How to Become a Graphic Designer in Kansas City, Missouri

Kansas City, Missouri, with more than 450,000 local residents and as many as 50,000 commercial businesses, is a popular home town for artists pursuing careers in communications design.  Companies all over Kansas City hire graphic designers for many different kinds of visual tasks.

Kansas City Schools and Training Programs for Graphic Design

A number of excellent Kansas City colleges offer degree programs in graphic design.  Popular local design schools include University of Missouri, Vatterott College, Kansas City Art Institute and Metropolitan Community College.  Some aspiring designers earn their degrees online.  Among the most successful schools offering online degree programs in graphic design are The Art Institutes, DeVry, ITT Tech, University of Phoenix.

Graphic designers at Kansas City colleges often major in fine arts or visual communications.  Required subjects may include website design, digital art, traditional media, marketing, photography, animation, technical drawing, typography, printmaking and other relevant topics.

Working as a Graphic Designer in Kansas City, Missouri

Graphic designers in Kansas City, Missouri remain in vigorous demand.  Companies hire designers to create logos, render visual product descriptions, make promotional artwork and develop educational materials, as well as designing book covers, web pages, product packaging, street signs, building interiors, textiles, assembly instructions and more. 

Some Kansas City graphic designers work for leading local ad agencies such as Kuhn-Wittenborn, Gragg Advertising, Horizon Project, McCormick Advertising and Muller-Bressler-Brown.  Other local artists design film credits and promotional artwork for top Kansas City motion picture producers like Blue City Digital, Prism Productions, publishfree.com, Riverkey Creative and Substation-K.

Graphic designers in Kansas City, Missouri also work for landscaping professionals, art galleries, patent offices, software developers, news syndicates, book publishers, retailers, real estate agents and internet start-ups.  United States commercial businesses currently employ more than 250,000 graphic designers.  Their salaries vary depending on education, skill and related experience, among other factors.  About half of all graphic designers employed in United States earn from $30,000 to $60,000 per year.  However, this data does not include the unreported incomes of self employed graphic designers.

Skills of a Graphic Designer

Primarily, graphic designers communicate messages to consumers by manipulating the size, color, location, orientation and motion of elements within a given area, as well as the backgrounds against which those elements appear.  In other words, graphic designers communicate with images rather than writing.  Most professional graphic design work involves layout – the arrangement of forms and features on a page.

Graphic designers affect the way we see what we are looking at.  They accomplish this with various techniques such as juxtaposing forms, combining colors, shifting light, changing backgrounds and altering the physical features of words to enhance or diminish their meaning.  Desirable attributes of professional graphic designers include intense focus, creativity and unshakable perfectionism.  Kansas City designers who possess these fine qualities can occupy the most lucrative positions the best local businesses.  Artists who lack these crucial traits can always deliver pizza.