Designer Job Description

What do a floral arrangement, the outer skin of an airplane, and the interface of that phone app for the place with $6.00 plushy capybaras have in common? They all started as a design, and those designs first began as a gleam in a designer's eye. Look around the room where you’re reading this, and you’ll immediately see a few dozen things that require design. First, there’s the computer or mobile device you’re staring into as you read. Then there’s the furniture, the wall decorations, the flooring, the window treatments, and the clothes on the bed that you should have folded when you did the laundry yesterday. The building you’re in had to be designed by someone as well. Design is what makes manufactured objects engaging and appealing. The people entrusted with ensuring that not everything is the same color and shape are the many different types of designers who make their living by using their creative abilities.

This overview will delve into what these creative people do, what categories they fall into, what different types of things they design, and what you can expect to earn if you decide to join their ranks. It will also explore the skills required to work as a professional designer. While pen-and-ink and a piece of paper sufficed for Leonardo da Vinci’s helicopter design, you’ll need more sophisticated tools than those to make it as a designer today.

What is a Designer?

A random googling of the word “designer” first revealed a story about a competition for oxymoronically official unofficial Lego set designs. It also produced the question, “what are the four types of designers?” along with its answer, “here are the eight types of designer you could be.” The first natural search result was from Nordstrom, offering designer apparel for women, men, and kids. That was followed by Neiman Marcus, SaksFifthAvenue, and Bloomingdale’s, and, finally, by Wikipedia and its definition of the term that comes precariously close to “a designer is a person who designs things.”

Etymologically, the word “designer” is an agent noun from the verb “to design,” which stems from the Latin disegnare, “to designate” via the same word in Italian, which, from the 16th century on, had acquired the senses of “to plan” and “to draw.” That got taken into French, which separated désigner (to intend) and dessiner (to draw), only to see the meanings reunited when the word passed into English in the 17th century. The sense of “to plan” is evident from the 1640s, while the artistic meaning has been around at least since the 1660s. (The Nordstrom/Neiman Marcus sense of designer clothing dates, interestingly, only as far back as 1966.) Thus, as far as the word’s origins in English are concerned, designing combines planning and drawing.

The job title designer covers an enormous range of possibilities. Some Floral Designers have the pleasant task of working with flowers all day long. Some industrial designers dream up the outside skins of airplanes (some interior designers are responsible for the Little Ease-like seats in which coach passengers are confined.) And a whole world of people designs everything you look at on a computer, phone, or mobile device. These three (actually four) random examples only scratch the surface of the kinds of designer careers available.

The eight types of designers listed by Google (graphic, information, experiential, interaction, user experience (UX), user interface (UI), web, and game) flesh out the list somewhat but also fail to exhaust it. Suffice it to say that there are as many types of designers as there are types of manufactured objects and that designers are imaginative people who make drawings of things that don’t exist yet. It is a good role for creative people, as opposed to the more reality-grounded people who can’t see things unless they’re right in front of them and may consider creative types to be witches in need of ducking in the lake.

Job Requirements

Making a career as a designer today has its fair share of analog and digital requirements. Being able to imagine things and then draw them on a pad of sketch paper, while an essential requirement for the job, isn’t enough anymore. A great deal of design media these days take the form of software programs that designers have to be able to use at least as comfortably as they can work with pencil and paper.

The software that the designer must command varies with the type of design role you wish to fill. Some fields need computer-assisted design (CAD) software like AutoCAD, while others require mastery of some of the Adobe Creative Cloud programs, such as Photoshop, Illustrator, or After Effects. Game designers have their own software to employ, such as Unity, Blender, or Unreal Engine. Some design roles also require the ability to code, although that’s by no means a universal must.

Many design roles also require a bachelor’s degree, preferably in a related field such as graphic or industrial design. Today's emphasis is on specialized undergraduate degrees, as opposed to general liberal arts degrees such as BAs in art history. While hiring directors look for college graduates for most design roles, there are exceptions to every rule. You certainly cannot be without an up-to-date portfolio that targets the role you’re trying to land: you can’t submit a pile of material demonstrating your mastery of typography with InDesign when the job you’re applying for is designing toasters. 

Read more about the job requirements for a designer.

Job Responsibilities

• Translating concepts and ideas into executable drawings.
• Working closely with other design team members so that all the parts can add up to a meaningful whole.
• Adapting designs to the needs of other team members.
• Preparing drawings using analog and digital media as required.
• Conducting research both for the creation and testing of the design.
• Remaining aware of design trends to keep designs fresh and cutting-edge. 
• Creating drawings in final, polished form.
• Presenting (and, if need be, tactfully defending) your work to fellow team members and, eventually, clients or stakeholders.
• Working with engineers, coders, and others responsible for executing designs to ensure that designs follow the universal laws of physics.

