Best Cities for Designers

To become a designer of any type, you’ll need to consider where to live to have that career. While many Graphic Designers are freelancers who can be based anywhere, many other design fields require regular attendance at a workplace, and not all cities are created equal for the opportunities they afford designers. While there is some obvious truth that major cities will provide more opportunities than smaller ones, that rule doesn’t hold up the way it did when you went to the Big City (usually meaning New York) to make your fortune. The tech industry, in particular, has created its network of hubs off the New York/Los Angeles axis and has turned Silicon Valley into the new digital Mecca. Thus, before you graduate college and pack your bags for the City that Never Sleeps, read on to discover which other destinations might also nurture your budding career. 

What is a Designer?

A designer is a person who comes up with designs—plans, drawings, schematics, renderings, and prototypes—of just about anything you may encounter in today’s world. Everything from a shampoo bottle to the outsides of airplanes had to be designed before they could become tangible realities. The designer is often the person who comes up with the idea for something and then comes up with the plans for it. Designers are idea people and creative types who possess the ability to see things that don’t exist (yet).

Designers come in as many shapes and sizes as the objects they design. You’ll thus encounter everything from Floral Designers to Mechanical Designers and Graphic Designers to UX/UI Designers. Each field requires specialized knowledge, but the threads connecting all of them are a creative spirit and artistic ability. Much designing today is done on the computer, using CAD (computer-assisted design) software, but the good old-fashioned ability to draw is still an essential tool in most designers’ toolkits.

Read more about what a designer does.

What Makes a City Good for Designers?

Several factors make a city attractive to people in a given career. Some of these are obvious and apply to everyone: little will make a city more attractive to aspiring professionals than the promise of high earnings. You are working, after all, to make money, and, all other things being equal, more money is better than less. All other things aren’t equal, however. Unless you’re driven by unbridled greed and don’t care about things like quality of life, you will need to take a number of other considerations into account to pinpoint the cities in which you, and not just your career, are likely to flourish.

Job Opportunities

Before you start looking at how much money designers make in a given city, you need to be sure that jobs exist in the first place. You could come upon a statistical outlier in the form of a city with one incredibly highly-paid designer and no other openings. Good luck landing a job in a place like that. Thus, you must look for cities with plenty of jobs for designers. The key statistic for this is the location quotient: it compares the number of employed people in a given field in a given city to the national average. Thus an area with a location quotient greater than 1 has more employed designers (or what have you) than the national average. In contrast, a location quotient of less than 1 means fewer employed designers than the national average.

For the more tech-heavy design fields like Product Designer or Game Designer, you’ll likely need to concentrate on cities recognized as hubs for those industries. You’ll have to focus on the Bay Area in Northern California and cities such as San Diego, Austin, Atlanta, Pittsburgh, or Toronto. These are areas where tech companies are relocating as they realize there are many countries beyond tech’s established nerve center in Northern California. You also needn’t go entirely by math (if you’re a designer, you’re probably not going to be attracted to using mathematical means to solve problems) and can use a degree of common sense instead.

You’ll also want to find cities with high job growth and not just cities with many employed Designers. Huntsville, Alabama, and Greeley, Colorado, are among the unexpected places showing higher-than-average design job growth. In fact, 2022 figures revealed that the world's most prominent tech sector job growth is in Bengaluru (formerly anglicized as Bangalore), India. If that seems too far, you may consider Destin, the United States’ fastest-growing tech hub in the Florida Panhandle.

High Salaries

Then, of course, comes the question of salaries. You want to make as much as you can from your workday labors. However, you shouldn’t be driven entirely by a few astronomical numbers that turn up for outlying places such as Los Gatos, where Netflix pays famously inflated salaries. Yes, more money is better than less, and extensive salary data are available from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Matters aren’t as simple as that, however, because you have to reckon with the cost of living to see what the purchasing power of your salary will be in the place you’re going to live. A loaf of bread (to say nothing of a one-bedroom apartment) will cost you more in New York City than in Huntsville.

