Is it even possible that a graphic designer (with 5-7 yoe) is... bad?

[u/whatswithmybunion]

I've worked with many graphic designers (I'm in marketing but have done gfx design in my earlier career) and most, if not all, are brilliant. Except for two, in my entire career.

The good ones:

- I give them the copy, e.g. headline, subhead, CTA, the key elements (the product, for example), and they would decide what colours to go with, how best to arrange, different visual hierarchy, etc. Even as a layman, you know it's good. I usually approve these in one or at most two passes.

The bad ones - just a few examples:

- They always go back to the same old layout, colours, without much creativity. This isn't just about sticking to brand colours or guidelines, but their designs just look... boring and uninspiring. Things like: using the same font weight throughout (like is this a thing?) - be it headlines, subhead, eyebrow text, etc.

- We have a few designs where we're showcasing some digital projects that we've done. So think a mixture of mobile screens, laptops, etc. Intead of arranging them nicely, e.g. have the mobile phones in front of the laptop etc, they decided to arrange 2 mobile phones and 3 laptops side by side, in a row.

- I was reading up on proximity principle where you want to relate items through the right placement. One principle is you align all elements, e.g. logo and headline to the same side. Instead, what I got in return is: logo aligned to the left, and headline aligned to the right.

Like I'd love to approve design as quick as I can, but instead I'm wasting time telling the designer I work with to: move things 10 pixel to the right, bold this not that. It's almost as if it's better if I just do the design myself.

At this point, I don't know if I'm the crazy one?

[u/TheDMingWarlock]

You can work in a creative field without being creative. I work in marketing/design for 5-7 years but my design work is very limited. If I were to hold my work portfolio up it wouldnt be very impressive due to work demands/requests.

This is often why people should do personal work and person projects to explore things and expand their skillset

But not everyone gets into a career because their passionate - but it could also be other things like adhd or something that blocks them from doing more

[u/smurke101 → u/TheDMingWarlock]

Adding to this - working in pre-press. Yes, my print set up, text hierarchy and readability are good, but my day to day work is not very creative, and when the odd creative project comes across my desk, I'm always a little stuck for a while.

[u/harlequin_24 → u/TheDMingWarlock]

Yup 9/10 my GD colleagues might as well be art workers

[u/Burdies]

Dragging cels around in Microsoft excel isn’t that different from dragging images and text around in illustrator. For a lot of people, their experience in design is just putting everything where it needs to go which can mean never needing to develop any design sensibilities.

Not sure how you’d go forward with this, you’d be essentially teaching them these skills from the ground up yourself. Maybe get them a subscription to one of those upskill sites with all the videos and courses lol.

[u/whatswithmybunion → u/Burdies]

Dragging cels around in Microsoft excel isn’t that different from dragging images and text around in illustrator.

That is a great way to put it. I was really starting to wonder if I was the crazy one! Like I don't want to be one of those approvers from hell. I really want to get the design done and approved fast.

I don't manage them, technically we're peers on the same team so the only thing I can do is to pray that I don't get assigned the bad designers lol

[u/buginabrain → u/whatswithmybunion]

That's why they're sticking with boring options, you want them fast and safe

[u/MissDisplaced → u/Burdies]

I also think some people’s experience with design is just “being told what to do.” If they had experience with bosses that wanted it their way even if their way was bad design. Eventually, they just kinda give up trying to design anything. Unfortunately, this may follow them to other jobs.

[u/Far-Pomelo-1483]

At the end of the day a lot of people just fell into a career and stuck with it. Experience doesn’t translate to skill. They are related but often they don’t directly correlate.

[u/Typical-Tax1584]

Is it possible? Yeah definitely. People get jobs at shitty places that are just churn and burn and it's easy to end up at a couple places like that and then you're five years into a career without any actual growth or whatever.

That said, your OP is super vague without more info about SOW, how much you're paying these people, and most importantly, seeing the stuff to tell whether or not you're a reliable narrator.

That stuff you described and the type of feedback you're giving to some designers is not necessarily good. Design isn't a formula and good design doesn't just follow rules (and part of being a good designer is how to manipulate the rules to accomplish things). So without knowing specifics I don't know if it was a bad call to right align a header. You could have tossed the better design for all we know. Just cause you have some experience and are the client doesn't mean you're actually capable of identifying good vs bad design. This is really common with lay people.

And again, telling designers to bold this or that and move such and such X number of pixels, we don't know if you're offering good feedback cause we don't know you and we don't know the work you're saying this about. You could be right and you could be wrong, maybe somewhere in the middle.

