Graphic Design

Graphic Designing is a job that most people will look over and just assume it’s an easy career that consists of a bunch of artists playing with computers and making “simple” graphics. Although, they might be right that graphic designers just sit at desks at sketching away concepts, designing simple logos, or even just scanning the web for the perfect font/ vector, it is by far an easy job.

Like most jobs graphic designers face issues in their jobs on a day to day basis. One would think that a job circulating art and computer software’s that provide everything to an artist to be able to create any design they can think of is super easy, it is still not enough. One of the most common and frustrating issues in the modern day for a designer is trying to find that perfect font to match their or their client’s project. Personally, I’ve spent more time looking for the right font on projects than I have actually working the graphic. The worst part of it all is that once you’ve found that right font 9 out of 10 times another issue has pop up and that is that you need to pay to use it. Now if you’re a designer working for a company that’s not as a big of an issue, but when you’re a freelancer than you have to think, “will the client pay for the font I’m going to use? Is the font worth the buy? Should I question my morals and ethics and just steal the font by creating the exact same font and pass it off as a licensed owner?”. This can be troubling for most designers and it’s an unfortunate issue we must face from time to time.

Which leads me into another issue designers have and it’s one that isn’t much of a modern-day issue, but an every-artist from the beginning of time issue and that is making the client happy. Clients come in all shapes and sizes with different ideas and guidelines for their projects, but they all share the same thing.

CLIENTS.ARE.NEVER.HAPPY.

They approach you with smiles and positive gestures with reaffirming words and gestures but once they have you working with them that all goes away instantaneously. Kind words turn into harsh feedbacks, the smiles turn into frowns accompanied with more harsh feedback, and the worst part the amazing talent that clients have of not being able to clearly explain or write down a brief for the designer, but that is another issue for another blog. Though at the end of the day if you have a client that means you have a job that is bringing in money, so it’s not all bad. That being said let me smoothly transition over to probably the biggest issue, if not THE biggest issue, for a graphic designer…finding clients.

Not only is it hard to find a client, but a client willing to work with you at a price that both of you can agree on. This is an issue I have found to be a troublesome every time I start a project with a new client. You can sit down with a client and lay the project out, see what is needed and then explain what you will do and how you’ll go about doing the job. Up until then it’s all fine and dandy, the minute you then speak about prices you can almost hear the gears in a client’s mind turning, thinking on how to get away with paying you the littlest amount as possible. You can come up with a detailed, itemized list with every step of the project and finalize a quote with a time frame of how many hours it’ll take to finalize the project and how much you charge per hour and guaranteed the client will start deducting steps to cheapen the project. Regardless if it doesn’t make sense to you it’ll happen and will make the project that much harder, but don’t worry that’s just the perks of being a graphic designer and with time you’ll end up knowing how to manage these issues and start to control clients with Jedi mind tricks.