As a young creative it's difficult to find a path to employment but hopefully some tips from our senior designer Alex will help you find your way...

In this week's blog post I am going to create an alternative guide for any young aspiring graphic designers which hopefully will help you on your way to landing your first job. When I first started in design I searched the internet endlessly for information on how to get into the industry but all I could find was blogs written by people who expected you to compete with agencies instantly. It’s important to say that design is a very saturated industry so it’s very difficult to get your foot in the door. However if you have the determination and talent you will definitely find a job. So let’s begin this guide so you can hopefully get on your way to landing that first job.

It’s going to sound obvious if you’re already on the trajectory of becoming a designer but you should start your journey at college studying art or design and get the best possible grades to open your options up to different universities. You should also start designing for friends and family early on just to get experience in being a freelancer and build up a portfolio for the future. You probably will look back at your designs during college and hate them but it’s more about getting the experience, dealing with people and handling a brief so when you do get your first job these skills are natural to you. 

University is where the work begins though, I may be wrong but I felt the first year of university was quite a breeze compared to the other two (or three). As the modules and briefs in your first year aren’t as challenging and difficult I would recommend focusing a lot of your spare time on creating a personal brand for yourself.

It’s difficult to create a personal brand because you may struggle with option paralysis and have no idea what to call yourself but don’t put too much pressure on your personal brand name being perfect (I’ve changed my freelance name about four/five times during university). Obviously I wouldn’t advise changing your personal brand all the time because you want people you’ve worked for to recognise you and you’d like to build a reputation that will lead to more work.

With your personal brand most people go with their name. For example mine would be ‘Alex Trowell Design’ or ‘Trowell Creative’ or something like that but I always hated my name so that wasn’t an option I wanted to take. My first personal brand name was ‘A7 Designs’ having an A for my name and 7 because it’s my favourite number and it’s what I wore when I played football at school. If you’re struggling you can always use word randomiser websites to find a unique name, that’s what most creative agencies do anyway. 

Once you have your personal brand all designed and sorted this is where the fun starts. You can use your personal brand designs to further your skills so get designing a social media presence like profile pictures, cover photos. Then once you have your social media presence on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter & LinkedIn you can start designing more formal things like business cards, letterheads and invoice templates. Don’t be intimidated about doing any of this. You tend to learn as you go along and that’s fine because after a year or so you’ll be confident and it’ll be second nature. I only learned to create invoices after clients started asking for them otherwise it would have never crossed my mind. 

It’s important to have a portfolio ready at all times to help show potential clients how good you are. I’d suggest creating an InDesign file where you have a portfolio template set out so as you're creating new stuff you can keep adding to the same portfolio. Make your portfolio fun, show your character and add some personal projects in there as this will help to fill it out. Personal projects can be what you’re interested in like mine was designing football shirts or music posters.

Now you’ve got the portfolio and personal brand now it’s time to start posting on social media so people can see you’re active and working. I would advise having something like open to work or open to commissions in your bio so people who view your profile know they could hire you if they wanted to. Your social media is going to be very quiet at first so don’t be disheartened when you don’t wake up to 1000s of likes.

The important thing to remember is that you’re not aiming to get loads of likes, you're aiming to get a job once you graduate so be smart in how you use social media. There’s a maximum number of people you can follow on social media per day so you might have to work at it over some time but I would get following local design agencies, local businesses and popular people in your area. When I started I went on to Hull Live’s social media (local newspaper) and went through the followers they had to find local businesses. Then from there you can find local businesses and look at their followers and you’ll never run out of people to follow. 

Now here’s the secret that landed me my first paid commission and ultimately led me to my first job. I would scout out local businesses that had really poor branding or none at all, then I would design a new logo for that business and direct message or tweet them the new design. I would do this every night hoping I’d wake up to some interactions and replies. It takes a while to get going but even if they don’t go for the logo you definitely gain interactions and followers from doing this. 

You have to be thick skinned and understand the more you do the more chance someone will want your design. There will be a lot of rejection and some people can be insulting. I've had replies like ‘Awful’ or ‘Please delete’ but internally you just got to know you’re going to be the best designer there is and nothings going to stop you. This is the main way I made financial gain from freelancing because it was hard to land bigger jobs as companies would much rather choose an agency but don’t worry all these little jobs will add up to a decent monthly wage.