How to be a graphic designer at 12 turning 13 years old

Hi,
Here is what worked for my little girl (age 9) when she decided she wanted to do something similar.

• Use your yellow pages, contact graphic design companies, and tell them you are interested in becoming a graphic designer. Ask if they would be interested in letting you come by, have a tour, etc. This is part of a "networking" process. Getting to know people who are doing what you want to do, in hopes they will think of you when a project or something comes up.
• Build a portfolio of your work to show around.
• Library. Do your research at the library. We found tons of books, but most importantly, in many of those books we found companies that take childrens work, freelance work, and offer internship opportunities (you work for free- but you learn tons and meet lots of people in the industry- networking again).

You are a bit young for working or internship, but my 9 yr old met a neat lady who does graphic art work for publishers designing book jackets. She calls my daughter for "work" on new projects -basically allowing my little girl learn and be a part of her project.

Hope these steps work for you!

I started in photoshop at about that age.  If you don't have access to photoshop, become a ninja with gimp (google will find it for you).  It's basically an open-source photoshop clone.  

Also, draw.  Draw a lot.  Pencil and paper will teach you a lot about graphic design.  When you get the chance to take electives, go for art and design classes over computer classes.  You can figure the computer stuff out on your own, but the hour a day working on drawing will be invaluable.

Become familiar with the work of others.  Find graphic designers that do what you want to learn to do, and examine why you like their stuff.  Then try to imitate those aspects.  

Build, keep, and maintain your portfolio.  It's going to be thousands of times more valuable to you than your resume.  If you want to be a web designer, teach yourself html with www.htmldog.com and by viewing the source of pages you like.  Then put your portfolio on a website.  

And did I mention draw?   

I once tought a 10 year old Flash. It was amaising to see the amount of pashion he and is friends had for expressing themselves on the web using the very basic tool thay had. they actually created full websites (not the most beautiful or preferct ones) that enabled them to share their passions with the world.

The reason I'm telling you this is because I think the goal you should set youself is not "becoming a designer" but rather "finding channels to express myself". 

Design is all about expresion and the web gives you tones of channels to express yourself without even knowing a single bit of design... So go on... create your own blog, upload your amaizing pictures to Flickr, create a profile and express yourself in any of the zilion social networks out there.

Once you start living the web than start exploring different designs on the web and try to think what you like or don't like about them... than experiment  

Learn photoshop (the basic tool you will need to create your designs) and HTML (the basic expression tool on the web) and start creating as many websites as you can... your personal website, one for your family, your class's web site, the school blog and so on... quickly enough you will find out that your firnds come to you and ask you... "how did you do this cool skin for your Myspace page? Can you do one for me?"... and there you are, you have your first client :)

The short answer , by the way, is simply start to design.