Become a 2D Game Artist.

Visual Merchandisers in India control the physical retail experience — from the window display on a Zara India or H&M high street storefront to the planogram governing every fixture inside a Westside, Lifestyle, or FabIndia outlet. The job sits at the intersection of spatial design, consumer psychology (AIDA framework), and brand storytelling: a VM translates a seasonal brief into mannequin styling, prop arrangements, signage hierarchy, focal-point architecture, and in-store navigation that drives footfall conversion and average transaction value. In India the two strongest employment tracks are brand-side in-house (Reliance Retail's Trends/AJIO Offline, Tata Trent/Westside, Shopper's Stop, FabIndia, Anita Dongre, Apple BKC) and international fast fashion (H&M India, Zara India, Mango India). Senior Visual Merchandisers own regional rollouts — executing identical festive theme windows across 60+ doors in a Diwali push — while Heads of VM at national chains shape the in-store identity across hundreds of SKUs and store formats. Entry runs through NIFT or Pearl Academy graduates with 2-5 years of floor-level experience; the craft itself is learned on shop floors, not in classrooms.

Character designers are the visual architects of personalities — they translate a director's or writer's character brief into a complete visual identity that works at every scale, from a 32px game icon to a 4K animatable asset. In India, the role sits across Toonz Animation (Thiruvananthapuram), Green Gold Animation (Hyderabad, home of Chhota Bheem), Reliance Animation, DQ Entertainment, and an accelerating freelance economy for global animation and game projects via ArtStation and LinkedIn. The craft demands simultaneous fluency in storytelling (can the personality read in 5 seconds?), technical constraint (does the design rig cleanly? does the silhouette read at 16:9 and 1:1?), and IP discipline (does every character look like it lives in the same world?). Unlike concept artists who range across environments and props, character designers go deep on the human or creature form — anatomy, costume language, facial expression architecture, and the iterative turnaround pipeline that bridges 2D design to 3D model or rigged animation.

Concept Artists define the visual world of games, films, and animated series before a single polygon is modelled or a set is built — characters, props, vehicles, environments, and creature designs exist first as hundreds of painted thumbnails, value studies, and colour passes on their screens. In India through 2026, the strongest demand comes from Lakshya Digital Pune (now Keywords Studios), DNEG Pre-Pro (Mumbai/Hyderabad), Sumo Group India, Dhruva Interactive Bengaluru, and an accelerating pipeline of US- and UK-paying remote contracts sourced through ArtStation and talent agencies. Film pre-production houses — Reliance Entertainment, Prime Focus World, and a growing slate of web series co-productions with Netflix India and Prime Video India — hire concept artists on project contracts that run 4–18 months. Entry-level concept artists typically enter through NID, IDC IIT Bombay, Srishti, or MAAC/Arena Animation programs, or from self-taught routes validated by an ArtStation portfolio that demonstrates value, anatomy, and perspective fluency. The career is technically and creatively demanding: a senior who paints convincingly across environment, character, and vehicle simultaneously and works efficiently inside AAA pipelines (Blender blockout → photobash → paintover) commands export-tier salaries from US studios.

Design Systems Engineers own the React (or Vue/SwiftUI) component library, design token pipeline, and documentation infrastructure that every product team builds on. The role sits squarely at the intersection of design and engineering: you translate Figma variables and Tokens Studio exports into Style Dictionary token transforms, maintain Storybook with Chromatic visual-regression baselines, enforce ARIA and axe-core accessibility contracts, and govern versioned releases via Changesets. In India, dedicated DSE roles exist at Razorpay (Blade design system), PhonePe, Cred, Swiggy, Flipkart, and at global product companies with India engineering hubs — Shopify India, Atlassian India, and GitHub India all run active design-systems squads. The role demands rare fluency in both design judgment and production-grade TypeScript; a pure frontend engineer who can't critique token semantics and a pure designer who can't write a compound component with polymorphic types will both hit a ceiling here.

Footwear Designers in India translate trend research and biomechanical constraints into commercially viable shoes — working across the full spectrum from mass-market PVC chappals for Relaxo and Khadims, athletic shoes for Decathlon's design team, leather office-shoes for Bata and Liberty, and women's fashion heels for Metro Brands, Inc.5, and Catwalk, to new-gen D2C premium labels like Aprajita Toor and direct-to-consumer plays under Bewakoof's accessory lines. The craft sits at the intersection of industrial design (last selection, sole engineering, EVA foam specification) and fashion design (seasonal trend boards, colourways, vamp proportion, silhouette). Most Indian footwear designers pass through the Footwear Design and Development Institute (FDDI, Noida/Kolkata/Chennai/Jodhpur) or the National Institute of Design Ahmedabad, with CLRI (CSIR-Central Leather Research Institute, Chennai) providing the technical-material science complement. The industry employs roughly 4.5 million people in production and a far smaller (and underserved) population of trained designers — making mid-to-senior design talent genuinely scarce at established brands.

