Seeking Career Direction, Want A Job Using Photoshop

You don't have a useless BA because a BA is not vocational training. You have a college degree, which is not worthless because having one is a requirement for many jobs. Congratulations; well done. I do not believe you can launch a career on web design on the basis of Photoshop. The one area that can require little to no coding but a lot of PS is UX design and you have no training, experience or portfolio. I think digital compositing is a brilliant idea. But I agree with the advice to stop expecting there is a special snowflake out there waiting for you if you can just find it: it's called work because it isn't fun. It pays bills and puts food on the table.

You say that you have learned Photoshop, but what does that really mean? Did you learn how to use it to create a cohesive visual system? A designer is somebody who solves visual problems, with whatever tool is necessary. Even though I have used it for my entire design career, I have always thought Photoshop to be a terrible tool for web design. The grid is static, the type rendering still can't match what you see in the browser, color palettes are unintelligent, the type styles are slow and unintuitive, smart objects can't be shared across documents, there's no multiple page support, and layers get messy fast. If any of the following sound interesting to you, perhaps web design is worth pursuing: --Translating a company's visual identity to the web --Designing for multiple screen sizes --Building out designs to work across multiple browsers --Creative concepting for interactive media Just liking Photoshop is not a good reason to go into web design. If you like visual communication, user experience and interactive problem solving, then go for it, but please find a design school--don't try to learn it all through videos.

"The one area that can require little to no coding but a lot of PS is UX design and you have no training, experience or portfolio. " I've been in UX since the late 90s. I haven't used Photoshop for work since the early 2000s. UX work these days mostly trends toward rapidly iterated, low-fidelity prototypes. None of my colleagues in web agencies or in-house positions use Photoshop. Psychology and anthropology are actually more of an appropriate background for UX work. OP: I think it's a terrible plan to try to choose a career based on pretty limited knowledge of one software product. Do you know the product roadmap for Photoshop? Will it still be around in 10 years? The tool is not the work. A hammer isn't building a house. Here's the thing: With a liberal arts degree and some moderate graphic editing skills, you're qualified for lots of entry- level office jobs like editorial assistant, communications associate, etc. In this job market, you should probably widen your options and apply for everything that looks mildly interesting to you. But you'll need a story to be a good interview candidate. "I like Photoshop" is not a good story; I wouldn't hire someone who told me that. I would, however, hire some who had a story like "I'm new to the working world and don't have a long-term plan yet. For years I've been interested in human behavior, particularly cognitive science. Lately I've been studying how small tweaks in the labeling and placement of controls in airplane cockpit design can make the difference between high and low air crash survival rates. I don't have an extensive portfolio, but here's a personal project I did where I refactored and relabeled some controls in an Airbus 330 cockpit based on NTSB findings and the studies of Joe Blow, a human factors psychologist."

Can't speak to the bigger questions, but web design is definitely moving away from someone being able to mostly use Photoshop. You'd either want to combine that with some ability to develop websites using HTML and CSS or or have other art skills (Illustrator, InDesign, digital painting, etc.)

I started on a similar path as you and currently work with Photoshop in web design. I think the trick is to be really good at it if you want someone to pay you to do it. You will probably use some photoshop in web design, but you will definitely use it in graphic design. Graphic design is hard and you need to be skilled (not talented). Talent is an innate ability. Skill is something you can be taught or teach to yourself. Photoshop, illustrator... whatever adobe is selling... can be learned along with the skill of design. A career in photography would allow for a lot of photo manipulation but it doesn't sound like its something you're really interested in. Most people who work in photoshop don't create works from scratch. Even the people who do digital painting import 3D models, textures, landscapes, etc. to help with their works. Also most tend to use a different program like Corel with a tablet interface like Wacom. So if digital painting for games like D&D and Magic:The Gathering is what you're into, start doing digital paintings with those tools. Since you sound apathetic, uninterested, moderately skilled, mildly talented and somewhat lazy I think the perfect job for you would be to do the graphics for a comedy central program like The Daily Show. I wish I was joking, but I'm not. Good luck to you, don't take yourself too seriously.

