Unit 11 Design Industry

Design Industry

The Design Industry is very important and greatly affects the visual world. It communicates, helps digest information and influences everyday decisions.

The design industry does a variety of things and is a vibrant, varied and dynamic creative sector. There are many different areas within the design industry, and covers everything including Brand Design, interior design,packaging design, product design, furniture design, Fashion and textiles and Copywriting to Graphic Design. These many areas enable a range of related job roles such as management, account handling, teaching, researching and public relations.

The Brand design sector brings together all processes and information from an organisation. This could be house style of colour, logos, fonts or even images. This creates a distinct identity and gives a personality to an organisation.this enables it to communicate with its target audience to promote a product, person or service.

The Design Industry is mostly in the south east of England and is in high demand in London.

The way that it links into other businesses is that with out design or design departments companies wouldn’t be able to reach their customers or future clients. Also all the areas of design link in together as a lot of them are needed to prepare new technology so that designers can work on their products and designs. Designers now need to be multi skilled and able to work across many different disciplines. The customer now requires a package rather than going to many different places for each part of design. 

As technology develops the design industry thrives. All different systems can evolve together and converge to deliver text, audio and video. This helps designers in many different areas to communicate ideas and advertise through social networking sites. It also means designers have to cater their designs for the new platforms. It also enables designers a wide range of research and design materials.

Globalisation impacts the design industry by creating a larger niche which will be more flexible and accessible to many different sectors of design and cultures. This means more and more designs are produced on mass and will decrease in quality. This will isolate independent design companies and decrease their work load but also create a new niche as people always want something different and unique. A Disadvantage of globalisation is that many designs will not stay loyal to the cultures and places they came from. For example the Swedish design at ikea is no longer Swedish design its just design. As ikea is made available everywhere it looses its cultural identity. 

Job Roles-

The Design Industry has many different job roles but all of which are hard to get into. At the moment a lot of young people are studying design and finding no way into the job they envisaged.

Graphic designers are from all walks of life and there is fierce competition for roles in the industry.

Roles may vary from company to company some require higher skills than others.

Creative designers are highly creative jobs where the focus is more on be able to generate highly developed concepts than the attention to detail. These jobs are mostly within agencies.

Artworker jobs are mainly within a studio and concentrate on detail, layouts and being able to turn ideas into a creative format. Speed and accuracy are essential for artworker jobs.

Creative artworkers are common in medium agencies and focus on individuals creating designs using a blend of different skills. Speed and an eye for detail can open up a career pathway and become head of design. 

Illustrators provide designs for a range of design sectors such as games designs, medical illustrations, and general illustration. most illustrators are freelance or work for major agencies.

Photo retouching jobs require a high skill level and are mainly within agencies or re pro graphics companies.specialist companies such as catalogue production carry out a high volume of re touching. 

web designers and developers tend to be freelance and creative individuals with skills such as database design and programming language. 

Getting into the design industry can be a hard prospect for younger generation who have just come out of education. most employers now focus on workplace experience rather than qualifications. this leaves only a few entry opportunities such as internships, apprentices, volunteering  and taking on junior roles.
an internship is a form of training given on the job. they can be paid or unpaid work depending on the company and level of position. Businesses are taking on more unpaid interns as a way to ensure free labour for desperate graduates. The law however states that any intern who meets the criteria for being a worker should be entitled to national minimum wage.
An internship may not give the benefits of paid work but will increase desirability on completion as more experience is gained.