Potential Design Careers for Your Children?

This is a partnered post.

Everyone wants the best for their loved ones, especially their children. Being an adult and having some life experience allows you to think forward about their future and prospects. Wondering how they are going to manage everyday life, and how they are going to survive, what they are going to do for a living. These kind of worries are far beyond the understanding of the average child and trying to persuade them to care about such issues usually results in resentment rather than interest. It is likely you have heard of someone being forced to play piano by their parents at a young age, and yes it might seem wonderful, kids learn things really quickly.They could probably be a master by the time they reach adulthood but that very rarely actually happens. In most cases children start resenting going to piano lessons purely due to the fact that they are being made to do it, not because they have something against the idea of playing the instrument. This whole idea largely applies to just about any sort of activity, not just piano. Let’s look at some ways you could get your children in activities which have the potential of leading into a career somewhere down the line.

Image source: Pexels

Art

Before you stop reading, keep in mind that there is more to art than just being a penniless painter on the streets of Paris. Other than the traditional “fruitlessly trying to sell paintings”, in the modern age where advertising and digital design are so commonplace and so ubiquitous to so many industries that having some artistic skills is nothing but a centrepiece to your child’s potential skillset. Other than the general “get your kids some crayons”, getting them exposed to some graphic design oriented programs is an excellent idea. Perhaps, you should learn a little bit yourself by going to some Adobe illustrator training classes then letting your kids see all the cool things you can do on a computer. With the amount of time the average child or teenager spends in front of the computer this might be a good way of approaching the topic, building on their computer-based interests.

Design

Illustrator is a good place to start if you want to get into the world of digital design because it is relatively simple to perform basic tasks. Allowing you to make various graphics out of shapes and a plethora of other helpful tools, despite that it is still one of the big three popular graphic programs. Adobe Illustrator is mostly used for (you guessed it) illustration, often used to make vector graphics used for logos, typography, billboards and all sorts of other advertising as well as children’s books and various others.

Adobe Photoshop is used for photo manipulation, retouching, also creating graphics and even rendering things in 3D to name a few. Unlike illustrator it does not work usually work with vectors, rather it works with pixels, giving it its own field in digital design and often used alongside Illustrator. Photoshop is very appealing to children for a number of reasons, mostly because it allows for rather effective and appealing results with rather simple tools. I remember seeing schoolchildren blown away by the various brushes you can download online for photoshop and use like stamps, creating cityscapes or landscapes from a few basic elements

Image source: Pexels

Last on the list, is Adobe InDesign. While InDesign might not be the most visually appealing tool for the eye of the average child, it is an extremely powerful tool used across the globe. InDesign is first and foremost a desktop publishing software program, used to all sorts of publications. This includes flyers, magazines, newspapers, books, ebooks, presentations and whatever else comes to mind. Anything which is heavy on text, gets handled by InDesign. Getting someone interested in it might be difficult, but maybe you should attempt doing some group projects with your kids, for example, creating a photo album from your last family holiday or something along those lines. If you manage to get it printed and bound they are bound to see what they did on a physical and tangible object which must be at least somewhat enticing.

If your kids pick up even basic things how layers work in photoshop, or how to use the pen tool in illustrator at a young age, they will be miles ahead of million upon millions of adults who pay for special courses to get taught these simple things in their mid 30s, giving them that competitive edge.