting so much as a rejection email in return.

That may sound not very optimistic, but such are the realities of landing your first job. The secret is not to take rejection personally and to believe in your abilities and training. Your hard work getting this far will pay off eventually. You just need to stick with it. There’s going to be a lot of rinsing and repeating and rephrasing of that cover letter, but with a great portfolio and some hustle, your dream job should be within your reach.

Learn the Skills to Become a Designer at Noble Desktop

If you wish to become a designer, Noble Desktop, a tech and design school based in New York that teaches worldwide thanks to the wonders of the internet, is available to give you the education you need to get started in this exciting field. Noble teaches certificate programs in numerous aspects of design and the technology that makes design possible in the contemporary world. These certificate programs offer comprehensive instruction in their topics and will arm you for the job market in whichever aspect of design interests you.

Noble has certificate programs in graphic design (the Adobe trio of Photoshop, InDesign, and Illustrator), digital design (the main troika of Adobe programs plus Figma for UI design), UX & UI design, and motion graphics. All these programs feature small class sizes in order to make sure that each student receives ample attention from the instructor, and can be taken either in-person in New York or online from anywhere over the 85% of the Earth’s surface that is reached by the internet (plus the International Space Station.) Classes at Noble Desktop include a free retake option, which can be useful as a refresher course or as a means of maximizing what you learn from fast-paced classes. Noble’s instructors are all experts in their fields and often working professionals whose experience is invaluable when they mentor students in the school’s certificate programs 1-to-1.

Noble offers further design courses that are briefer than the certificate programs. You may also wish to consult Noble’s Learning Hub for a wealth of information on how to learn to be a designer.