Game Designers are the architects of player experience — not programmers, but the people who decide what the player does, why it feels satisfying, and how the systems hold together across a 50-hour RPG or a 90-second hyper-casual loop. The role splits across three specialisations that often overlap: systems designers (who build the economy, progression curves, and meta loops), level designers (who craft the spatial pacing, encounter scripting, and difficulty ramps), and economy designers (who balance IAP tiers, gacha pull rates, battle-pass value, and ARPDAU targets). In India through 2026, game design demand concentrates at RMG (real-money gaming) studios — Nazara, Junglee Games, Moonfrog Labs, Octro, Dream11's game-design team — where economy and monetisation design command the highest salaries, plus AAA-adjacent roles at Ubisoft Pune and Rockstar India and a growing indie/hyper-casual pipeline shipping to global markets.

Jewellery Designers in India conceptualise, CAD-model, and bring to life pieces in gold (22K, 18K), silver, platinum, and gemstones — spanning bridal kundan and polki sets for Sabyasachi Jewelry, everyday 18K diamond solitaires for CaratLane, meenakari bangles for Tanishq, and lightweight silver designs for GIVA and Melorra. The role bridges design craft (gemology, metal engineering, stone setting) with industrial production (BIS hallmarking, 916 purity certification, karigar management, costing against live gold rates). Workplaces range from the in-house design studios of Titan-owned Tanishq, Kalyan Jewellers, Malabar Gold & Diamonds, and PC Jeweller to D2C-first brands CaratLane (Tata subsidiary), Bluestone, GIVA, and Melorra, to heritage high-end houses like Birdhichand Ghanshyamdas (Jaipur) and Sabyasachi Jewelry, to independent jewellers and export studios supplying gold and diamond jewellery to Europe, the US, and the Gulf. Entry salary ranges from ₹3-7L (design trainee); mid-level brand designers at Tanishq or Bluestone earn ₹8-18L; Head of Design at Kalyan or Tanishq clears ₹20-50L.

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Set Decorators translate a Production Designer's visual blueprint into a fully dressed, camera-ready environment — sourcing, renting, buying, and placing every piece of furniture, fabric, prop dressing, and surface treatment that populates a set. In India this spans Bollywood productions at Yash Raj Films, Dharma Productions, RSVP, and T-Series through Netflix/Prime/Hotstar OTT originals and the larger-budget slate of Tollywood (RRR, Baahubali-scale) and Kollywood productions. The role sits inside the Art Department hierarchy directly below the Production Designer and alongside Art Directors; it requires forensic spatial memory for continuity, the ability to source from Mumbai's Chor Bazaar or Hyderabad's antique wholesale markets on a Sunday before a Monday shoot, and an eye calibrated to what reads on camera rather than what looks good in a showroom.

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Character designers are the visual architects of personalities — they translate a director's or writer's character brief into a complete visual identity that works at every scale, from a 32px game icon to a 4K animatable asset. In India, the role sits across Toonz Animation (Thiruvananthapuram), Green Gold Animation (Hyderabad, home of Chhota Bheem), Reliance Animation, DQ Entertainment, and an accelerating freelance economy for global animation and game projects via ArtStation and LinkedIn. The craft demands simultaneous fluency in storytelling (can the personality read in 5 seconds?), technical constraint (does the design rig cleanly? does the silhouette read at 16:9 and 1:1?), and IP discipline (does every character look like it lives in the same world?). Unlike concept artists who range across environments and props, character designers go deep on the human or creature form — anatomy, costume language, facial expression architecture, and the iterative turnaround pipeline that bridges 2D design to 3D model or rigged animation.

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Matte painters create photorealistic digital environments and environment extensions that replace or augment what could not be filmed on location — aerial cityscapes, alien landscapes, period-accurate historical settings, and fantasy worlds. Working from concept art and live-action plates, they photobash, digitally paint, and project 2.5D multi-plane matte paintings onto geometry in Nuke or Maya, then animate parallax and camera moves so the extension is indistinguishable from a real set. In India, the role is concentrated at studios serving global streaming productions: DNEG India (Mumbai/Bengaluru/Chennai — Oscar-winning work on Dune, Oppenheimer), MPC Bangalore (The Lion King, War for the Planet of the Apes), Framestore Mumbai (Paddington, Black Widow), Red Chillies VFX (SRK's studio — Jawan, Brahmastra), and Method Studios India, with growing demand from Netflix India originals, Amazon Prime India, and Disney+ Hotstar. Entry requires a portfolio of painted environments that can survive a production comp, not just a standalone render.

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Build the digital worlds, characters, props, and effects that show up on movie screens, AAA game consoles, OTT shows, and ad films. 3D Artists model geometry in Maya, Blender, or 3ds Max; sculpt high-resolution detail in ZBrush; bake and paint textures in Substance Painter; light and render scenes in Arnold, V-Ray, or Unreal Engine 5; and hand off polished assets to riggers, animators, and the lighting/comp pipeline. The Indian market is unusually deep here — DNEG (Mumbai/Bengaluru/Chennai), Prime Focus, MPC India, Technicolor India, Framestore Mumbai, Ubisoft Pune, Rockstar India (Bengaluru), Sumo Digital, and dozens of mid-tier studios in Hyderabad/Mumbai/Pune service the global pipeline for films like Dune, Mission Impossible, and AAA franchises. Specializations diverge fast — environment artist, character artist, prop artist, lighting artist, look-dev TD, and hard-surface modeler are all distinct hiring tracks by year 3-4.

Senior: ₹40.0L