Specialist vs Generalist: Choosing a Design Career
Should you be a specialist or a generalist, or something in between?
Over time the body of knowledge became too large for one person to learn
The renaissance man did everything. He was an artist, scientist, philosophy, architect, singer, and athlete. When humans started developing bodies of knowledge, that knowledge was concentrated in a few great minds. This allowed these individuals to have a holistic approach to answering the big questions of the day, or inventing some new technology.
Over time the body of knowledge became too large for one person to learn or retain, so specialization occurred, creating the various disciplines of study that we have today. The movement today is back toward a collaborative mind, and the focus of a lot of technological development is to facilitate combining experts in various fields into one working unit.
There will be disagreements between the experts, just as our own brains have arguments with themselves at times. The trick organizationally and technologically will be to quickly remediate the disagreements and come to a logical conclusion based on individual's areas of expertise, among other factors.
The idea of this unicorn that could do UX, design, and program web pages and apps appeared.
Should you be a specialist or a generalist, or something in between? There was a time when you could be a specialist in nearly anything. A graphic designer. A web designer. A 3d modeler. An illustrator. Those times, for the most part, are gone. I saw it happen over the course of my career. Lucky for me, I was already of the mindset that I wanted to have as many skills as I could. Graphic designers were asked to design web pages. Web designers were asked to do some coding. Developers were asked to design web pages. 3d modelers needed to be able to texture. The idea of this unicorn that could do UX, design, and program web pages and apps appeared. It's scary how many people actually fit this description. Personally I have stayed more focused on various visual arts, restricting myself mostly to front end programming (and avoiding even that whenever possible).
The reality is that in many fields you can still specialize, but in visual arts it's more difficult to do so these days. It's also more lucrative to have a more broad skill set, and it's easier to get hired both as a freelancer and as a regular employee. With that said, there are limits, particularly when starting out, to what you can adequately learn, and so you have to be pretty focused. Some skills tend to naturally clump together, and some tend to be useful across different specialties. Always work on those fundamental skills that are useful across the board, and then pick one or two specialty clumps to focus on.
The fundamentals of art and design don't change
The fundamentals of art and design don't change a whole lot. How do you draw attention to a certain part of a painting or layout (contrast, saturation, size, line directions, texture, focus)? Color saturation, hue, and color combinations (Kuler can handle a lot of this for you) are all universal. Adobe even has an app that takes an image, be it photo or painting, and creates a color swatch from it. Studying masterworks will teach so much about color use. Things like grey being the 'perfect color' thanks to it's tendency to take on a complimentary color value to the color it's next to (looks cool next to warm colors and warm next to cool colors). These fundamentals should be learned and relearned and honed throughout your career. They will improve everything you do and generally help you maintain a high attention to detail. That 'sense' you get of whether something is off.
For those going into graphic design, you're already looking at a fairly broad field. It can include print graphics, layouts, web graphics, photo manipulation, vector drawing and illustration, and even some understanding of printing processes. Many people will assume you can design a website or paint a mural. The most valuable extra skill for a graphic designer to learn, in my opinion, is web and mobile design. You'll be much more marketable if you can design the individual graphics on a site and the site's look/feel itself. You won't necessarily be figuring out the layouts/wireframes/interaction (small companies might expect it), but just being able to contribute and pick up that slack in addition to regular graphic design duties is major.
If your passion is designing web pages and mobile interfaces, but you don't like mucking about in Photoshop, I would highly recommend you get past that. There are certainly amazing web and mobile designers who aren't great at the graphical part of it, but they usually come from a developer background, not an artistic one. Again, you can specialize at big firms, but initially you're less likely to get to work at a big firm. Not only that but because you're inexperienced it's important to be available for any opportunities that come your way. Brush up on the visual arts and it'll also open your eyes to new ways to create interesting layouts and to draw attention to various interface components.
In my opinion the coming hot areas here are stylized realtime 3d graphics and 3d interaction design.
Those of you that want to do 3d animation are in an interesting place. Most big production houses are going to require you to specialize. In my opinion the coming hot areas here are stylized realtime 3d graphics and 3d interaction design. Photorealism is fine, and will continue to be an important quest in film and even games. It is, however, also the style that looks dated the quickest. It's an obvious target too, and one many are shooting for. If that's your bag, go for it, but increasingly the more artistic and stylized graphics are becoming popular. I believe this will become even more important as we move into an era of VR gaming where what looked good on a monitor looks super creepy up in your grill. This same trend will also give ample opportunity to move into interaction design for VR and AR user interfaces. Tons of work needs to be done in this area. Overall if you're in 3d it's a huge field and you will do well to learn as many facets of art and design as possible.
User Experience designers can go one of two directions. You can certainly just work in UX, but many don't understand that UX isn't UI. The way I see it there's some natural overlap between UX and SEO on one side, and UX and UI design on the other. If you're more analytic, go with UX and SEO. If you are more artistic try out UX and UI design, eventually moving into graphic design.
If you like video, you'll want to learn some motion graphics. Maybe even some basic 3d. This will help you make really nice quality video rather than vlogs.
Overall it's just a balancing act. Try to see where your strengths are create projects that will showcase them. Focus on one area, and don't get sucked into a hundred different fields, but do try to recognize opportunities to expand your skillset in an intelligent, methodical way. This is a partial list obviously, but I hope it gets you thinking about really defining your skill set and determining from the outset what your arsenal will look like when you're ready to go out and conquer the world!