How To Become A Graphic Designer Without a Degree

hey adrian wake up i'm up i'm up we gotta make another youtube video today oh that's right that's right it's monday what are we gonna do today you know i wanna talk about how i got started as a graphic designer with no degree it's fun a lot of things i want to talk about so why don't we just jump right into it let's roll [Music] hey guys welcome back to another adrian graphics and marketing video i just wanted to take a minute today tell you guys my my story of how i became a graphic designer with no degree many of you guys have gone to college but there's probably a lot of you that have no degree and you're great artists you're super talented and you're super creative and you want to make money as a graphic designer so today's video is going to be just about that and so i want to talk about the five things that you need to know if you want to have success as a self-taught graphic designer but first what i need from you as a favor for all the value that we're bringing to this channel is hit that like button below hit the subscribe button below because it helps youtube show my videos to more people and i always ask that in every video as you know so let's go ahead and jump into it if you want to be a graphic designer you have to first educate yourself on how to use the programs and my little brother came to me and said hey have you ever heard of adobe photoshop and i said i've heard of it but i've never used it because at the time i was using paint and i was using paint to make club flyers and so i actually educated myself i downloaded the program i actually pirated it don't tell anybody but i pirated that program and i ended up using photoshop it was a great program it took me probably two or three months to learn but i started reading up on it and finding other ways to learn that program and the more and more i used it the more i fell in love with that program so that's the first thing that you need to understand that you need to do is you have to understand the programs that you're working at or working with it doesn't matter if it's affinity designer if it's adobe photoshop or if it's any of those tablet apps you have to understand how these programs work so you can maximize its capabilities and so as an artist all i was doing is enhancing the artistic ability that i had on these programs so you need to raise your skill levels to the point where somebody will actually pay you now the next thing you need to understand is who is going to pay you well the beautiful part about what i was doing at that time god had laid everything out for me perfectly i was in the car business at the time but i had also learned a lot about the nightlife industry i was actually doing nightlife events on the side for some friends of mine shooting photos at night clubs and things like that and i saw these people making nightlife flyers and i thought to myself i could do that so i started taking my photoshop designs and started making flyers for my own events and started promoting my own nightlife events and next thing you know i had a nightlife promotions business it was okay it wasn't a big income provider but it was a lot of fun i was in my early teens and coming into my 20s and so i was really starting to get a lot of experience in the nightlife world and i saw a big opportunity for nightlife flyers and so that's my first initial design world that i came into was the nightlife flyer design working in restaurants and nightclubs and bars and things like that and so i actually landed my first client in that niche and that's what you need to have is you need to have a niche whether it's skateboarding whether it's cycling whether it's in restaurants it doesn't matter what your niche is there's so many niches that you can go into and you want to build your name and reputation after i did a few nightlife flyers for myself for free right just to promote my own events i ended up getting approached by a guy who owned a bar and that guy ended up not just becoming a client of mine but one of my greatest friends and mentors throughout my whole life larry in fact the guy that rented this building that i'm in here right now with me a few years back and the third thing was as soon as i started doing graphic design for all these nightlifes and started getting one client then two clients then three clients people started wanting my work and next thing you know people were seeking me out i wasn't having to go hit them up they were seeking me out to do their flyers because they saw the caliber of work that i was doing and all i was doing was modeling or cloning another designer that i really liked and respected so that's a big deal you got to take your flyer designs put them online print them out show them to people have conversations this is a very big deal an important part of why i was able to scale so quickly is because i had what they call social proof i was able to get those clients to talk about me to talk about hey i'll sit down in front of you right now and we'll design the flyer together none of my competitors did that they saw their flyer designs come together right to life right in front of their face and so they talked about me i gave them a story to tell about other people and that's an encouragement i have for you is push yourself outside of your comfort zone it wasn't comfortable designing right in front of a client but what it did is it taught me how to do it quickly and it taught me how to do it very well and i was able to get feedback from them right on the spot so there was no gaps or delays in communication between going back and forth between emails and text messages and things like that