How are graphic designers supposed to survive in this society?

Sara Morgan
Jul 24, 2017 · 4 min read

A graphic design student blogs about design, communication, and the challenges of a digital world.

Through a good friend I got a job designing some flyers for a local theatre in my home town in Bavaria. It was only the second time I had received a request — a mission to design a few small flyers and posters. I was excited to be able to earn some money whilst having fun putting my creative energy into a project for a good friend of mine. She knew what she wanted and the communication between us was working well. What more could I ask for? And then, the theatre asked me to submit a budget for the job, and that’s when I started to wonder. How much should I ask for?

After one of my design classes I went up to my teacher and politely asked if he had a minute. I explained my situation and asked for his help with the budget proposal. You want to know what he said? I was surprised by his answer. As I recall he said, “Make a list of all the things you put money in for this, add it together, multiply it by 70 and then divide it by 2. That’s how much you should ask.” After adding it all together I realised that was way more than 2000€ — and I couldn’t really expect that from a small local theatre, could I?

I decided to ask another friend who was studying with me — surely she would have a good idea about how I should do this. Indeed, her realistic view of my situation gave me a better idea how much I could resonably ask per hour.
Because I didn’t want to lose the job, I decided to go for a much lower price than I had originally thought of.
This situation made me think about the problem many designers have — getting paid less than they’re worth. How many companies try to cut corners when it comes to design — because it’s just something that needs to be done, and at the lowest possible price. What many of us fear, is that if we stand up for the quality of your work and ask more than 15€ an hour is that they will take their business to someone who meets their budget. (well that’s understandable, I guess). Sadly there are many graphic designers who undersell themselves (not to mention the ones who are probably charging too much for the low quality work they are delivering— #sad).

How is society supposed to take our work seriously if people are giving it away?

A site called fiverr started a shitstorm when they posted this on facebook:

When I read that, I was shocked— what could this mean for my future?
I read a blogpost on logofactory.com by Steve Douglas which discusses the problems that fiverr has. What his critisism comes down to is that the plattform offers no affective controls for policing abuse of intellectual property rights for example the illegal watermark-removal on stock pictures some offer on that site, or logos that might have been stolen from other companies/sites to showcase the designer’s portfolio (in this case not his/her’s).
I scrolled down to the end of the post and found a comment by a fiverr-user which at first surprised me.

“Ultimately, people who truly want a job well done will pay for it. I can’t say that Fiverr has been all bad — I’ve got a lot out of it — but some of the stuff on there is downright shady and they need to deal with it. It’s an interesting concept but I feel like we (designers, writers, etc.) are getting shafted.” — Kierah

Kierah wrote that she used fiverr to build a portfolio next to her normal job, and that she was careful about what requests to admit and in some cases what jobs she would cancel if she felt there was someone trying to rip her off. But she was defending the site, and that struck me.
I want to finish this post quoting Kierah again:

“Ultimately, people who truly want a job well done will pay for it.”

It’s important to stand up for your work and show your customers how much time and thought you put into something. Convince them that your design is something worth their money as well as their time. It’s not just how it looks, but how it works too. Because design is meant to have a function: it needs to communicate something. And that’s what communication designers learn to understand and practice. It’s certainly worth more than 5$ (or 15€/an hour).

http://t3n.de/news/fiverr-561382/
http://www.thelogofactory.com/fiverr-continues-to-be-awful-doubles-down/

Sara Morgan

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22 || B.A. in Kommunikationsgesaltung an der Hochschule für Gestaltung in Schwäbisch Gmünd ||

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