If you want to work remotely, you’ll need to be making money to support your digital nomad lifestyle. Graphic designer is a great choice for the remote worker.
Although the income for a graphic designer in the UK or USA isn’t the most impressive, once you’re living somewhere with an affordable cost of living, your money will go a long way. At around £22,000-£30,000 a year, this may not quite be enough to buy an apartment in central London or downtown San Francisco. But, in Bali, Buenos Aries or Budapest – it’ll do nicely.
What Does A Graphic Designer Do?
If you have a keen eye for modern design, you’ll probably have already considered being a graphic designer. Working with software mostly, you’ll design logos, illustrations, document layouts, magazines, advertisements, book covers – in fact anything that needs some degree of visual manipulation.
Often it’s a case of arranging sourced images over text to produce something such as an advertisement for a product or service or packaging for something. In some cases you may be required to actually do some design, such as designing company logos or curating a brand identity.
What Sort Of Skills Will I Need?
Having some sort of artistic flair will help, but put simply, you can totally wing it if you’re not the best at art. In fact, it’s probably more important that you can use the software effectively more than your artistic ability. You’ll be aware no doubt of Adobe Photoshop, probably one of the central graphic design tools. Beyond that you’ll do well to be adept at packages like Corel Draw, GIMP, Inkscape, Illustrator and InDesign.
Mostly it’ll be a case of simple aesthetics and translating a clients requirements into some sort image file such as a pdf, jpg or vector graphic.
Being a bit of a tech nerd will help you go far as a graphic designer. Learning new software packages and being ahead of design trends means you’ll be able to respond to demands from the industry.
How Do I Get Into Graphic Design?
The best bet is to download one of the software packages above such as Gimp, or Inkscape and start learning how to use them. Design a logo for yourself, mock up some magazine covers for fun, design a few logos, make an advert for your favourite product and then assemble a portfolio.
A good way to get started with getting paid is sites like Fiverr, Upwork and Freelancer. Pitch for jobs and assemble your portfolio and before you know it you’ll be able to find a client who could hire you on an ongoing basis. Job done…
Work/Life Balance
Working as a graphic designer can be time consuming, but often it is pretty straightforward. If you have a solid client who you can rely on you can usually find yourself doing some simple work for a few hours and then being able to relax. But in the early days, yes you’ll probably find hustling takes up a lot of time.
If you’re good with computers and have access to a decent connection, you will find that doing graphic design work is the ideal global playboy job option.
If you’re up for that digital nomad lifestyle and you want to train as a graphic designer, get the skills over at Udemy.