Some cities—that frequently coincide with significant tech hubs—are notoriously overpriced, and you will find your dollar going a lot less far in those places than elsewhere. There are other factors as well: New York’s astronomical rents are, to a small degree, mitigated by the fact that you don’t need to keep a car in the city. Nor will you in other cities with robust public transportation systems, and although BART, the L, or the T aren’t free, they come cheaper than a car payment, insurance, gas, and tolls.

The demographics of the individual states’ populations are in considerable flux at the present moment. The country is moving away from its big cities as they become perceived as challenging. There is evidence of a departure from the usual megalopolises in favor of cities perceived as more livable and in which smaller salaries go a long way. Off the beaten track, however, affordable places still pay well and give your hard-earned dollars more spending power than in established major urban centers.

Strong Designer Community

When seeking out a city to live and work in, you also want to consider the urban ambiance for someone in your line of work. You don’t want to be the only designer for miles in every direction because while that will earn you a small work monopoly, you won’t be able to network, branch out, and ultimately move up. Careers today are far more complex than when you got a job and stuck with the same company until you retired 40 years later. Design careers today are nothing like that; you will find yourself switching jobs as you advance. Some career experts even say that you should change jobs every three years. That will make it essential for a sizable professional community of people who do what you do and to whom you can turn for support and networking opportunities. Your research about places to live could also include seeing whether there are any professional associations for what you do in a given city: those can be important for advancing your career. They can also be beneficial when it comes to laying the groundwork for a social life in a new city.

A design community can also mean that there will be possibilities for you to develop your craft and professional toolkit. Continuing education can be a beneficial factor as you tread your career path: you should be aware of what kind of educational opportunities exist for the category of designer you are in a city before you decide to move there.

Art Scene

Designers are fundamentally visual artists and, as such, require some kind of visual stimulation from their environments. You need that to recharge your creative batteries, as your soul will sometimes require refreshment. Living surrounded by urban light may wear away your creative sensibilities, whereas living in an attractive place can have the opposite effect. Depending on what appeals most to you, a cityscape (like Vancouver) or a natural setting (like Denver), you’ll have to consider the look of your new city. You’ll feel better if you get to enjoy your surroundings rather than needing to put on blinders just to get out the front door.

In addition to the cityscape, observe the visual cultural life in your prospective new location. That would involve museums and the quality of urban art installations, galleries, and the overarching artistic climate. Just as you will need to network with other designers to further your career, networking with other artists can help improve your artistic skills and, thus, your abilities at work.

Museums are an essential first step, especially for graphic designers who may look to them for inspiration. You won’t find art museums comparable to New York, London, or Paris in every American city. Still, world-class art museums exist in such places as Chicago, Boston, Detroit, and Atlanta. Those are in areas as widely flung and off the beaten path as Portland, Maine, Asheville, North Carolina, and Cincinnati, Ohio. The reality is that you can find artistically vibrant cities that aren’t New York, London, or Paris, and you can use the money you save by living in the former to finance trips to visit the latter. Galleries and an overall art scene can also make a city a great place for professional designers. 

Little Things that Make the Big Picture

While there are sensitive Accountants and philistine designers, as a general rule, the creative brain needs a bit more coddling and stimulation than just the downtime everyone requires. Thus, in choosing a city to practice as a designer, you need to consider the minor things that can make relocating into something exciting and fulfilling.

Some blanket considerations apply to all human beings regarding where they live. These include two factors that are often inversely proportional: weather and traffic. If you can’t bear the cold, don’t move to Minneapolis. If you want a four-season climate, don’t choose Jacksonville. If you can’t deal with the prospect of sitting in your car for an hour, avoid Los Angeles. If you want to get around without getting into a car, choose a city like Vancouver with a highly developed mass transit system.

Quite a few other factors affect the quality of life in a new city, and you’ll need to research what’s available to your interests. If food is important, check out the types of restaurants in a given place. If you’d prefer to cook, look into the ethnic market situation and whether you can buy a bottle of ground mango powder in your new city. Streaming services and take-out food are available everywhere, but most designers will probably find that there is more to life than Netflix and middling, lukewarm food.

