Why aren’t moregraphic designers creative entrepreneurs?

The time has come
for Graphic Designers
to work out their value,
rather than what they cost.

I have spent over twenty years in design education and seen irreversible changes to the industry as a whole. These changes are due mainly to the introduction of the desktop computer and the Internet.

The Internet has allowed for the outsourcing of design services, in most cases to developing countries. The resulting tide of templates, free fonts and cheap solutions undermines the quality of professional design services. But I don’t think that’s necessarily a bad thing.

Designers everywhere are voicing their disapproval on design blogs. I can hear them complaining now. I have even seen designers admonish people for ‘sharing’ these resources on social media, as if they can somehow stop the tide of change by pointing out how unfair it all is.

It would appear that design services and competitions such as Elance, Fiverr and 99designs are here to stay, whether professional designers like it or not.

They are popular, useful and serve a purpose.

Bemoaning the lack of taste, value, innovation and integrity rife in this industry is futile. Look at it this way: if a client is happy with the quality $5–$10 will get them, then chances are, if you are a $90-an-hour designer, you don’t want the hassle anyway. But the rising popularity of these services should send a clear signal to the design industry that there is widespread frustration on the part of the design consumer. Frustration that online services and outsourcing will continue to solve.

I have seen a slow and steady decline in the job satisfaction of my design graduates over the past five years, as they move into an industry where they expect creative and financial reward but increasingly, they find their roles as a fee-for-service designer devalued by their industry.

It may be an unpopular sentiment,
but if graphic designers continue to compete
with the rest of the world on time and money,
I can only see the traditional job market
getting worse, not better.

The way forward for the creative industries as a whole is for designers to express their creativity through a unique point of view. Finding ways of demonstrating innovation, authority, vision and strategy has always value-added graphic design. You may have rockstar layout skills, great taste, software proficiency, and client service to die for, but these will no longer sustain a business model. Without the addition of a unique viewpoint, the role of the designer will devalue to the point where they can easily be replaced.

It is not all doom and gloom however. The Internet may have caused all this, but it is also our saviour. The ease with which designers can service clients anywhere, and payment gateways which allow us to sell anything to anyone, has never been as convenient as it is today.

What follows is a list of ways professional graphic designers are currently adding value by working with the Internet, rather than against it:

Cultivate skills that are not easily reproduced

• Custom logo design
  Designers such as Claire Coullon and Sergey Shapiro have built a strong online presence and have cultivated such breathtaking custom logo design skills that whilst many try to imitate, their logo style is unique and recognisable.
• Illustrative design
  Designers such as Marian Bantjes and Kelli Anderson utilise illustration skills to embellish their graphic design to the point where it is unclear whether we should describe them as design or illustration. Their crossover skills make them very versatile and highly desirable.
• Tactile and hand made
  Designers such as Yulia Brodskaya and Stefan Sagmeister spend many hours making pieces of typography or imagery by hand, using tactile materials, such as paper, money, even bananas to create their innovative design work. The computer is clearly a tool in this process, not the master.

Share skills with others

• Write Books
  Designers such as Ellen Lupton and Steven Heller have built publishing empires around the books they have written, essentially sharing all they know about design thinking, typography and the design industry.
• Self-hosted courses
  Designers such as Paul Jarvis and Caroline Kelso have written and hosted their own courses where they offer advice to other designers on how to freelance or learn hand lettering.
• Skillshare
  Designers such as Courtney Eliseo and Jon Contino have to taken to sharing their skills on the skillshare platform, charging small amounts of money for large numbers of people to take courses where they learn about lettering and logo design.

Content marketing

• Write about what you know
  David Airey published a blog about logo design and how much he loves logos and what he thinks makes a great logo. Now he is one of the Internet’s leading experts on logo design, he’s published books on the topic and has increased the profile of his logo design clients considerably.
• Publish magazines
  Janine Vangool publishes UPPERCASE magazine and shares inspirational design stories in a magazine with such high production values that only designers would pay to read it. Which they do.
• Share your point of view
  James Victore is a colourful, outspoken, entertaining mouthpiece who loves messing with the establishment and the status quo. He speaks his mind on design and people get motivated, inspired and angry. You might not agree with his viewpoint, but at least he has one.
• Get paid to speak
  Michael Bierut is a designer who has worked for some very high-profile design agencies and travels the world speaking about design to colleges and design conferences. Many high-level designers tour the conference circuit because once the word is out that they give a great presentation, more invitations usually follow.
• Curate resources
  Fabio Sasso started his blog Abduzeedo in 2006 as a way to back up resources online after his studio was robbed. The blog is filled with inspiration resources and tutorials and now attracts three-million visitors a month, with advertising on the site more than supplementing his income and paying for the site.

Design and sell products and services

• Software and Apps
  Scott Belsky built Behance, a folio website and app for creatives and developed an entire industry around organising creatives, which was subsequently bought by Adobe.
• Products
  Simone Legno has built an entire industry around his Tokidoki range of illustrated products. He licences the characters and ranges to large companies in a win/win cross-marketing exercise. His illustrations appear on footwear, accessories and other apparel.
• Run Conferences
  Andrew Johnstone left his day job as a designer to run the Semi-Permanent Conferences full time. What started as a side project in Australia is now a global design conference series. He publishes and curates art and design blogs and magazines as well.
• Sell Templates
  Websites such as Graphic River and Creative Market facilitate online marketplaces where graphic designers can sell their wares, not to mention stock photography and icon websites as well.

Behave like an artist

• Pitch
  David Carson is a legend in the design industry, breaking new ground as magazines transitioned into the digital age. He challenged our notions of what was legible in the 90s and is still pitching ideas like an artist. Large companies want a piece of his creative genius and so David is often paid to pitch.
• Crowdsource the content
  In 2000, Jake Nickell and Jacob DeHart devised Threadless. An online community of artists who design T-shirts. Threadless designs are created by artists and chosen by the community, then people can buy them from the website, safe in the knowledge that the designs are good quality and approved by popular vote.
• Crowd-fund
  Illustrator Mathew Inman has built a loyal following as a cartoonist, producing posters and other merchandise using his distinctive comic style as The Oatmeal. He recently launched a project on Kickstarter. He and his friends were asking for a measly $10,000 to produce a whacky card game they thought up, but because Matthew had a huge following on social media as The Oatmeal, they went on to break all Kickstarter records and 200,000+ people handed over 8 million dollars in 30 days. It would appear Matthew underestimated how much people would really want a card game about exploding kittens.

I hope that if you are a professional graphic designer feeling disheartened in the current design economy, you can be safe in the knowledge that there will always be a place for innovative design thinking.

I would caution however, that the opportunities for high-value, fee-for-service design will most likely dwindle, but the opportunities for creative entrepreneurship are at an all-time high.

In what ways can you charge for your value rather than what you cost?