Is Design a Good Career?

Design, in one of its many various forms, can be a very good career indeed for someone with a visually creative temperament. Although there are ways to make more money than by being a Graphic Designer, foregoing a huge paycheck so you can make art for a living may be attractive to many artists who are looking for a way to turn what would otherwise be a hobby into a career. Graphic design also offers considerable opportunities for freelancing, which may be enormously attractive to people who don’t want to be tied to a rigorous nine-to-five schedule. Other types of design careers have things to recommend them as well: UX, UI, and Product Designers are all very well-paid, and Game Designers, while they don’t exactly get to sit around and play video games all day, do get the chance to do something they ostensibly love doing. Even floral design can be a good career for the right person: making attractive things with flowers is definitely a way to earn a modest but pleasant living. 

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 Design a Good Career?

The Work is Creative

The primary attraction of a design career is that it offers creative people the chance to get paid to create. Instead of starving in a garret above the Left Bank in Paris, which may sound romantic, but which becomes unpleasant in short measure, a design career rewards you monetarily for using your imagination.

Graphic Designers are the design professionals who are most closely connected to creating art in the traditional sense since they may even still get to work with traditional artists’ media as well as the computer. Fashion Designers also get to sketch with old-school media as they transfer the image of the garment in their head to the pad before transferring it to the computer. UX Designers also get to create an overall aesthetic vision that can include hands-on fabrication of visuals, while Game Designers get to make up entire visual worlds. Even designers who arrange more than they create (such as interior or floral designers) can look at a room or a vase as a blank canvas ready to be turned into some form of aesthetically pleasing applied art. Finally, Industrial and Mechanical Designers get to channel their creative abilities into more applied directions but still get to use the creative parts of their brains as they do so. If you’re visually creative, there is probably a Design field in which you’ll be able to make a happy career.

The Salaries are Rewarding

The reason people go to work every day is to make money so they can afford the necessities (and, if they’re lucky, some not-so-necessities) of life. As such, and all other factors being equal, you’re going to want to find a job that pays well so that you can live a comfortable life and, eventually, retire securely. All other factors aren’t equal, however, and intangibles such as job satisfaction play a substantial role in finding the career that will suit you best. Yes, you can conceivably find something that pays very well but that you hate on a daily basis, but that’s a recipe for a miserable life. You ideally want to find a balance between remuneration and job satisfaction and will probably hope that you won’t have to sacrifice too much of the former to get more of the latter (and, of course, vice versa.)

The good news is that most design careers pay well. Don’t fool yourself into thinking that you can make six figures right out of the gate, but salaries are generally high, especially for UX, UI, and Product Designers, who are at the cutting edge of what design careers can be. Graphic Designers don’t quite make that kind of money, but their median pay for 2021 was over $50,000, and their line of work has a unique set of perks that artists will find to be a lot more interesting than just the fabled catered lunches offered by major tech companies. No, a design career won’t get you rich quick, but it will get you more than enough to keep you in paints and brushes for your creative downtime activities.

Design is a Growth Field

Good salaries today aren’t the only reason to turn to a particular career. If long-term employment is your plan, you’re going to want to make sure that you’re moving into a field with growth potential, in which there will be more, rather than fewer, jobs in the future. The United States Bureau of Labor Statistics publishes projections of expected growth for given careers, and the future, especially for certain branches of the design field, is decidedly rosy. For their statistical purposes, the BLS lumps together Web and Digital Interface Designers (which is their title for the UX-UI-Product Designer axis), and they offer a highly encouraging projection of 16% job growth from 2021 to 2031 as ecommerce continues to develop and more and more activities shift online. Game Designers came in for a 5% growth figure.

Although the numbers for other types of designers aren’t quite as sanguine, the BLS nonetheless projects some growth in most areas of the design profession. Graphic Designers can expect to see their field grow more slowly than average at 3%. Mechanical Designers will see their own ranks shrink by that figure as advances in CAD software make human endeavor redundant. Fashion Designers face better job growth figures, probably because people are going to continue to need to put on clothes, with the same 3% figure as for graphic designers, while growth in the Interior Design field will be very slow, at only 1%.

