Going From Graphic Designer To Professional Illustrator: Useful Skills To Learn

As a professional Graphic Designer with 10+ years experience (inc. 3 years as a freelance designer), I’m very lucky to have built up a set of skills and experience that (I hope) can be easily transferred to a career in illustration.

You certainly don’t have to come from a graphic design background to have a successful illustration career but here are a few skills I’m glad I have and that it would be worth any wannabe-illustrator acquiring - which could also give you the edge over the competition…

Knowledge of the printing process

A basic understanding of the end-to-end design/printing process and what is going to happen to your digital artwork file once you bid it farewell, will give you invaluable insights into how to better set up andcreate your artwork and make an Art Director’s life easier.

Make a point of understanding the end-to-end printing process, including required file formats, bleed, colour separations, different print finishes and how paper stocks can vastly affect the final printed product.

Your AD won’t necessarily expect you to know all these things in great detail but it will make their life easier if you understand the lingo and are able to provide them with a product that is totally print-ready.

Make their job easier and who do you think will be at the top of their list when commissioning the next illustration for a publication?

Basic design skills

If you’re an illustrator the chances are you’ll already be familiar with software such as Adobe Photoshop and Adobe Illustrator. You may know how to use them to create your illustrations but do you know how to use them to create your marketing materials - vital tools in your quest to become a pro illustrator?

Learn how to use this software to create the print-ready files for your leaflets, mailers and business cards and save yourself the hassle and extra cost of outsourcing this to a professional designer.

Try to get a basic understanding of composition, grids and margins to create effective, clear and legible marketing materials - don’t go crazy with weird and whacky fonts (always print out and mock-up your marketing materials before you send it off to the printers to see how it looks at actual size) - your postcard may look cool with that grunge font, but if the AD can’t read your email address or url easily, he/she will move onto the postcard from the next illustrator.

Web design skills

With basic (and easy-to-use) Content Management Systems like WordPress out there, you don’t need to be an html guru to create your own professional looking portfolio website and/or blog these days.

There are hundreds of free WordPress themes on sites like this and this to choose from and even more themes to buy at very affordable rates from companies such as Theme Forest.

There are many tutorials out there to guide you through setting up your own website from scratch (see our ‘Build A Website From Scratch In 60 Minutes’ tutorial on the Resources for Illustrators page), you no longer need to go to great expense to hire a web designer to create your site.

There are numerous free online software applications online too, sites like Picnik and Pixlr that you can use to optimise your images for the web, ensuring loading times of your site are super fast - remember you only have a short window of time when an AD visits your site, don’t make them wait for ages while your 3 megabyte images opens on screen. You only have a matter of seconds before they get fed up and move on to the next illustrator.

Experience running & marketing a creative business

From the experience of being a freelance graphic designer - and running our business with my wife - one of the most important things I’ve learnt about running any business is Marketing. This is going to play a huge part in my journey from designer to professional illustrator - and I know it’s one of my personal weaknesses (my wife’s the marketing expert).