To a degree, designers depend on coffee shops, bookstores, and clothing shops that suit their style, and artists’ supply stores are resources for all designers. If you’re used to having a full selection of retailers available, you may have trouble adjusting to a small city where all there’ll be to choose from is a small Michael’s in a shopping center stuck in the 1970s.

Civic events to which you can look forward are also part of what you should consider. If you’re a Game Designer interested in anime, a place with a significant anime expo on its annual calendar will make a good home for you. You may not take advantage of everything your new city offers, but you should do some due diligence to find out what’s available. If you’re a classical music fan, is there a symphony orchestra or an opera company? If your music tastes are more catholic, is the city you’re considering a place to which bands you like regularly tour? Sports fans should investigate local teams: you don’t have to be in New York or Los Angeles to have major league teams at your disposal, but even in smaller places, there are minor league teams that can be just as much fun to follow as the big ones (the Savannah Bananas aren’t the Dodgers, but they certainly are fun.)

If you like the outdoors, you’ll want to investigate green spaces, both urban (like Vancouver’s Stanley Park) and nearby (such as having mountains to explore or lakes to fish that are a short distance from the city center.) The list can go on, but if you have an interest, ensure you can exercise it in a place you’re considering living. Massive cities can probably offer you anything, including plenty of things you don’t know about but could discover, but smaller towns will be, by definition, more limited. So, if you want to spend all your leisure time on horseback, make sure that the city under consideration has stables on offer.

All this can be lumped under the rubric of quality leisure time, and a designer of any sort will be much better off with the option to do things they enjoy when they’re not at work. Recharging creative batteries is all-important, and living in what you perceive to be the boring middle of nowhere will not help you, either as a person or as a professional.

Top Cities for Designers

When it comes to finding a city in which designers can work and thrive, you should bear in mind that the more tech-oriented types of designers are going to find their best opportunities in tech hubs. On the other hand, Graphic Designers, Mechanical Designers, and Web Designers are needed just about everywhere and get a much broader choice of places to work. For example, Provo, Utah, and Boulder, Colorado, feature the highest location quotients for Graphic Designers in the country. They’re both highly livable mid-sized cities (populations of 600,000 and 300,000 respectively) with much to recommend them. Still, while they’re highly suitable for Graphic Designers, they’re not exactly tech hubs, and if it’s a tech role you want, you’ll have to look elsewhere.

Other branches of design have their own hubs. If the professional hat you wish to wear is Fashion Designer, you’ll likely think you’ll have to work in New York, London, Paris, Milan, or Tokyo to make a living. That’s not the case, however, and there are considerable opportunities for Fashion Designers in American cities as unexpected as Milwaukee, Minneapolis, and Portland. Herewith is a list of six cities worth consideration for professional designers of all stripes.

Austin, Texas

There’s a lot more to Austin than being the state capital of Texas and the location of the University of Texas’s flagship campus, which is how many people still think of one of the country’s most prominent up-and-coming tech hubs. Recent years have seen tech firms leaving California, and a lot of that traffic has headed to Texas, as the 2021 move of Tesla from Palo Alto to Austin shows. 

Austin is famous for its music scene (indeed, it is known as the Live Music Capital of the World due to its high concentration of music venues per capita.) Yet, despite the inroads of tech, both big and small, a famous campaign has been afoot for years to ‘Keep Austin Weird.’ The Texas Longhorns will keep sports fans happy, and there is a AAA baseball team in nearby Round Rock, the Round Rock Express. Before you pack up and move to Bat City (Austin is so named because of a proliferation of Mexican fruit bats, making it a bad place for the chiroptophobic,) be forewarned that you won’t be the only person who wants to live there. In fact, Austin now ranks as the fifth most expensive city in the country for renters. On the bright side, wages are high, and at least some costs are manageable: a McDonald’s Quarter Pounder with Cheese still costs only $4.29 in Austin, as opposed to $6.43 in Manhattan.

