Designing courses can be broadly divided into 5 different kinds.

1. Fashion

Fashion design which is about creating products, styles, garments which can be used on the ramp or sold anywhere in the world.

Fashion Styling which is something newer and is also coming up in a big way. Fashion styling is about creating a look, for example, say Bollywood, there are different types of movies like Ashoka, Bajirao Mastani so stylists suggest the garments, makeup, music, jewellery to create that image. That happens in movies, ads in magazines.

Fashion Business which is a huge industry. In fashion business, there is merchandising, marketing, luxury brands, social media marketing, advertising, that's the whole area of fashion business.

Fashion Communication which is about creating communication through content, blogs, movies and it is about creating the  content of the movie or content of the magazine.

Design industry is huge and there are so many people who want to consume this.

2 Products

In products there is product design which is like industrial design may be like Whirlpool, automobiles so large mass produced products. Then there is accessory design.

Furniture will go into product design if it's large, if it's craft it could come into accessory design.

There is also jewellery design.

This area is also very interesting because nowadays technology is used in product design, there are a lot of sustainable products that come out and of course we all need products and like to have well designed products.

3. Interiors

Interior design is about working with building the kitchen, constructing the interiors of home.

There is also interior styling because your home is constructed but you want to have a winter look or retro look, so interior stylists do that job. There is huge business in interiors right now also. Also, Store interiors are becoming important because every story must look different from the others. Exhibitions, festivals are all places where interiors need to be done.

4. The fourth one is actually more creativity than design. Experience design, events design, entertainment, advertising, that's another whole area like media design.

And finally, one of the areas that is the most important nowadays is the communication design because today everything has to be communicated and every brand, every designer wants to communicate to the audience.

Communication design includes graphics, animation and VFX, user interface so that's technology interface, and also game design. All these need a designer behind it.

So, that kind of covers the entire area of design. Now, to decide what you want to do. Remember that you are choosing a career. It's not that you are just doing something for fun. So, you have to be willing or able to spend 50% of your time till you are 60 years old in that area. So read up about it. Look on the websites of colleges to see what kind of projects students do. talk to somebody who is working in that area and don't think about that I have to be a sketcher, artist, I must know coding because the college is there to teach you all those things. You have to be able to communicate. If you can't communicate through a beautiful sketch, you can take a photograph that's what the new world is. So it's really important to decide before you go into it and take every help that you can and in most colleges if you want to change your mind in the first few months, they will happily allow you to do so.

Nandita Abraham
President, Pearl Academy