Interactive Media
Interactive Media Design Career Overview
The most basic requirement for being considered interactive media is user involvement. The field of interactive media includes but is not limited to digital technologies. Any form of media that allows a user to interact with other users, the creator, or a computer is considered interactive media.
Technological advancement has made interactive media increasingly popular and widespread. The increased use and speed of the internet has made it a major venue for interactive media, allowing internet users to interact via social networks, blog comments, forums, and online games. Mobile technologies have also developed as an environment for easy interaction between fellow users via text messaging and smart phone capabilities.
Students in this field learn to process information and then make this information available to audiences via electronic media. Professionals in this field design Web pages, animated banners, video programs, and sound broadcasts using graphics and sound as educational, advertising, and entertainment tools.
Interactive Media Design Training & Education
The all encompassing nature of interactive media means that pursuing training and education in the subject may include many different disciplines. Subjects including design, writing, computer programming, computer science, and multimedia may all be relevant to interactive media training.
Students may choose to focus on the research and strategy aspects of interactive media, studying how and why people participate with different forms of media. Other degree programs may concentrate less on the strategy and research and more on the production of interactive media. These students would learn how to work with audio, visual and computer programming to create interactive media features.
There are no specific educational requirements to become an interactive media designer. However, due to the large spread of information that is valuable in the field, the more experience and education that a prospective interactive media designer completes, the better their chances of success within the industry.
Interactive Media Design Career & Salary
The interactive design industry is growing as media and commercial companies increasingly attempt to reach out to their customers through interactive technologies. There is an increasing need for designers with interactive training and experience.
A career in interactive media design could vary greatly depending on an individual’s specialization and employer. Possible employers include media outlets, advertising agencies, retailers, and web-based companies. Salaries vary by company and by specialty. According to simplyhired.com, interactive designers make an average of $67, 000, while web ui designers make $64,000 on average and advertising specialist average $44,000.
Interactive Web Designer Career
The design of a website should facilitate navigation and use. It is the job of an interactive web designer to organize a website’s content in a user friendly format that encourages understanding and participation. Designers draw on their knowledge of user interaction to format the information they are presenting in an interesting and easily digestible webpage. The web design may include features like a search tool, graphs, videos, and flash games to best communicate the content of the site.
Intereactive Flash Designer Career
Flash is a graphics program that allows designers to create web pages with more complex color and movement. Interactive Flash Designers utilize the software program to facilitate user interaction. The interactive nature of flash based web designs have made them increasingly popular as advertisers and media outlets move towards active content participation. The greater control that Flash allows a designer over the look and feel of a site has made it especially popular for advertising and branding purposes, which are highly focused on design.
Interactive Web Content Coordinator Career
Web Content Coordinators have training in all web site design and maintenance as well as writing and editing. The role of the web content coordinator is to organize the efforts of web designers, web content contributors, and the overall goals of the site. The coordinator is often the employee that actually publishes content to a company’s site and tests to make sure that the site is working properly. Depending on the web site a coordinators work include the planning and organizing a site’s content or they may be involved in a more administrative manner.
Interactive Site Developer Career
Web site Developers are responsible for the usability and functionality of a Web site. This role may overlap with that of the Web Designer, however, site designers are usually in charge of the look of a site, while the site developer is responsible for a sites structure and layout. However, there are some students who train to be both developers and designers.
Web Developers will have knowledge of graphic design packages such as Fireworks or Photoshop in order to produce basic layout and manipulate images. Skills in cascading style sheets (CSS), e-commerce and server side technologies, such as PHP and Perl, and internet security can also be helpful.
