Journo Salary Sharer: How much do designers make?

Depending on whether a designer works mostly in picas or pixels, the salaries can vary from nearly as high as we saw for some top editors down to almost as low as reporters.

Who’s included: Print designers, web designers and graphics designers (and I’ll break each of those out in this post). I’m including the handful of combo copy editor/designers, and people in management who oversee designers (like art directors).

The most common titles of those who responded were “Designer,” “Graphics Editor,” “Page Designer,” “Art Director,” “Graphic Designer,” “Copy Editor/Page Designer,” and “Visual Journalist.” The web designers had the most variety in titles, often including phrases like “data viz” or “news apps” or terms like “UI” or “UX” (user interface and user experience design, if you don’t much about it, is a fascinating field, especially in savvy newsrooms).

Who responded to the survey?

151 designers shared their salaries using Journo Salary Sharer. When people took the survey, they could choose a category. The three categories that most designers picked:

• Print design
• Web design
• Graphics

A bit more than half of the responses came from print designers (88), a quarter of responses came from graphics designers (39) and the rest came from web designers (24).

More men responded than women, 53% to 44%. (The remaining 3% chose not to specify.) This is the first group I’ve looked at where more men have responded to the survey than women.

• For print designers, the gender breakdown was pretty even (41 men to 43 women)
• For graphics designers, it was a little more pronounced: 22 men responded, and 16 women.
• For web designers, it was drastic, but also a small group: 17 men responded, and 7 women.

Breakdown of responses by cost of living:

• High cost of living: 46%
• Medium: 35%
• Low: 19%

Breakdown of responses by company size:

• Large (100+ editorial employees): 55%
• Medium (20–100 editorial employees): 31%
• Small (2–20 editorial employees): 14%

Sixty percent had less than 10 years of experience. 33% had between 10 and 20 years of experience, and 6% had 20 or more years of experience.

And here’s a reminder that this information is from a self-reported, non-random survey (please take it if you haven’t already!), so while it’s interesting and hopefully useful, it shouldn’t be considered statistically representative of the industry.

What’s the range of salaries for designers?

As you can see, print designers reported lower salaries than web or graphics designers, which is especially notable since print designers who responded were often much more experienced (Median of 10 years of experience for print designers vs. 4 years for web and graphics designers).

Let’s look more at years of experience

For respondents with fewer than 5 years of experience, the median salary for print designers was $38K, compared with $60K for web and graphics designers.

For those with 10 or more years of experience, the print designer median salary was just $64K, compared with more than $80K for web and graphics designers.

Which is to say, you could work for 15 years as a print designer and still be making less than some web designers with 3 or 4 years of experience. Not to say that all web designers make a ton — there were a dozen (out of 63) web or graphics designers who make $45,000 or less.

How company size plays into salary

The salaries reported by all varieties of designers at small and medium-sized organizations were much lower than at large organizations, which isn’t a huge surprise and lines up with what we’ve seen for reporters and all the other roles we’ve looked at.

What’s interesting to me here is how big the gap is for web and graphics designers (though it’s a very small group of respondents — for example there were only 11 responses from web designers at medium and small companies).

Cost of living

As we’ve seen before, the salaries go up in higher-cost-of-living cities and the range of salaries gets wider. Since there were so few responses from web and graphic designers in low and medium-cost areas, I only looked at responses from print designers here:

(Number of responses in each category: Low: 23 | Medium: 40 | High: 25)

For comparison, here’s the median salary reported by the other types of designers in just high-cost-of-living areas:

• For web designers: $80K
• For graphics designers: $75K

I’d love to hear from more designers and maybe do a follow-up post in a few weeks showing more about web and graphics designers, so if you know some people in those roles, pass the survey link along: bit.ly/journosalary.

Any other questions about designer salaries, or anything else related to this series? Find me on Twitter (@JuliaJRH) or email (Julia.Haslanger@journalism.cuny.edu).

For more about the limitations of this survey data and my process in handling it, see my earlier post.

Previous posts about Journo Salary Sharer:

• How it all started: Let’s talk about journalism salaries (Aug. 7, 2015)
• Update on Journo Salary Sharer — 2,500 responses! (Aug. 14, 2015)
• Job-specific posts: Reporters | Editors | Web producers | Copy editors | Social media editors