Skills

Design is a field that calls for a specific and highly developed skill set: it’s not a field you can expect to learn while on the job. To be a designer, you must possess the requisite hard skills to create designs on paper and computer. You, therefore, need to know how to draw a rough sketch of the thing you’re envisioning in your head, and you need to know how to turn your paper prototype into a set of computer drawings. That involves working in traditional artistic media and in such things as the Adobe Creative Cloud, the portmanteau name for Adobe’s creative software, which includes Photoshop, Illustrator, In Design, AfterEffects, and Premiere Pro. Other fields may require different software, such as AutoCAD, Rhinoceros 3D, InVision, Figma (useful for creating UX prototypes), and, for game designers, Unity or Unreal Engine. On top of that, talent as a draftsman can be extremely handy when it comes to architectural, mechanical, or interior design.

Above and beyond those “hard” skills, for which there is no substitute—you either can or cannot work with the requisite programs—designers require a set of soft skills that might not seem native to a creative temperament. The first is being able to work on a team since even Leonardo da Vinci had Leonardeschi to assist him in his workshop. The second is knowing how to accept and profit from criticism from team leads, managers, clients, and sometimes even fellow team members. That means being able not to take a critique of your creative “children” as a personal affront and to be able to subordinate your own vision to the overall needs of the project. That can be tricky for creative types. Equally tricky is having the ability to be creative on demand and to produce deliverables on schedule. You can say that you’re an artist and that inspiration comes when it comes all you want, but if you do, you’re likely to be an artist looking for a job.

Read more about what skills you need to be a designer.

Why Do Businesses Need Designers?

Designers are essential to any business that manufactures anything. That ranges from print media (for which you need graphic designers) to giant cruise ships (which call for industrial designers to draw up the parts that keep the boat afloat and interior designers to decorate the staterooms.) Basically, any time that there’s an abstract idea that needs to be translated into executable (buildable) form, you’re going to need a designer.

The scientific debate is ongoing as to whether creativity is genetic or learned. Current research seems to favor the hypothesis that creative people are made rather than created and that nurture is more important in creating creative people than the innate nature of a person’s brain. That said, wherever they come from, creative people are still a minority among the species. Studies by Adobe, the doyens of innovative software, have revealed that only 40% of people surveyed consider themselves “creative,” and only 25% feel they are living up to their creative potential. Whereas most anyone could be creative, the reality is that most people aren’t. This has given birth to a well-meaning industry of classes and adult coloring books to help people “unlock their creative potential.” 

In the meantime, some people are recognized as creative (by themselves or others), and employers turn to these people when they need something designed. Creativity doesn’t grow on trees, and most people are not functionally creative, whence the need for creative talent and, thus, for designers.

Where Do Designers Usually Work?

Because the field is so vast, designers work virtually everywhere, from florists’ shops to aerospace plants. Any business that manufactures anything is going to need designers on staff. That includes firms whose products aren’t designed, shampoo manufacturers, for example. They may need chemists rather than designers to create the product, but they still need Graphic Designers to design the packaging.

Above and beyond these examples, Interior Designers work for decorating firms, while Fashion Designers work for fashion houses. Game Designers work for game manufacturers, and UX & UI designers work for tech companies that develop apps and software. Design is also a field ripe with options for freelancers: Web Designers, for instance, can be brought in by smaller companies to design a web presence and then move on to their next client. That applies to other design fields when shorter-term design projects are encountered and keeping a full-time designer on staff isn’t practical.

Every commercial endeavor will require the services of some kind of designer at some point. Designers, depending on their specialization, can find themselves working just about anywhere. Perhaps professionals such as doctors, lawyers, and accountants don’t require much design services. However, someone has to design their offices and a visual graphic strategy around which the firm’s reputation and identity can coalesce.

How Long Does it Take to Become a Designer?

The time required to become a professional designer varies significantly from one person to another and from one set of circumstances to another. There can thus be no one answer to the question, especially as the rules change from one type of design career to another.

That said, the most straightforward answer that applies in most cases is the four years it takes to earn a college degree and how long it takes to pound the pavement with your portfolio in search of a job. That’s an unpredictable time, of course. You may get lucky on your first go (it does happen), or you may need several discouraging months before you land a position as a designer. Such are the vagaries of the job market, which constitute the wild card in any attempt at predicting how long it takes to establish yourself professionally.

That four-year figure for a bachelor’s degree is, on the other hand, largely unvarying if you attend school full-time. It will take longer if you can only attend school part-time. Still, the reality is that most people hiring for design positions—this can be fashion, graphic, UX/UI, video games, interior design, and any other field—generally prefer college graduates to fill available roles. There are ways to make it as a designer without a bachelor’s degree, but getting a four-year degree in some form of design is still the most usual route. 

Generally, you don’t need graduate school on top of a four-year bachelor’s program to become a designer. The major exception is architecture, where a master’s degree is an essential career-building block. (The other exception is if you wish to have the option of teaching design at the university level, in which case an advanced degree is necessary.)

Can you make it as a designer without college? Although a bachelor’s degree is far and away the most usual route to a design career, you can acquire sufficient knowledge to work as a designer in other ways. Many schools today offer certificate programs that provide an accelerated path to develop the skills needed to land an entry-level job in the design field of your choice. These courses can take anywhere from a month to a year and often offer flexibility that makes it possible to enroll in them while working full-time at your current job. Nothing will replace an architecture degree for Architects, and Engineers also most likely can’t sidestep a college education. Still, with some determination, you can acquire the skills required for design jobs today from one of these certificate programs or their slightly briefer cousins, the computer bootcamp. 

