Graphic design class–these students are literally designing their future career. 

Many people know of famous logos from McDonald’s golden arches to Target’s famous red bullseye.These designs don’t just magically appear; they are carefully thought out and designed. Graphic designers are the component that makes this all possible. 

Elkhart High School’s Career Center is home to a graphic design class. Many students from in and outside the school come and pursue their career in graphic design. Elkhart HIgh School junior Carly Bedel shares how she joined the graphic design class. “I was originally going to take Early Childhood Education, but I asked to take Graphic Design instead. I always wondered if the Career Center had an editing program, and I was so excited when I heard they did! I love this class so much!”

Everyone has different hobbies or things he or she likes. And, how each gets into those hobbies also is different. Every student in the Graphic Design class had his or her own special reasoning for looking into the career. “Graphic design is something I have wanted to do since early middle school,” states Elkhart High School junior Dilan Baena. “I enjoyed the idea of designing posters, different advertising, and logos that keep up with today’s trends. Making logos that could be recognized easily was always something that I have wanted to do,” he continues. “I’ve seen different influencers or companies have marks or logos that they use on social media to identify themselves, which gave me the thought of wanting to do something like that.”

For people like Bedel, their love of graphic design is more fresh. “What got me interested in pursuing graphic design was during quarantine,” she states. “I wanted to try something new. I have always watched edits on Instagram of my favorite TV show/movie characters. I started watching YouTube editors like Lauren and Vivian Shea. I started to edit photos and videos of my favorite TV show characters and posted them on Instagram.”

Graphic Design is a type of art, meaning that the creators are artists. All artists has their favorite piece they have worked on. Baena talks all about his favorite project. “My favorite project has been our compositing project, which is a blend of different tools we have learned and used–and overall a somewhat freestyle project. I enjoyed this project since there wasn’t a set theme for the whole class to follow and just see where your imagination takes you. It could be an inspirational image of a person scaling a mountain or a person falling upward. To me,” Baena concludes, “it was a great first project to see what we were able to do in this class and a good project to look back on to see where we started.”

When going into graphic design, Bedel thinks there is one important thing to remember: “Don’t stress; you’ll do just fine.”