The moral of the story here is one that can be observed throughout the job market: the tech-heavy fields are projected to show substantial growth, while more traditional professions will find their expansion comparatively limited. If there is an upside to that, it’s that learning new technological processes—the development of AI art for Graphic Designers, for example —is probably the best way to prepare for a long-term future in the design business.

The Work is Varied

No two design projects are exactly the same, which means that the work a designer does during the length of a career can be varied in the extreme. Whereas some roles seem to doom workers to an Eternal Return of the Same, design careers offer a much greater variety of professional activities. Even as you remain with a single employer, there will be differences between the products, apps, or campaigns for which you’re designing.

And, as you change employers in the course of your professional life, you’ll encounter brand new kinds of projects and different ways of organizing creative thinking around them. If you ultimately choose to freelance, you’ll have an even greater variety of work, especially if you do well enough for yourself so that you’re able to choose what you work on next. Even if you don’t get to pick and choose the jobs you do, you can at least be reasonably sure that there’ll be some variety to them. Variety isn’t just the spice of life; it’s vital to a creative person’s mental well-being.

You Can Freelance

One of the most attractive things about graphic design (it applies in smaller measure to other branches of the design field as well) is that so much of it is done by people who are self-employed. According to 2019 figures, 21% of all graphic designers were working as freelancers. Freelancing offers many desirable advantages over traditional work, including not having to report to an office at nine o’clock every morning, five days a week. That said, breaking away into the world of self-employment has hazards of its own since it basically means that you have to run a business while simultaneously doing client design work. And you’ll have potentially demanding clients in place of a demanding boss, but that can at least mean that you’ll have fewer people to please with your work. You’ll also have to be your own accounts receivable department, and, as any freelancer can tell you, getting paid (and getting paid on time) can sometimes be a challenge.

That’s not to scare you off being a freelancer, just to be realistic about what is a very enjoyable way of working for a lot of Designers. Some freelance Designers do very well at it, while others choose to take a comparative pay cut in exchange for the independence a freelance working style gives them. The important thing is that design as a field offers the possibility of working in a way that can seem like a dream come true to people whose work lives have consisted exclusively of a nine-to-five grind.

Career Paths Related to Designer

 “Designer” is such a broad term that switching the particular design hat you’re wearing can amount to a career change. Thus a Graphic Designer’s skills with the Adobe Creative Cloud can also be used as the basis for a web or fashion design career. You’ll still need to add to your existing skill set (web designers need prototyping software like Figma; fashion designers need to know how to sew), but you’ll have the creative and software abilities upon which to build. Or you can adapt your Photoshop skills to working with photographers, while AfterEffects skills can be rerouted from motion design to film production. And so on. Amidst the nebula that is the design field, there are endless possibilities for cross-pollination and transfer of transferable skills.

The entirely different but concomitant career that calls for design skills is that of the people who are responsible for turning a design into a thing: Engineers. There are similarities and differences between the types of brains best suited to each career, but a designer’s skill set can be highly useful for an engineer. The same is true for Architects, although, as with Engineers, quite a bit of additional schooling is required to get started in those professions (a bachelor’s of science in engineering or a bachelor’s of architecture.) Still, computer-assisted design skills are essential for either of these careers, as they are for ancillary positions in engineering and architecture offices.

Read more about further career paths related to designer careers.

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.

Key Takeaways

• Design can be an excellent career choice for creative types looking to make a living from making art. Indeed, it’s the best and most reliable way for an artist to make a steady living.
• Most Designers are reasonably well-paid; the high-tech design fields offer considerable growth potential as ecommerce and digital design become increasingly important.
• Design work varies from job to job, helping to allay workplace boredom, and certain branches of design can be conducive to working as a freelancer.
• Noble Desktop can start you on your path to becoming a designer with in-person or online classes.