Free Graphic Design Prompts Generator for Practice & Portfolio Building

Practice design using the graphic design prompt generator: FakeClients.com

As a graphic designer, you'll often need a portfolio to represent yourself with your design work. Especially if you are just starting out as a graphic designer as employers will be less willing to hire you just on your work experience. This is why it can be hard to find your first design job if you don’t have much of a portfolio. It's easy to get stuck at this starting stage of your design career as you most likely don't have a whole lot of past work to showcase when making up a portfolio. This cycle of not being able to land jobs because you haven't taken on enough jobs yet can be very hard to break.

Luckily, there now are plenty of options to help you create graphic design work for you to expand your portfolio in order to break this cycle. One of the easiest these days is to use graphic design prompts.

What are graphic design prompts?

The use of graphic design prompts is one the best practice exercises a graphic designer can use. A graphic design prompt essentially is a job description or design problem from a non-existent client that a designer can work on as if it were a real client. Using graphic design prompts, you can create graphic design work without having to wait or look for clients first. Using a generator like FakeClients.com, you can easily generate an unlimited number of randomly generated graphic design prompts.

Why use graphic design prompts?

In order to create a good portfolio, you’ll need to show that you are able to solve a client’s problem using graphic design. A graphic design client must feel they can come to you if their brand doesn’t get the right recognition or doesn’t reach its target audience. When you’re just starting out as a graphic designer, it can be incredibly hard to find your first clients and, consequently, to grow your portfolio. Using a graphic design prompt generator like FakeClients.com, you are able to imitate this process of taking on a client’s requests. Design prompts help you gain experience in working according to a client’s requests and demands.

When you try to come up with graphic design projects on your own, for practice or just for fun, people naturally tend to choose the easier path in terms of creative thinking and research. When it comes to real clients that is often quite the opposite. They can often be quite a pain in the ass in the way they disagree with decisions you make, they can have bad taste, or just don’t want to pay you the right amounts.

Especially beginning designers will find that their first clients, who are often just looking to get the most work for the lowest possible price, can be the most difficult. With graphic design prompts you can teach yourself to gradually evolve from working on your own projects to working for simple practice exercises and eventually take on your first client.

How to use graphic design prompts?

To start working on generated graphic design prompts, go to FakeClients.com and press on the big 'Generate brief'-button. This will generate the first graphic design prompts for you. If you don’t think you can handle that first one, you can generate as many new ones as you like and find one you want to try and work on.

If you want to challenge yourself a bit more, you can force yourself to stick to the very first prompt you get, whether you like that one or not.

These design prompts may not be as descriptive as a professional design brief you would get from a large, real-world client but when you are starting out designing for your first real clients, you’ll get a lot of clients that have no idea how the design process works. A lot of your first clients will just send you similar, overly simple requests to the generated prompts like "design me a flier", "create a business card", etc. This also allows you to have a bit more freedom and creative liberty in the beginning. If you rather prefer to work on more detailed and in-depth briefs, constraining your creative freedom a bit more, you can also try out the longer briefs that fakeclients offers on FakeClients.com/briefs.

This collection of more detailed briefs contains briefs from logo design to ux design so select graphic design in the dropdown menu to get to the graphic design briefs.

Alternatively, you can also challenge and constrain yourself a bit by thinking of some requirements for the prompts yourself before you press the generate button. For example, think of a company mission, a deadline, competitors, and industry before generating a graphic design prompt. This can be very challenging at first but it really helps you train yourself to stick to a client’s requirements and can also help you better empathize with your future clients’ point of view.

Getting feedback on your designs and improving

One of the most understated skills you need as a designer is being able to take and use valuable feedback. You need to teach yourself the skill of knowing when the feedback you get from a client or colleague is useful and well-founded.

Any experienced designer will tell you that a lot of feedback you get from clients, especially your first clients, will not necessarily improve the design. Clients often have difficulty handling big changes to a design they interact with every day or they can be stuck on their own design ideas.

This doesn't mean no feedback is useful for improving your design. Especially after a long time of working on a design, you can become blind to certain mistakes. That's why it's important to ask other designers for feedback. After you're done working on your design prompt, you can post your work on FakeClients.com/feedback to get valuable feedback from other designers and users of FakeClients. Use this feedback to learn taking comments and evaluating whether these can be used to improve your design or not, training yourself to eventually take feedback from real-world clients.

Present your designs

Once you are finished with your design for your fictional client, you can present it in your portfolio. Some people decide to only showcase the design and possibly the name of the fictional business but it can be very interesting for your potential employers or school to list some of the requirements or the mission of the fictional business you designed for.

In a lot of cases it's also a good idea to show your design process. This is often needed in cases like when you're creating a portfolio to get into a design school. This helps them understand how you work to solve your client’s problems using your experience in graphic design.