I agree entirely with Levi. If you stick around, you will see exactly what he means about wannabe designers armed with optimism and alacrity and little else who come here asking for a 3-line how to on building a career as a designer.
Most of us around here, who are seasoned designers, with more years of experience than we care to think about, will likely tell you of similar paths, of either education and experience or working their way up from within the industry. It takes a lot, lot longer than a few months.
My own experience after leaving school with reasonable A-levels, was to do a 1-year foundation course (a requirement to get in to the colleges I wanted to back then, even with A-levels), then a three year degree course (for which, I had to race 35 other people for my place). Once I had completed my degree, getting a job was still pretty competitive. After a fair bit of trawling a portfolio around design companies in London, I got a break. I worked there for almost 5 years. I learned a lot, made mistakes, earned victories, pulled a lot of all-nighters and did a solid month of 18-hour days on one particularly heavy project. Only after this, did I feel equipped to even think about going freelance.
This is not to put you off. If you want to do it, it is an incredibly rewarding career, but it’s tough and there are no easy routes. If you want to do it, do it the right way. The way I did it is not the only way. You can work your way up from an entry level job in the industry, but if you want experience in a top agency, then they are more and more going to expect a degree. Not because the degree in itself is the silver bullet – there are a lot of talented people who didn’t go this route – but what it does is weed out those people who think design is a cool career and haven’t put in the hard yards.
There are so many people out there doing exactly what you appear to be wanting to do, that it ends up being a bottom-feeding frenzy for $50 logos. This serves nothing other than reducing clients’ expectations of quality and driving prices downwards. Moreover, and most importantly, it simply doesn’t work for clients, so they end up pissing money away on adornment.
Design is about problem-solving and not about pretty. It involves an understanding of how the human mind works, how it accepts and processes visual information. It involves an understanding of typography at a fundamental level. It involves… it involves a lifetime of study. It is one of those subjects that the deeper you go, the deeper it goes.
What it is not, without sounding too scathing, is a love of drawing and a Wacom tablet – which is still the best you can buy, to my mind, by the way, for a designer. That said, if I focussed solely on illustration, I’d use an iPad and pencil every time. This is exactly what I use when I do illustration work. For design work, always a Wacom.
What do you want to be, ultimately? A graphic designer? An illustrator? If the latter, what area of illustration? Even for the former do you want to specialise or be a generalist?
Again, I am not trying to put you off, but like Levi, hoping to help you go into it with your eyes open.
Do you have samples of work? If so, post them here. You’ll get an honest – if not always easy to swallow – critique. This is important. You need objective opinions from people who know what they are doing. No point even wasting your time if you don’t have talent and/or aptitude to start with. If you do, there are lots of people around here who will be able to help nudge you in the right direction.
Good luck.