The question on most people’s tongues when they consider certificate programs is whether or not the certificate programs will make them competitive with college graduates. The answer is that more and more Hiring Directors are coming to appreciate how certificate programs equip their graduates with the skills they require to succeed in the design workplace. That’s not to say that the time spent in college getting a more rounded education is wasted, but it is to say that certificate programs can be an efficient means to a measurable end.

There is another track for becoming a designer. That is the way of the autodidacts, the self-taught individuals who manage to learn their design craft and trade from books, the internet, and having someone help to guide them. It doesn’t happen often, but, using fashion as an example, neither Coco Chanel, Karl Lagerfeld, nor Giorgio Armani attended fashion school. (Chanel was a drop-out who learned to sew in the convent school she attended, Lagerfeld entered a coat-design competition when he was a teenager and won, while only a twist of fate landed Armani in a Milan department store’s window-dressing department.) Thus it can be done. There is certainly no shortage of books and self-paced video resources to teach you how to be a designer.

Whichever path you take, there are a lot of skills involved in becoming a designer, and you’ll need some patience to acquire them. You can’t become a designer overnight.

Designer vs. Engineer

The career that most closely parallels (and is most easily confused) with a designer is Engineer. There are similarities between the two: both designers and Engineers make things, but the things they make—and the way they make them—differ considerably. Designers and Engineers have different patron saints: St. Catherine of Bologna for designers and artists, and St. Patrick (who built clay churches in Ireland) for Engineers. The etymologies of the words are also different: Designer comes from the Latin disegnare (“to designate”), while Engineer stems from the Late Latin ingeniare and ingenium (“innate qualities, abilities”) back to the Proto-Indo-European meaning “that which is inborn.” Linguistically, then, the Engineer’s “knack” has been assumed to be inborn for millennia.

Although the topic becomes more complicated by the different ways actual jobs are described, a useful oversimplification is that designers know what they want. Yet, they don’t know how to make it. On the other hand, Engineers know how to make things but aren’t always sure what to make. Thus there’s a symbiosis between the right brain, creative designers, and the left brain, slide rule-wielding engineers: the architect makes up the building, and the engineer ensures it will stand up.

That’s all very nice, but that’s not quite how things unfold in real-life workplaces, where the line dividing the designer’s turf from the Engineer can get a little blurry. For instance, the engineer builds things in mechanical engineering and design, but the designer is responsible for preparing schematics and such for what the engineer is trying to develop. Thus, Mechanical Designers and Engineers work concurrently rather than sequentially, as described above. The designer doesn’t always go to the engineer and say, “I’ve got this idea that will do X and Y. Can you build one?”

Another way of looking at the dichotomy is that the Engineer is responsible for the mechanical guts of a thing and for making sure they work. The Engineer devises the coils and pop-up mechanism that are required to transform bread into toast; the designer is the person who makes this toaster look different from all the others. And so forth. Engineers don’t worry about how knobs feel to the user; designers do.

The two have very different educational backgrounds. As might be expected, Engineers have engineering degrees, more often than not a bachelor’s of science, and take care of all the math, physics, and hard science involved in creating a product or a prototype. Designers usually have design degrees, the programs for which lean far more toward the artistic. And, in detail, perhaps endemic to a society that doesn’t always value creativity, Engineers tend to be somewhat more highly paid than the designers working on the same projects. More depressingly for creative types, the US Bureau of Labor Statistics predicts slow growth for Mechanical Engineers and a decline in the need for Mechanical Designers, who fulfill many of the same functions as drafters.

The opposition between designers and Engineers also turns up when comparing so-called top-down and bottom-up work methods. The designer, who wants to imagine a finished product, favors the former, while the Engineer prefers the latter, who likes to work out problems one by one in a systematic fashion. Thus, the jobs are very different and call for different temperaments. There are, of course, Engineers who can have overall creative visions, and there are designers with the technical ken to assemble things. Still, some organizations may not appreciate those overlaps, especially the larger ones that prefer employees to stay in their lanes. However, one thing remains certain: the ideal scenario is one in which designers and Engineers work together in perfect harmony. Only by having the two work together can a genuinely outstanding product result. 

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.

Key Takeaways

• Nearly every manufactured object you encounter has involved the work of a designer of some sort. Designers are necessary to manufacture anything and work in almost every manufacturing industry.
• Design is a vast field that can range from something as simple as designing floral centerpieces to complex designs for airplanes and ocean liners.
• Contemporary designers need to know how to use software relevant to their field and translate their ideas into drawings.
• More often than not, design roles require a bachelor’s degree. However, an accelerated certificate program from a school specializing in educating budding designers in the 21st-century tools they require can be a substitute for a four-year college degree.
• Noble Desktop teaches the requisite in-person or online classes to enable you to become a designer.