1. 26
2. 3 years full time, plus part time and freelance work while I was a student.
3. BFA in Graphic Design

• Full time job – InDesign, Photoshop, Illustrator, Sizmek
• Freelance and personal projects (mostly illustration, some web stuff) – the adobe programs above plus ArtRage, Sublime Text, Cyberduck

6. 35-40k depending on bonus, plus really good benefits (I live in a low cost of living area, so that’s actually a pretty decent wage)

7. Develop varied interests. For example, the photo manipulations and digital painting I do for fun have helped me become really familiar with photoshop and learn a lot of tricks and shortcuts. Also, being a knowledge sponge means there’s a lot more concepts to draw from during the creative process.

If you go to school for design, try to get relevant work experience before you graduate. I did some internships, freelance projects, and worked at my university’s print shop during the school year.

Don’t think a marketing or design agency is the only place you can find design work. A lot of companies have in-house departments with designers. There’s tradeoffs to working as an in-house designer, but a lot of the advantages and disadvantages will depend on the individual company’s structure and workplace culture. A lot of fresh designers only focus on getting into agencies, so those entry level positions tend to be more difficult to land due to the flood of applicants.

When applying to companies which are not marketing or design agencies, you don’t necessarily have to be super experienced with their product. Don’t be afraid to apply even if you’ve never heard of them before. Just make sure you do some preliminary research and get a basic handle on their business before applying, and research their industry segment as a whole before doing any interviews.

There is no reason you can’t have a decent portfolio site if you’re doing any kind of job searching. There’s lots of options to build sites without touching code. If you at least have basic web design skills, you can get HTML templates or use frameworks like bootstrap as a starting point, and then customize them to your personal brand. Web hosting isn’t that expensive either, since you really shouldn’t need a whole lot of bandwidth for a portfolio site.