Boston, Massachusetts

Beantown is one of the United States’ most historic cities; if you can get past the baked beans moniker, it’s also known as the Cradle of Liberty. It boasts just about anything you could want from a major cosmopolitan city, from a major symphony orchestra to museums to some of the most hated (by non-Bostonians) sports teams in the country. With just under five million people in the greater Boston area, it’s intimate in comparison to gigantic metropolitan agglomerations such as New York or Los Angeles. Public transportation is plentiful, and so is snow in the winter. Designers of all ilks are well compensated in Boston, but living there will also cost you more to live there. Housing expenses are a frightening 125% higher than the national average, and that cheeseburger will cost you $6.87 – more than New York City.

New York, New York

New York is, quite simply, New York, one of the greatest cities on the planet. It offers arguably unparalleled cultural riches to the nearly 19 million metropolitan area residents spannings three states. The job opportunities for designers are considerable, even if New York isn’t what one ordinarily thinks of as a tech hub. While there should be no surprise in learning that New York, long a nexus of artistic innovation, should be a good destination for Graphic Designers, there are also more UX/UI Designer jobs in the Big Apple than anywhere else in the country. This city among cities provides ample opportunities for game designers, and it ranks with Paris, Milan, and Tokyo as one of the world’s reigning fashion capitals. Jobs are definitely to be had, and careers are to be made in New York’s five boroughs, which explains why people continue to flock there. Alas, the cost of so much opportunity is a notoriously unlivable and expensive city. Crime is high, summer weather is oppressive, and the public transportation system, while still efficient, is, to put it mildly, in a state of disrepair. Rents are astronomical, with average figures for studio apartments (let alone one-bedrooms) sitting above the $3000 mark. Although wages are high, they don’t always cover the high cost of living, which includes that $6.43 McDonald’s Quarter Pounder with Cheese.

San Francisco Bay Area, California

The Bay Area extends beyond San Francisco and Oakland to include San Jose and the all-important Silicon Valley, which makes the area inescapable as a potential destination for Designers, especially those interested in the field's tech side. San Francisco also has a location quotient of 1.53 for Graphic Designers and possesses more video game development studios than any other city in the country. Although hoodie-clad Bay Area residents aren’t generally famous for being fashion plates, there is even a small but substantial fashion industry in the city. There is thus no way not to recommend San Francisco, which, even though not a major cosmopolitan capital, offers its fair share of arts organizations, sports teams, and nightlife. The climate can be erratic (Mark Twain never said that the coldest winter he’d ever spent was a summer in San Francisco, but there’s something to the quote nevertheless), and the crime rate is high. So is the cost of living, although salaries are high as well, and that McDonald’s cheeseburger will set you back at only $6.07.

Seattle, Washington

Thanks to the verdant lushness of its landscape, Seattle is known as the Emerald City. However, that lushness is all temperate rainforest, with the accent on rain. On the other hand, Seattle provides an unusually generous concentration of coffee shops in which to get out of all the rain. Graphic Designers, Product Designers, and Mechanical Designers are all well-remunerated in Seattle. If you combine Seattle with neighboring Bellevue, you find a metropolitan area that offers as many game studios as San Francisco. Violent crime rates are traditionally lower in Seattle than in many comparable cities, property crimes less so. If you’re a culture vulture, you’ll find plenty of sports teams to root for and rather less to applaud. The problem, again, is the cost of living: designers have gotten to Seattle before you and driven that all-important statistic up, so those large salaries will be gobbled up in large part by rent and other expenses. That said, Seattle is less costly to live in than San Francisco or Boston, as borne out by the cost of that cheeseburger, which is a relative bargain at $5.88.

