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Color and materials designer skills for your resume and career

Updated January 8, 2025

1 min read

Quoted experts

Samantha Osborne,

Carmita Sanchez-Fong

Below we've compiled a list of the most critical color and materials designer skills. We ranked the top skills for color and materials designers based on the percentage of resumes they appeared on. For example, 39.4% of color and materials designer resumes contained photoshop as a skill. Continue reading to find out what skills a color and materials designer needs to be successful in the workplace.

13 color and materials designer skills for your resume and career

1. Photoshop

Here's how color and materials designers use photoshop:

Worked specifically in Adobe Illustrator and Photoshop.

2. Apparel

Apparel is anything worn especially formal clothes; outerwear; garments; attire; raiment worn on an important occasion to protect, wrap, adorn or beautify the body. Apparel also refers to clothing of a specific type that is sold in stores. Product categories include everything from basic items like underwear, badges, jewelry to luxury items. The general classification of clothing is as follows: men's wear, women's wear, children's wear, and others.

Here's how color and materials designers use apparel:

Collaborate with Apparel Design on seasonal color palette, color direction & initiatives.
Learned technical aspects of construction techniques and fabrications for intimate apparel and supported Technical Designer in all aspects of technical design.

3. CMF

Here's how color and materials designers use cmf:

Established T-Mobile's CMF process: winning over cross-functional team members + OEM partners which resulted in efficient CMF sign offs.

4. Consumer Trends

Here's how color and materials designers use consumer trends:

COLOR DESIGNER Lead research on consumer trends & competitors for focused market category.

5. Color Direction

Here's how color and materials designers use color direction:

Provide Color direction for category prints and graphics.
Increased or maintained sales with accounts by presenting seasonal corporate color direction and visual lineplans.

6. CAD

Here's how color and materials designers use cad:

Completed on-site measurements and utilized design related computer programs including 20/20 Design and Auto CAD.
Developed and implemented CAD guidelines.

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7. Seasonal Color

Here's how color and materials designers use seasonal color:

Created monthly/seasonal color palettes and implementation for retail and wholesale environments.
Created seasonal color palettes, material development and application for all Collective Licensing brands and their licensing partners.

8. Design Trends

Here's how color and materials designers use design trends:

Researched color market and design trends.

9. Support Production

Here's how color and materials designers use support production:

Coordinate and manage new color development required to support production, advanced interior model builds, and concept car programs.

10. Production Color

Here's how color and materials designers use production color:

Create production color & trim with regard to automotive color and material initiatives.

11. Material Stories

Here's how color and materials designers use material stories:

Determined and designed the 2014-2015 color and material stories for the Vision Street Wear Footwear Line.

12. OEM

OEM stands for Original Equipment Manufacturer and is a term for a company that produces and markets the parts of equipment for another company after having received the go-ahead to do so. The company can also produce devices from the combination of parts from different companies while in partnership with these companies. This is common in the computer hardware industry and is popular in the automobile and computer industries.

Here's how color and materials designers use oem:

Introduced a new product line to Global Tier 1 and OEM globally resulting in double digit growth.
Worked with advanced design OEM teams to establish 5-10 exterior colors for Model Year 2018-2020.

13. Adobe Indesign

Here's how color and materials designers use adobe indesign:

Headed the conversion of pagination of all mail order catalog page files from QuarkXPress to Adobe InDesign.
Update branding manuals as needed utilizing Adobe InDesign.

What skills help Color And Materials Designers find jobs?

Tell us what job you are looking for, we’ll show you what skills employers want.

What skills stand out on color and materials designer resumes?

Samantha Osborne

Assistant Professor of Graphic Design, Owner, Samantha Osborne Design, Eastern Illinois University

Soft skills are equally important to hard skills. Graphic designers are visual communicators. Visual communication is a universal learned skill, vs. a linguistic capability. This means that graphic designers must learn to recognize and effectively utilize mood and tone in their own visual compositions in regard to color theory and psychology, gestalt principles, and font or lettering design. Essentially a well-skilled graphic designer becomes part psychologist in working through design problems and deciphering client direction, part problem-solver in developing an effective solution to the design problem, and part artist in bringing astonishing and original visual communication and graphics to reach a solution.

What color and materials designer skills would you recommend for someone trying to advance their career?

Carmita Sanchez-Fong

Professor and Chairperson, Fashion Institute of Technology, SUNY

Sketch, sketch, sketch, and work on your portfolio. Use the many resources at FIT to stay current with technology, including 3d printing, laser cutting, and virtual reality. Volunteer with one of the professional organizations, attend virtual conferences, enter a competition, develop your personal/professional profile, and become familiar with digital material resources. Work on your research and presentation skills. Create a well-organized digital library of your 2d and 3d assets. Prepare yourself to go back. Take some masterclasses. Volunteer as a virtual artist-in-residence at a local school. Be creative, remain engaged.

What soft skills should all color and materials designers possess?

Diana Boyd

Faculty, Highline College

-Collaboration/Teamwork

-Interpersonal

-Reliability

-Ethical behavior

-Self-starter

What hard/technical skills are most important for color and materials designers?

Diana Boyd

Faculty, Highline College

-Adobe Illustrator - Vector drawing skills

-Adobe Photoshop - Working with raster images

-Adobe InDesign - Layout skills

-Adobe Animate - Animation

-Adobe XD - UX/UI prototyping

-Wordpress/Adobe Portfolio/Adobe Dreamweaver - web design/development

-Microsoft Word /PowerPoint

Do you want to know more?

List of color and materials designer skills to add to your resume

The most important skills for a color and materials designer resume and required skills for a color and materials designer to have include:

Photoshop
Apparel
CMF
Consumer Trends
Color Direction

CAD
Seasonal Color
Design Trends
Support Production
Production Color

Material Stories
OEM
Adobe Indesign

Updated January 8, 2025

Zippia Team

Editorial Staff

The Zippia Research Team has spent countless hours reviewing resumes, job postings, and government data to determine what goes into getting a job in each phase of life. Professional writers and data scientists comprise the Zippia Research Team.

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Color And Materials Designer Skills

Updated January 8, 2025

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