Interior Design Career Options

Making a Living With Interior Design

Interior design is a very diverse field. The modern world has an increasingly wide variety of buildings and layouts that can use a touch of creativity and artistry. Interior designers have helped create the look and feel of the majority of public and private buildings in many urban environments. The career options that interior designers are able to choose from may vary substantially in terms of the work environment and the everyday tasks, even if the underlying theory and skills involved are fundamentally similar.

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Your Focus

Some interior designers will specifically focus on a particular type of residential room, such as kitchens or bathrooms. More and more home owners put effort into improving the look of individual rooms in their homes, for personal reasons or to improve the resale value of their homes. Interestingly enough, interior designers can also consider real estate sales as one of their career options. Interior designers with more business training in particular may benefit from choosing real estate as their personal niche.

Environmental Awareness

One growing niche for interior designers also involves helping to create green buildings. As environmental awareness becomes more and more common and more and more lucrative for various organizations, interior designers who have received professional accreditation as Leaders in Energy and Environmental Design will continue to find more work. Having a baseline awareness of trends in building design is very important for all interior designers, regardless of their exact career choices. Sustainability will certainly continue to be a much more prominent trend in the coming years, and interior designers can be part of it.

The Arts

Interior designers who are interested in the entertainment business or the performing arts can consider working in set design. Sets have different requirements than many other spaces, which can be a welcome change for seasoned interior designers, or a new challenge for people who are just starting in the field and exploring their career options. Interior designers will come from all sorts of professional backgrounds as well, and some of them may have training that has specifically prepared them for working in the theatre or in film.

As well as education and experience, the area of speciality will impact on an interior designer’s salary, so if this is important to you, the field you choose should be considered carefully.

There is some overlap between careers in interior design and careers in many other closely related fields. Interior designers will have their own different specialities. Some interior designers focus on antiques, knowing everything from popular antique selections to how to present antiques in a way that is the most appealing to potential customers. While other interior designers will essentially be doing writing and editing for a living, writing about design or working in the design department of various publications. Interior designers can also work as purchasing agents for various companies, putting their skills to use in a whole new way.