Tips on Choosing a Design Specialty

Being a jack of all trades isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. Many creative types consider themselves a jack of all trades and are truly a master of none. Equipping yourself with knowledge is one thing, but spreading yourself too thin is another. Defining a specialty as a freelance graphic designer is an important first step when starting your freelance career. Being a generalist/jack of all trades might seem smart, but being very experienced and knowledgable about one area of design is much more attractive to clients.

Here are a few tips to help:

• Figure out your strengths and weaknesses: This is a crucial first step. Knowing your strengths and weaknesses can help you pick and choose the projects you want to work on and will excel at.

• Figure out what you like to do: Pretty self explanatory, if you hate doing print design or have experience with PHP, that probably should not be your specialty.

• Don’t be afraid to dabble: Dabbling and doing different projects is a good way of finding a design specialty that suits you. Design school projects and taking on pro-bono work can provide opportunities to experiment and dabble in various design work. If you’re an aspiring web designer but are interested in print design, take a print production class. If you’re interested in WordPress (and have some basic knowledge), contact a non-profit about sprucing up their outdated WordPress blog design. You get the idea.

In Conclusion:

Finding a design specialty and sticking with it will benefit your freelance design business imensly. By being able to define your specialty, you can focus on only the choice projects and clients, making for a much more lucrative and enjoyable freelance design career.