Toronto, Ontario, and Montreal, Quebec

If growth continues at its present rate, Canada’s largest city, Toronto, will employ more tech workers than Silicon Valley as soon as early 2023. Toronto is now Canada’s most-prominent tech hub. It offers so many opportunities to skilled tech workers that the country’s rather rigid work visa laws have been bent considerably to facilitate immigration for skilled tech workers. Further programs are in the works. Thus Toronto’s employment landscape offers what you may not find so easily south of the 49th Parallel: many tech jobs and a shortage of qualified people to fill them. Metropolitan Toronto is home to some 6.3 million people as of 2023, a growing figure. It has been dubbed the safest city in North America, and public transportation is abundant and reliable. It’s not New York or Paris in terms of cultural offerings, and you probably will have to become a Leafs fan if you move there, but Toronto has much to offer in terms of green spaces, and 2022 figures rank it eighth among the most livable cities in the world. That’s even with the issue of a climate that tends towards frigid winters and hot and humid summers. `Cost of living, while nothing to rival comparable American cities, still runs high, although Canadian McDonald’s’ charges a modest $5.88 CAN for that Quarter Pounder with Cheese, and four bucks will get you a large coffee and ten Timbits at Tim Hortons.

Significantly more affordable than Toronto is Francophone Canada’s leading city, Montreal. It’s not quite the up-and-coming tech hub that Toronto is, but it is widely considered to be a tech city in the making. It offers more game development studios than either Vancouver or Toronto (or, more to the point, San Francisco or Los Angeles), and the same four dollars Canadian will get you that coffee and Timbits order as in Toronto. Of course, you’ll have to do something about learning French. Winters are no warmer in Montreal than in Toronto (they are, in fact, colder and snowier thanks to Montreal’s more northerly latitude), and American citizens will need a work visa. Still, Montreal is regularly considered a highly livable city and shouldn’t be dismissed out of hand as a possible destination for a budding Designer.

Why Become a Designer?

There aren’t many careers out there that allow for the play of the imagination. Creative people, whether born or bred, often need to create to stay sane and could find themselves highly frustrated and unhappy in non-creative jobs. Not everyone gets the luxury of matching their temperament to their vocation, but you owe it to yourself at least to try to see whether you can make a career of your creative energies.

The main reason for seeking to make a career as a designer is that you’re artistic and want to have a career that’s artistic. Of course, drawing is not all fun, but you still get to use parts of your brain that accountants don’t get to employ in their daily tasks. Design may not be a get-rich-quick kind of career, although Designers are, for the most part, well enough paid: something close to $65,000 is a figure that Indeed quotes for a mean “Designer” salary in the United States, although a figure like that is too broad really to get a feel for what the different types of Designer actually make. Some high-tech design roles (like UX) can make for salaries that just skim the six-figure range, and, as a general rule, the more technical the design job, the higher the pay. Even if you go into a branch of design that doesn’t pay as much as UX, a creative person may well find that not getting rich quickly but getting to spend your day creating images and objects is a highly desirable compromise upon which to build a professional life.

Read more about whether designer is a good career.

Learn the Skills to Become a Designer at Noble Desktop

If you wish to become a designer, Noble Desktop, a tech and design school based in New York that teaches worldwide thanks to the wonders of the internet, is available to give you the education you need to get started in this exciting field. Noble teaches certificate programs in numerous aspects of design and the technology that makes design possible in the contemporary world. These certificate programs offer comprehensive instruction in their topics and will arm you for the job market in whichever aspect of design interests you.

Noble has certificate programs in graphic design (the Adobe trio of Photoshop, InDesign, and Illustrator), digital design (the main troika of Adobe programs plus Figma for UI design), UX & UI design, and motion graphics. All these programs feature small class sizes in order to make sure that each student receives ample attention from the instructor, and can be taken either in-person in New York or online from anywhere over the 85% of the Earth’s surface that is reached by the internet (plus the International Space Station.) Classes at Noble Desktop include a free retake option, which can be useful as a refresher course or as a means of maximizing what you learn from fast-paced classes. Noble’s instructors are all experts in their fields and often working professionals whose experience is invaluable when they mentor students in the school’s certificate programs 1-to-1.

Noble offers further design courses that are briefer than the certificate programs. You may also wish to consult Noble’s Learning Hub for a wealth of information on how to learn to be a designer.