Dear Designer-by-night,

First and foremost I would like to applaud you for attempting to apply your newfound Photoshop Skills. However, while I admire people who pursue their passion, yours is a pursuit at someone else’s expense.

We understand that being a designer isn’t the most stable or financially responsible job, but designers love their jobs enough to tolerate the bullshit from clients, long overdue payments, sleepless nights and the list goes on. Having said that, you can only imagine how absolutely pissed-off we feel when people such as yourself start undercutting us ($20 logos, really? not to mention all those people on Fiverr) and spoiling the market for the rest of us who are freelancing or just graduated from art school. Stop spoiling it for the people whose day job is in the field of design!

Aside from the undercutting, your watered down idea of what design is is dumbing down the general public’s view of what is good design. Now its all about aesthetics and no concept. Clients want pretty logos, not logos with meaning. This also means that our dreams of executing those really ground-breaking-boundary-pushing ideas will remain as – dreams.

Thanks to you, people think design is a cheap effortless job that just about anyone can do as long as you know a little bit of photoshop. While technical skills are an important component in the designer’s repertoire of tools, knowing how to use the Adobe Creative Suite does not a designer make. Thanks to you, I have lost small freelance jobs halfway through because they found someone (probably YOU) who could do it at less than half the price I quoted.

To all you Designers-by-night, I urge you to do further research before you take on an actual design job. Find out the market rates before giving quotes to clients even though you only do designing on the side and reading up on design theories every now and then wouldn’t hurt either.

All I ask is that you stop undercutting us and maybe treat design with the respect it deserves.

Sincerely,
A Designer.