I’ve spent a lot of my life learning graphic design stuff. There’s a lot more to it than people realize, so that’s why I decided to help demystify this subject for anyone who’s interested. Whether you’re an interested newcomer to the field or a interested in learning about graphic design, I’ll be very helpful for you in this field of study. I’ve been in practice since 2010, and I have passionately pursued graphic design information all that time, year after year. Here’s what you should know according to the 15 years of knowledge i’ve stored between 2010 and now (2025):
Graphic designers handle a myriad of tasks, but there is a core set of skills that a graphic designer needs to study in order to work as a graphic designer. Before I get into those core sets, you should know there are really 2 core sets depending on the type of graphic designer you’d like to be. The two types of graphic designer you can be is a production artist and a go-getter. That’s an over-simplified way of saying that, but just bare with me while I explain.
A production artist is someone who doesn’t want anything to do with freelance work. These graphic designers will be working with a team. They will tend to want to avoid climbing ranks because they are comfortable just producing work for the love of the craft. They work out of their love for the process.
A go-getter graphic designer, on the other hand, is one that uses graphic design as a facet of their career. Go-getters recognize that anyone can spend 100 hours making art that’s going to look great (because 100 hours IS A LOT). They recognize that it’s cool and all, but why not just take a photograph if you want photo realistic. Real art is found in telling stories through the combination of elements, people, or controversial ideas. A go-getter graphic designer doesn’t sell their passion for creating art to gain money like a production artist does—they sell their ability to produce messages with their art. Sometimes they love to unleash their inner artist in private work, but they recognize that a simple smiley face is enough to make money with art. A go-getter graphic designer gets paid to boost their clients and partners using visual communication methods. This type of graphic designer will usually have knowledge with branding, marketing, sales, business, and psychology to really understand how to use visually aesthetic/controversial messages to drive sales. This type of graphic designer is usually a strong story teller (or would benefit from it), and able to generate evergreen value for businesses.
In contrast: a production graphic designer is in love with the process and is content with spending all their time creating new things like business cards, flyers, postcards, etcetera. They are not usually going to be interested in playing around with your website analytics or building a brand guide for your new business. They just want to infuse their unique artistic talent all over your marketing collateral and hear you tell them that it rocks so they can send it to print. Unless they’re producing digital assets for you like website ads, or social media posts. This doesn’t mean they want to run the ad campaigns for you. This means they want to produce the gifs and static ads for you. They might even feel comfortable pitching in on the scripts you place on each post, but that should really be your writer’s job. Leave the social media marketing with a go-getter graphic designer because they will be more savvy in the skills you need for a successful social media marketing campaign. The go-getter will usually know how to read your analytics and devise a successful campaign using proper SEO to generate more income for your business. The go-getter graphic designer will know which of your graphic assets would work great in the campaign and how they should be arranged to boost your reputation and drive sales.
So let’s talk about the core skills you’d need to pursue for these 2 different types of graphic designers. With the exception of needing to know how to use design software (obviously), we’ll start off with what a so-called “production graphic designer” needs to know:
- Color theory
- Design systems
- Layout design
- Typography
- Desktop publishing
- Printing standards
And the core skills you’ll need to be focused on as a “go-getter graphic designer” are as follows:
- Color theory
- Design systems
- Business operations
- Layout design
- Typography
- Desktop publishing
- Printing standards
- Social Media
- Social Media Marketing
- Direct Mail Marketing
- Sales
- Writing
- Contracts
- Invoicing
- Proposals
- Pro-rata employment
This should hopefully help clear up your understanding of what a graphic designer studies, and how to pick the right graphic designer for your business needs.