If you are a creative type looking to make a career for yourself in a graphic design-related field or you are looking to establish yourself as a professional content creator of some kind, you will almost certainly want to learn how to use Photoshop. Graphic Designers in NYC make significantly above the national average. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, Graphic Designers in NYC have the second highest average wages in the nation at about $80,000 annually (trailing Washington, D.C) and the second most full-time jobs available (second to California, but significantly more than D.C. explaining the discrepancy in wages).
NYC is also home to some of the largest cultural and artistic communities in the world, ranging from major museums and art centers to small community-driven artistic collectives. This makes learning Photoshop appealing to anyone who is hoping to make a name for themselves in the field of digital art since the tool is such an important aspect of the digital design process when it comes to creative expression. Students interested in becoming professional artists or photographers are likely to want to spend time learning the finer points of Photoshop.
Photoshop is also just a useful skill to have if you have to do any kind of mass media communication with a large audience. While this is most frequently thought of in advertising and art, it can be as simple as learning how to develop posters and flyers for your group or event in Photoshop or learning how to make flashy announcements to post to social media in order to remind audiences of something you want them reminded of. If you are holding a block party, a church picnic, or a rummage sale, for instance, learning Photoshop can make it easier to announce and advertise your event with only a small bit of training.
NYC industries that use Photoshop
If you are looking for a job working with Photoshop in NYC, you are likely to find a lot of options on the table, especially if you have training in graphic design skills beyond just understanding Photoshop. Learning how to use Photoshop can open the doors to work on graphic design-related projects in a wide range of different industries, making NYC an ideal place to look for a job.
The most obvious place that graphic designers will find work is at design studios. NYC is home to dedicated creative and digital design firms like Harper+Scott, Lucid, Utility, and Mekanism, all of which have large and small clients with whom they work to design everything from ad campaigns to product packaging. These design studios are always in the market for skilled graphic designers who can help meet the needs of their clients by using tools like Photoshop (and its sister programs) to create new and exciting designs. NYC is also frequently seeing emerging start-ups come and go as the demand for graphic design services increases.
Graphic Designers also work in the traditional marketing side of most consumer-facing industries, and Photoshop is a key part of their toolkits. Home of Madison Avenue, the advertising industry has a massive footprint in NYC culture, with major firms like StrawberryFrog, TBWA Worldwide, Organic, Inc., and DDB Worldwide still occupying space on Madison Avenue (with many others having moved to other parts of the city). If you are looking to channel your inner Don Draper, learning Photoshop to create content for clients is going to be an essential part of the process.
Advertising is also a vital part of the city’s tourist economy, and any landmark or attraction worth its salt is going to hire out professional designers to help develop the right iconography and brand identity for the experience they are selling. This includes major aspects of the design process, like the creation of posters for Broadway musicals and the creation of logos for tourism campaigns. It is also key for the various basics of tourist advertising since the goal is to reach out to potential visitors, and it is employed by everyone from major NYC landmarks, like museums and parks, to small restaurants and shops looking to make a name for themselves amongst the competition.
Finally, if you are interested in working in politics, activism, or the profit sector, NYC is second only to Washington, D.C., in terms of offering opportunities to find work. All of these fields are brought together by a need for skilled designers who can assist in the mass communication projects that institutions and campaigns undertake to persuade, inform, or reach potential voters, supporters, and donors. If you are looking to break into this side of the professional world, either in a campaign for one of the many, many elected positions that make up NYC’s government (and New York’s government at large) or as part of a nonprofit aiming to make the world a better place, learning Photoshop and other graphic design skills can be a powerful rhetorical and persuasive tool that it pays to learn.
Other practical considerations when learning Photoshop
While it is important to consider the long-term financial and professional advantages of learning skills like Photoshop and other graphic design tools, it is also important to consider the practical matters that you’ll need to deal with during the beginning of the training process. The first and most obvious aspect to consider is the cost of your training and the amount of training you think you need to accomplish your goals (since these two things tend to go hand in hand). Learning Photoshop in NYC is likely to be more expensive than it would in other cities (or in an online context) because the cost of living in the city is higher, but the alternative is that the salaries newly minted graphic designers can expect to earn in the city will be higher than in other areas because of that increased cost of living.
You’ll also want to consider how much training you expect to need when you are looking for a Photoshop course. One of the beauties of the application is that it is used by hobbyist photographers and professional graphic designers alike, with tons of different levels of proficiency you can shoot for in between. If you are looking for a career in graphic design, you will need to enroll in a Photoshop certificate course that covers a lot more than just the software itself, especially if you are looking for a job in a competitive city like NYC. Plus, you will need extensive Photoshop training, since an introductory course won’t be enough to get you prepared for a career in the field. By contrast, if you are looking to learn how to make flyers for a band’s gigs or create posters for an upcoming event you are organizing, you probably don’t need to drop a few grand on a career-focused graphic design program.
Finally, you’ll need to consider the practical logistics of learning Photoshop. This includes the basics of acquiring the application to work on your own, having a machine that can run Photoshop, and being able to commute to and from your course if you are learning in person. NYC may be home to one of the most robust public transportation systems in the states, but it is still worth considering how long of a commute you’ll have when looking into a course since that can add significant cost and time investment to your program if you are either unlucky or have limited options.
