By: farquaar

With so many graphic designers, website designers and logo designers competing in the field, it is more important than ever to specialise in a particular area and be top rather than covering all bases and mastering none. Here’s how to find your own graphic design niche.

Stick with a style and run with it
So many young designers coming out of the art colleges today have a style taken wholesale out of the fashion mags and club flyers. Granted there’s nothing wrong with selected pilfering of ideas but to steal complete styles and typefaces means everything you see looking pretty similar. The more long sighted designers would do well to develop a style of there own and make this into a recognisable trait. Trying to ape the latest trend in clubland is going to see your designs rapidly losing favour once some bohemian brown hatter decides the current vogue for vector graphics and fonts on a 45 degree angle is yesterdays news.

Pick a particular industry and specialise
There are whole swathes of industry that are in dire need of a makeover, the building industry for example is populated by design illeterate seventies throwbacks, who couldn’t recognise a good logo if it jumped off the page and took a bite out of their backsides. An entrepreneurial young designer could clean up by proffessing to be the building industry design specialists. Bare in mind builders like big fat typefaces in keeping with their big fat bellys.

Use an existing project as a springboard to greater things
So, you were approached by the Cumbrian Choral society to produce a flyer for their Christmas bazaar. It was a satisfactory if not exactly stimulating project. And that was the end of that. Or was it…hold on, how many other church based societys are out there looking for a similar flyer to advertise their own family fun days or church roof whip rounds? Could this be a deep furrow of design work ahead…who knows?

Local Jobs for local people
Britain is a hot bed of talent, many of it arriving from overseas, increasingly from the relaxed borders of the former Soviet Bloc countries. But I’ll bet a dollar to a pound that the average little Englander would rather eat nails than go to a foreigner to place a design job. Providing you’ve been established for at least a couple of years in your locality there’s no reason why you cannot stress the locally organically reared nature of your graphic design business e.g. Golden Plum design - Serving the good local people of Midsommer Norton and Westfield since 2001. Whether the locals are inbred or not, and it would be beneficial if they were, the reassurance of a ‘local’ business to the area will keep them happy, while they munch on their cornish pasties.

Hopefully, that’s given budding graphic designers some incentive to go out there and carve a hole for yourselves. Remember it’s better to be big fish in small ponds than little fish in big ponds, or is it the other way around…whatever.

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