Designer Salaries

Recent­ly, I met an odd guy who, after ask­ing what I do for a liv­ing, said “Graph­ic Design­ers don’t make any mon­ey. A cou­ple of my friends are design­ers and they got laid off and are poor and work for almost no mon­ey.” I resist­ed the strong urge to punch “strange guy” in the face and instead gave him a death stare and told him his friends prob­a­bly aren’t very good at what they do. Of course he insist­ed they are amaz­ing (like every­one insists their design­er friends are), but I’m not tak­ing his word for it.

In today’s econ­o­my, there are plen­ty of tal­ent­ed peo­ple who are laid off and can’t find anoth­er job. Believe me, I’ve been keep­ing an eye open for oth­er poten­tial job oppor­tu­ni­ties for the past two years and there is not much out there. How­ev­er, I do not like being lumped into a group with every sin­gle design­er who ever lived, because there are a lot of unmo­ti­vat­ed design­ers out there who are con­tent work­ing for very lit­tle and have no intent of evolv­ing them­selves. On the flip side, I also know many graph­ic design­ers who are great pho­tog­ra­phers, illus­tra­tors and web design­ers as well. You can’t just group us all togeth­er in one stereo­type.

“Weird guy” wouldn’t have been wrong if he sim­ply said “I have a cou­ple friends who are design­ers and they were laid off. Now they don’t make much mon­ey.” I prob­a­bly would have felt bad for his friends instead of being angry. The way he phrased it, he put a lim­it on my capa­bil­i­ties and put a cap on my earn­ing poten­tial with­out know­ing any­thing about me.

I end­ed the dis­cus­sion by say­ing, “Well it doesn’t mat­ter any­way because I’m not going to be work­ing as a Graph­ic Design­er much longer and I’ll make more mon­ey in Design Man­age­ment any­way!”

I said this in anger, but the truth of the mat­ter is I’m not going back to school so I can make more mon­ey. I’m annoyed that “weird guy” had to bring up mon­ey at all. I’m going back to school so my work can become more mean­ing­ful. As I’ve said before, I feel too boxed in and lim­it­ed by my cur­rent role in the design process. The way I see it, I don’t deserve to make more mon­ey if the projects I work on seem mean­ing­less to me and don’t make much of an impact.

Maybe the fact that I feel boxed in by my work was what made “weird guy” and his com­ments get to me. I don’t want some­one else box­ing me in when I’m cur­rent­ly push­ing to free myself from these lim­i­ta­tions. I don’t mean to sound like John Locke, but “don’t tell me what I can’t do!”

A few days pri­or to this sit­u­a­tion, I was look­ing at the Coroflot 2009 Design­er Salary Sur­vey. I fig­ured this rant was a good way to tie in with the salary sur­vey results that I have been think­ing about post­ing for a while.