What is the cost?

Do you know how much it costs to become a graphic designer? The question is not rhetorical - we are talking about a real situation if you want to be a real graphic designer.
Let's see, you first need hardware, which means: an Apple Mac, quick and with the maximum RAM, fully equipped with modem, sound card, etc. You definitely need a PC, even if you don't like to admit it, which is equally fast with a lot of RAM.
Then you need a good scanner, a colour printer and a laser printer. You need a digital camera, storage devices and definitely a good internet connection. Not to mention that nowadays an internet site is a necessity to promote your work. To now, and if you are lucky enough that your best childhood friend has a shop that shells all these things so you have a full discount, you are somewhere around 15,000 euros!
Next, you need furniture but let's say that you take from your room your childhood desk and you pinch from your father's office the chairs you still need a couple of more things but your generous family finds them somehow. As for the office, after begging your father he takes out his car from the garage and you make it your office!
You think you are ready? No! You need software! You need photographic program, vector program, publishing program, internet publishing program, word processor, antivirus program, 3D program, translators, and animation program. You think that's enough? No! Because dealing with the market it means that for half of these programs you need their competitors as well! Just to be sure that you are compatible with the market.
Let's say now that you are lucky enough to sleep with the dealer of all these programs, so you have again the full discount. How much? 10-12,000 euros. I'm not joking.
And you think you finished? No! You need information, which means books and magazines. Magazines that inform you of the new developments coming out, what's going on in graphic design internationally, in other words, something like 100-200 euros a month.
Now you think you are ready? NO! Because a year later all these programs make an upgrade and because you want to be part of the market, since in an international conspiracy all the market buys the new upgrade, you buy it as well. Let's hope that you still sleep with the dealer and you end up paying something like 5 - 6,000 euros!
So to start as a graphic designer nowadays you must have something like 35,000 euros for the first year, at least, but that is if your best friend has a computer hardware shop, you sleep with the software dealer and you steal everything else from your parents' house!
A friend of mine, a dentist, opened a new practice with all the latest laser machinery and it cost him something less than 25,000 euros! What else can I say?
Something must change and everything has to start with the software companies, especially if they don't want to see more illegal copies of their programs going around. Why? Copying programs is a huge argument and if you don't understand where the problem is, please do read this article again!

From Ovi Magazine