A Guide to Industrial Designers
A designer is a person who, with the help of his/her skills and expertise, designs and provides structure to objects and their functionality. A designer uses various designing tools to analyze, assess and visualize the results of his/her creative process. A designer works on a creative project from the very beginning till the end, visualizing, modeling, designing and making changes along the way. There are designers who work for a single firm, designing specific products, whereas there are many others who work as freelance designers, offering their services to numerous clients, as per their wish and capability.
A designer is not only found in the fashion industry, but in every sector and profession. Designers are found in every field, such as the aerospace industry, automobiles, engineering, electronics, healthcare, education, multimedia, printing, etc. In recent times, the fashion world has also witnessed the rise of numerous fashion designers who have made an impact on the global fashion scene. Fashion designers can work in the designing department of any company, developing their ideas into reality through the help of their skills and expertise.
Though there are several design roles available in the market, fashion designer and graphic designer are two of the most popular categories. Though both of them play a vital role in the designing process, yet they differ in many ways. While the fashion designer creates the concept or the layout of the product, the graphic designer does the actual visual part of the product. They are also required to do other types of jobs like testing of electronic and software products, creating concept paintings, illustrations and many more.
These two categories of design roles are widely used by many companies and firms. They both concentrate on different aspects, which makes it difficult for a company or a designer to do both. They usually follow different methods while developing the products, though one is more concentrated in creating new designs and the other in improving the usability and visual aspect of the product. Both of these designer roles require an equal amount of knowledge and skills.
A successful designer should be able to understand the taste and the needs of the people and the design should reflect that. They should be skilled to create attractive designs and use innovative graphics and unique visual elements in their work. Most of the designers are of great caliber but there are many who have failed due to improper education and lack of focus on the specific job. Some of the best graphic designers came up after retirement, after they failed to find a job with proper wages. Many of the industrial designers or product designers who had joined well paying firms after retirement, started their own firm or founded their own product designing company.
The most common type of designer is the one, who does both product design and graphic design together. This person is called as Industrial Designer. There is no limit to the number of projects you can ask for when it comes to the industrial designers, but mostly, they are involved in only few specific types of projects. They do a lot of motion graphics for advertising campaigns, but are very much absent in doing 3D computer graphics. They might come up with outstanding user experience though.