An Overview

Welcome to The Real World

In the corporate world, every graphic artist is a specialist and a generalist.

Graphic artists specialize in — or at least emphasize their skills in — what they do best and like to do the most. That’s true in any artist’s life. That’s true in this assignment.

A skilled and gainfully employed graphic artist may specialize in one or a couple of this assignment’s categories — Photographic Art, Cover Design, Digital Paintings, Surreal Collages or Typographical Art. The artist also may be a superb data geek, geographer or cartographer, or economics devotee, and work in infographics or maps that explain some of the world’s most complex issues.

But regardless of any artist’s specialty/specialties/uniqueness, every artist must be able to do it all, at least passably. Because every artist who works for a corporation, a design house, a media organization or a highly demanding client will be called upon to incorporate their art into a cover, a poster, a greeting card or a lunchbox at some point. If the artist works for a media organization, the deadline for “at some point” is five minutes ago, whether for digital, broadcast or print. If the artist works for a corporation or a client, then not only was the unrealistic deadline last week, but there will be “just one more tiny change, please.” Tiny, as in humongous.

So:

Specialist.

Generalist.

Artist.