they were sitting there right there in front of me within a couple hours i was able to produce them a flyer that they loved and my pricing went from 30 to 50 to 75 to a point where eventually i was charging as much as 250 dollars to design one flyer the next thing that i did because i surrounded myself with titans like larry is i kept learning youtube was starting to pop up and become popular so i started watching youtube videos i started reading books i was going to the library and looking at other books on graphic design i started studying other designers i started taking courses around that time and learning what the best graphic designers in the world were doing what styles they were implementing what colors so i was continuously learning i was always a student if you're going to be a self-taught designer you have to be self-taught you have to teach yourself if you're not going to get that education you have to be accountable and show up for yourself and actually go out of your way to teach yourself and you can learn more on your own than you could in college because you're going at their pace there's no limit to how fast you can teach yourself you can teach yourself as fast as much as you want to invest into yourself on a daily basis you can read one book a week you could read 10 books a week it's just all up to you if you learn how to speed read right so there's no limitations to how fast you can learn and if you put yourself into a space where you're showing up for yourself every day and you're accountable and you remain open-minded to learning and just learning one two three four or ten things every single day that's going to compound and who you are today will be completely different than who you are in a year from now so that's my encouragement i want to share that with you this is a very big deal for you to understand you got to do these things and then the last piece that you have to think about as a self-taught designer is making more offers for me when i got in trouble when i was really young and i had to go to jail i realized that the more offers i made every day it was a numbers game the more opportunities i was gonna have and i got more no's but i was also gonna get more yeses if i only talked to 10 people a day and eight of them told me no and i got two yeses versus talking to 50 people a day and i got five yeses that is what increased my income so if you want to make more money if you want to become more successful and you want to move the ball down the field faster you got to make more offers and in the beginning you're going to have to start with low prices it may make 10 15 20 bucks an hour as long as you're not losing money doing graphic design as your side hustle as a side gig you can eventually replace your full-time income from your side hustle as you gain the skills once you become good enough you can start to almost name your price nowadays when i do design i don't even quote an hourly rate i don't even quote a per project price i'm all about solving the problems of the businesses and they pay me a percentage of the problem that i'm going to solve if i can produce them a flyer or a brochure or a business card or something that i know is going to make them twenty thousand thirty thousand forty thousand or fifty thousand dollars at the end of the year i'm gonna charge a percentage of what i'm gonna produce for them in solving that problem if i can make somebody a million dollars in 12 months like i've done on numerous occasions what is that worth should i not make a hundred thousand dollars to solve that problem all the other competitors they've worked with in the past haven't been able to solve that problem because they've nickeled and dimed them and they haven't made a serious investment into solving that problem so that's who you truly should be at the end of the day as a designer as a person that's gonna go out there and serve and solve problems and that's the way you make real money that's gonna actually move the needle for your future and actually build something that you can scale so that's my encouragement for you guys today as i want you to go out there educate yourself learn how to become talented become skilled and have the right mindset because mindset is very important you got to go out there and build a niche find your niche where you can get in something that you already do something you already know you already have the terminology whether that's the car business or the nightlife industry it doesn't matter find your niche make sure that you're actually showing the work that you do getting recommendations and referrals make sure that you're actually continuing to learn ongoing every single day that you learn something new every day and the last part was making more offers this is super important this is how i became as successful as i am and i'm still on the journey i still have a long way to go i'm still learning new things every day so i thank you guys so much for watching i look forward to seeing you guys on the next video i'm adrienne boycell and as always keep looking up

Channel: Adrian Graphics & Marketing

Views: 2,282

Keywords: How To Become A Graphic Designer Without a degree, graphic design career without degree, how to become a freelance graphic designer without a degree, How to become a graphic designer, how to become a designer, become a graphic designer, how to become graphic designer, graphic design career, how to get paid as a graphic designer, learn graphic design at home free, graphic design, self taught graphic designer, Graphic design for beginners, Learn graphic design, graphic designer

Id: n6EWhB4kwI0

Length: 9min 18sec (558 seconds)

Published: Mon Feb 15 2021