Charmaine Phoswa: Being A Graphics Designer In The Industrial Revolution

Hello everyone, my name is Charmaine Phoswa and I am a Junior Multimedia and Digital Developer at Geekulcha. Aspiring to be a “grand multimedia designer” and play a part as the world evolves into the 4th Industrial Revolution.

I am living in the most exciting times of graphic and web design, and one of the fastest-growing occupations in visual arts. Being a multimedia designer means, I get to find creative ways of communicating a concept or information usually in an interactive form by skillfully manipulating, touch up here and there and synthesizing different media sources.

I've worked on the Geekulcha profile, digitally telling the Geekulcha story through Data and Interactive graphics. In this project I was in-charge of the graphical end of the profile. I got to use old and new tools to make the story come to life. Through the journey it has taught me to be sharp when visually communicating concepts, sparked my creative flair and have an innovative approach to all my designs.

"A picture is worth a thousand words", that’s when the picture is greatly designed and best told graphically rather than using words. In most cases my clients prefer insight of the data I handle. Meaning I’ll use that data to see the problem or potential solution and visually display differently.

Data visualization is highly useful for almost every step of the data science workflow, it has turned into an irreplaceable standard for today's business intelligence (BI).

A good information designer has additional skills that lend themselves toward understanding and presenting data like:

• Working directly with analysts to find additional data points
• Notice discrepancies or other issues with the dataset

Top 10 tools for young and upcoming designers

Adobe Creative Cloud - Creative Cloud gives you the entire collection of everything you need to create, collaborate and get inspired

Unity 2017.3 - 2017.3 completes the 2017 cycle introducing new features and improvements across the board for both artists and developers
Apple Final Cut Pro X

Canva - Canva is a popular tool for quickly creating social media images and infographics.

Bootstrap - Bootstrap has revolutionised development and there’s no doubt the ubiquitous framework will continue to shape how we build stuff on the web.

CodePen - A new tool lets you build websites directly inside CodePen.
Sketch - Sketch is all round winner for web design community that offers hundreds of plugins to make a designers work flow easier.

Figma - Figma is an interface design tool that enables multiple designers to collaborate in real-time.

PicMonkey - PicMonkey describes itself as a photo editor, design maker, and idea realizer. You have access to everything related to photo editing, collage-making, and graphic design.

Affinity Designer - Affinity Designer is a proprietary vector graphics editor.

Being a designer has increased my thirst for learning, it has given me the desire to be a contributor to the digital evolution. I’ve come to realize that everything I do is experiential, from a video, logo sign to infographics to a web page. Everything I do needs to take my viewers to another dimension. My future as a designer is to excel creatively and maybe one day own a multimedia and digital empire.