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Graphic Designer Skills: What Design Students Need To Develop

Inkbot Design

A strong design sample set, or portfolio , helps show their value. What's more valuable: formal design education or self-taught skills? The market doesn't care about your degree—it cares about your portfolio. A self-taught designer with 50 completed projects beats a graduate with 5 class assignments every single time.

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Chris Charlton on life as an in-house illustrator: singular focus, shifting styles, and staying true to the craft

Creative Boom

In a world that often celebrates freelance illustrators as personal brands, with their signatures neatly stamped across a portfolio, Chris stands for a quieter kind of creative power. That self-sufficiency is hard-won and the product of years of learning to think like a designer and draw like an illustrator, blending both mindsets.

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How to calculate your day rate as an Illustrator

Lisa Maltby

What does 150/day work out at as a yearly self-employed income? However, as we all know the self-employed dont get paid holiday so we need to deduct this time. less time may be spent on self promotion and more on communication once you have a reputation and more enquiries).

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From fine art to Photoshop: Sam Gilbey's illustrious career so far

Creative Boom

In case it's unclear from his portfolio, Gilbey loves film, so some of his favourite projects have been making covers for physical media, often for reissues of classics, such as True Romance or The Karate Kid Trilogy.

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How creatives are surviving the 2025 slowdown

Creative Boom

And it's the self-employed and small creative businesses who feel the impact first and most acutely. Too many rejections and too much time spent making a portfolio and CV all shiny. A confluence of economic pressures and rapid advancements in AI has created the perfect storm.

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Humility: An Essential Value

A List Apart

For example, this iteration of my personal portfolio site (ā€œthe pseudoroomā€) from that era was experimental, if not a bit heavy- handed, in the visual communication of the concept of a living sketchbook. Maybe an icon library is employed with selections that vaguely relate to their respective content. Very skeuomorphic.

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Need a Killer Resume Presentation? How Can This InDesign Template Transform Your Application?

We And The Color

Highlight Key Achievements Visually: Think charts for skills, timelines for experience, or even portfolio snippets integrated seamlessly. Essentially, a resume presentation helps you stand out by offering a richer, more engaging snapshot of your professional self. However, it often lacks personality and visual appeal.