Are you into film at all? I have a job that you may want to look into,https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_compositing. It's basically image manipulation similar to photoshop, but at 24 frames a second. You would have to learn new programs, but if you enjoy that sort of thing, it could be fun. Visual effects is so huge in film and tv these days that there are jobs all over the world - it is the sort of job that you have to start at the bottom and work your way up, and is very dependent on your skill and talent as to how well you do. I love it, though! commonly used programs are http://www.thefoundry.co.uk/products/nuke/, http://www.autodesk.com/products/flame-family/features/flame-3d-visual-fx/all/gallery-view and https://www.blackmagicdesign.com/products/fusion. They re all really amazing - I use both Flame and Fusion, and the cool thing about fusion is that their latest version is available as a free download, so you could try it out and use online tutorials to teach yourself enough to have a chance at an entry-level position. I'm happy to answer questions if you have them.

Photoshop is still very much used in web design. But it won't be easy to launch a career in doing cool and lucrative web stuff solely on the basis of your knowledge of the intricacies of that one bit of software. For a start, you'll need strong (and current) graphic design skills - the ability to put together a design (or a series of designs) within the parameters set out by clients and others. Can you quickly knock together five different professional-looking concepts for a website for a quirky startup or an established luxury brand? I've known people who can throw those sorts of things together in an afternoon. Mostly they've been people from a strong design background (art/design schools). And despite skills I couldn't hope to learn in a hundred years, they weren't terribly well paid for what they did. In a smaller company, you may be expected to be able to slice up a design and render it in clean, minimal (and valid) HTML5 and CSS, ready for developers to use as the basis for a working website. You may even need to know jQuery or another framework to be able to add interactive elements to your designs. I don't want to put you off - it can be a wonderful career if you can tick all the right boxes. But it can take several years to become the sort of jack-of-all-trades that appeals to a smaller web design firm, and even longer to become an in-demand specialist in one particular tool or technique. If I were starting again from where you are, I'd probably set aside a lot of spare time to learn as much as possible (and there's a heck of a lot to learn) about the whole web development process. I'd want to keep an open mind - we don't always know what we're going to enjoy. Build yourself a website, just for fun. Learn to write good, clean HTML and understand how CSS enables you to set things out just so. Learn how to replicate your Photoshop design by using borders, backgrounds, transparency, and well-optimised image files. There are lots of little, separate but interrelated skills, and you may find that you enjoy the intricacy and precision of all the little things that go into turning a static image into a working website. It's something that will probably take you a few frustrating months to get a handle on, and a few years to get really good at. It may lead to a career, or it may remain a hobby. Above all, though, you need to have the desire to keep learning new stuff, basically forever. I got my first job as a developer at 25, by the way, and I was very low in self-confidence - I came from a background in science and teaching, and didn't think I'd measure up. By 29 I was doing really well. I decided I quite liked what I'd seen of web design and development, so I started messing with that in my spare time. By 32 I was working mostly in animation, web-based games and other interactive content. I'm a developer again (and an IT Director!) now, working with databases and web interfaces for things that aren't exactly exciting, as well as writing lots of documents. But it's still fun, and I'm still learning.

Art as a career is tough to do unless you have an independent source of support and have been networking your ass off ever since you were 15. But you like graphics? You like math? You like applying math to graphics? You have interests in seeing things from a new perspective? You have interests in psych, anthro, socio, and other -ologies? GIS might be something worth looking into.

I recommend getting a job that appeals to your analytical side for money, and do art in your spare time. I was going to suggest Actuarial Science, but I don't think you have the right background for it. You have to be quite a bit of a math genius for it. Husbunny is an Actuary, he sits in a cube and fools around with SQL and Excel all day. Very low stress, and he spends about 25% of his time studying for one of the 9 actuarial exams (he's passed 3 so far.) He's also done Calc, Trig and regression analysis. So...would have been a thought a few years ago, but probably not realistic now. Rather than learn to code, you might be better served by learning a particular program and becoming an Administrator. I'm a Salesforce.com administrator. I got a job where I learned by doing. It's pretty easy to learn, and we are in high demand. You team that with DEEP Excel skillz and you'll be golden. It's fun because it's formulas and math, but you can also do really pretty things like charts and graphs. With Salesforce, there's also a path, from User, to Admin, to Developer to Architect. Salesforce is fun and easy. But there are other things to learn, SAP, Oracle, basically, just look at the want ads and look at the programs, do some tutorials on line and see what resonates with you. There are Photoshop jobs, and they are very competitive to get and don't pay as well as other gigs.