This is an article outlining the path of an upcoming designer. It is a guide for a person starting from scratch to learn how to design and how to make money from it. Most of the tips will be from previous experience.

My first and main tip is - visit and contribute to forums. If you think of a forum as a business you can see why they are so useful. When you first visit a forum as an upcoming designer you are a novice looking for training. People more knowledgeable can help and advise you to guide you and to better your designing. Later on once you have good designing skills people with other range of expertise can advise you on marketing and general business. Once you have got all the basics down forums then supply you with your first customers - people interested in either buying your designs or hiring you as a freelancer.

The first forum which I contributed to was ClanTemplates.com. The forum is great for people learning to design. There are lots of people experienced there but also a lot of people new which you can progress aside. Other forums that I visit are:

TalkFreelance - A great community with a healthy marketplace. Good for designing help.

DigitalPoint - Good later on when you have your own websites. Excellent for business and marketing advice.

WebForumz - Excellent for coding help and marketing yourself as a freelancer.

Others you may wish to visit are SitePoint.com and CodingForums.com.

Other types of websites which will be integral to your learning are tutorial sites. The best way to learn to design and to progress is to post on a forum with your design for a critique and tips on improvement. Tutorial sites will give you the basic skills to design websites visually in Photoshop. Photoshop is the most used software amongst designers. If you can't afford it don't worry there are plenty freeware. I would however recommend Adobe Photoshop.

Tutorial sites which I like to visit are Pixel2Life.com and Good-Tutorials.com. Those two sites should have enough tutorials for you to learn most techniques in photoshop and how to take your design in photoshop and turn it into a website.

At first your designs will probably be quite poor and feedback from forums will be negative. Don't let this discourage you. Listen to the tips on improvement and make your next design better.

Now to the fun part. You can start making money. When you have good designing skills and are making designs which people on forums love you can start to think about selling designs and doing custom design work. The first thing you should start with is selling designs on forums. This is quite simple, go to the marketplace on the forum and post your design with an asking price. The other way of making money and making more might I add is to custom design work. Again this is probably going to happen through the forum you post on (at least at first anyway).

To set yourself up for custom design work I advice buying a domain. Something which is related to you or your style of design. Next make a design to showcase your work and services and put it one that domain. You can use that site to show people as a portfolio of your work.

When you start out with custom design work you should start with low prices until your build up a portfolio of work. Once you have that you can put up your prices and become a well known designer. Remember: when you start out learning to design and also later on in your designing life to keep a professional and well mannered approach to anything online. If you don't you will acquire a bad reputation will later may come back to haunt you.

Article written for Union Graphite.com