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How Much Do Marketing Graphic Designers Make?
Whether you want to employ a designer or become one, you will need a basic knowledge of how much graphic designers make. Making art for a profession is an appealing lifestyle, but it is essential to consider realistic financial expectations for the future. This is not as simple as you would think. You can learn graphic design online through Blue Sky Graphics online graphic design course.
How does experience affect graphic designer pay?
The easiest and most practical method to ensure that you are getting compensated appropriately for your level of expertise is to compare your graphic design pay to that of comparable positions that are being offered. There are many job boards that specialise on web design. When you start searching, you will find that the range of wages varies greatly even within your own city. One of the most important criteria is the degree of experience.
Experience
Let us start with a look at how experience impacts graphic designer average salary estimations (note: the research here reflects averages across all fields of design such as logo, web, etc).
0 to 2 years of experience
Designers that have just started freelancing, graduated from a design school, or established a design business or corporation would fall into this category. Designers in this category are usually competent in many design applications but have yet to develop their style or establish a professional reputation for themselves. In a company, you would expect these designers to have frequent direction from a boss.
Designers with this degree of competence should have extensive portfolios that show their expertise as well as their unique flair. As freelancers, they will often have a professionally designed website with defined procedures and conditions of engagement. They will usually have extra talents in a company, such as team building and communication, and will need less supervision from supervisors.
5 to 10 years of experience
At this level, you may anticipate professional designers who are well-known as freelancers or who occupy the role of senior graphic designer at a business, where they oversee design teams. They would be well-versed on technical advancements in design, as well as changes or trends in the design industry and how to design successfully for a certain target demographic.
Salary ranges for various design jobs
To narrow down these wage projections even more, we must examine various jobs within the area of graphic design. SimplyHired.com provides the following estimates:
£25,291 – Internship in Graphic Design
£38,310 – Graphic Designer
£55,149 – Senior Graphic Designer
£83,312 – Senior Designer
£76,602 – Art Director
£108,833 – Director of Creative
£60,294 – Instructional Designer
£61,970 – Web Designer
£77,109 – Visual Designer
£89,061 – User Experience Designer
£80,712 – User Interface Designer
Based on these estimations, we can see that compensation rises not just as a result of experience, but also as a result of skill requirements and degree of responsibility. Consider art direction, which costs £76,602. In many instances, you will be in charge of managing various design teams to create a unified appearance for a whole company. That is a lot of responsibility, and the aforementioned pay estimate reflects that!
What about ad hoc work and crowdsourcing?
Salaries for freelance or crowdsourced designers are difficult to determine since they are paid on a job-by-job basis. Furthermore, the large variable of time input is usually related to income, thus a designer who works 10 hours per month would earn much less than one who works 100 hours per month.
Having said that, it is not difficult for a highly talented designer to earn up to £10,000 per month via crowdsourcing competitions and referrals. That is not too shabby! According to the aforementioned figures, a web designer would earn half that amount—£5,000 per month.
Of course, not every designer has a consistent clientele, and demand for freelancing work may vary. So one month you may have to choose between a deluge of customer demands and the following month you might have to choose between varieties of instant ramen for supper. If you are experiencing the latter, you may want to brush up on some freelancing best practises.
Being a designer pays well.
Charging a fair, competitive price for design work is not an exact science, but the figures above should give you a good sense of what to anticipate. When you first start out as a designer, it may be difficult to determine where you fit on the spectrum. You may avoid settling for less than you deserve if you understand the prevailing cost for design work in your region and at your level of skill.
How your job affects your graphic design income
However, it is not just seniority that causes pay rates to fluctuate. The kind of design work you perform will also have a significant effect.
Graphic design disciplines have grown more specialised in recent years as the design world has become more complicated. Graphic designers with specialised skills include:
UI designer: creates user interfaces for applications, internet, TV services, and gaming consoles. Typically, you will collaborate with UX (user experience) designers, who will assist you in translating your ideas into practical code.
Editorial designer: creates layouts for books, periodicals, newspapers, and other publications.
Packaging designer: responsible for producing print-ready designs for product packaging.
Motion designer: creates short, basic animations based on graphic design concepts for websites, TV idents, TV credit sequences, music videos, explainer videos, and other applications.
Environmental designer: concentrates on graphic design for physical places such as conference rooms, shop interiors, museums, and public transportation, among others.
Salaries for each kind of designer will vary greatly, thus if you work as an editorial designer, do not anticipate your income to equal that of a UI designer, since that form of employment will often pay considerably more.
Now that you know what to compare, the next step is to look for comparable positions to your current (or desired) employment in your region to get a sense of what the pay should be.