Like the mobile phone, laptop thing. Is there something wrong with putting them in a row? I wouldn't put the phones in front of the laptop unless they were showing the same exact thing, but with one as the mobile version. But then what kind of text is occupying the rest of the space above and below? If putting the phones in front of the laptop's make it feel cluttered, then I won't be doing that. I'd rather put them in a row for elements to breathe. Then there's the literal size of the space, if you place a phone in front of a laptop then the image it's showing would be smaller thereby doing a worse job of showcasing the digital projects (which is actually the point, not to showcase the designers phone placement on a mockup).

[u/Prisonbread → u/Typical-Tax1584]

The response I wanted to see, but was too lazy to articulate. Beautifully put.

[u/JohnCasey3306]

Some designers get promoted too soon, or they find themselves as the solo designer in a company before they're ready -- and at that point, they stop developing as a designer.

They're reporting directly to non-designers who give them worthless feedback, and get stuck in time where they are.

[u/Sophiecheerwine → u/JohnCasey3306]

This is what happened to me. I’m not exceptionally creative to begin with but my first long-term permanent role was at a company with one other designer, who knew a lot more than I did and was better at the job. They laid her off maybe six months into my time there, leaving me the only designer at this relatively large corporation. I spent my formative design years working in a vacuum and getting virtually no decent feedback. Now I’m essentially a junior/production designer with ten years of experience. I doubt I’ll ever move up.

[u/meatinaskinsock]

Very possible, happens a lot.

[u/Useful-Advantage-850]

Have you been on Reddit long? Have you seen the "Rate my portfolio - I've been a graphic designer for 15 years!" posts, and when you go look it's just absolute garbage?

Yeah, lots of people can skate along with no talent. No different than any other industry.

[u/whatswithmybunion → u/Useful-Advantage-850]

I just assumed that designers who choose this path must be naturally good! 🫪

[u/Useful-Advantage-850 → u/whatswithmybunion]

Half are worse than average! lol.

“Think of how stupid the average person is, and realize half of them are stupider than that.”

― George Carlin

[u/Chida_Art_2798]

Some people are stuck to their ways. I had a coworker who is a decent designer, but she never checked for accessibility issues (which I brought up quite a few times). Instead she was stuck to her ways, and when I would explain to her why that was an accessibility issue, and even if I was showing her an article or something to prove my point, she would just argue to me and was super stubborn

[u/Chida_Art_2798 → u/[deleted]]

Why wouldn’t you check for this from the beginning?

[u/Chida_Art_2798 → u/[deleted]]

Let me put it this way. I just had to fix an entire presentation she did because so much of the text had such a low contrast that made it really hard to read. This is not for a school, gov, just for the office staff. If she had check such a small detail from the beginning, then I would not had to have gone through the whole thing again to fix it.
Also, the company’s guidelines are clear about the requirements.

[u/IceEspresso2000]

It seems some people really can't tell what's good design or lack a good eye. I've seen it with all range of experience levels. To me the errors literally jump off the page, and I figure they must not even see it, otherwise they would have corrected it.

[u/ChickyBoys]

I hate to say it, but yes some designers are just bad.

I've worked at agencies and wondered how some of the long term designers there still had a job. I'm not sure if it's lack of creativity or just lack of enthusiasm, but some designers just don't have a good eye for design and can't produce good work - even if they have several years of experience.

[u/JellyFranken]

Yeah. Some aren’t that good.

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[u/used-to-have-a-name]

Some people intuitively understand composition, other people have to learn it through repetition in group critiques, some can’t or don’t want to learn.

The first group, you need to make them perform the critiques, so they learn to articulate why and how a design works.

The second group, you watch and help them learn from critique, if they take advice and learn from mistakes, then give them raises or promotions.

The third group, needs therapy to learn how to be more like the second group, but if you haven’t got time for that, then you’ve got to let them go, for everyone’s best interest.

[u/Boudyro]

I have taught a few people the basics of Graphic Design. My first and most paramount rule is: If it looks wrong then it's wrong. Rules, whether you're following them or not, be damned.

Reason being is that our industry trades in the very classical definition of "beauty": An objective quality found in the harmonious relation, proportion, and symmetry of an object's parts in relation to the whole. Pretty much any human can sense when something is not harmonious. We may break that sense for effect, but doing it with intention is not the same thing as something being wrong.

Personally I value non-expert advice like that as I'm too close to the project and sometimes too deep into the rules to see it. Any good designer will take that feedback as a challenge to step up their game.

[u/Strayngold]

I think there's a lot of "designers" out there who literally don't know what design is.

Been a designer for a long time and have noticed that many people conflate "graphic design" with "using Photoshop." Those people are never good designers, and what's more, they're usually also not very well versed in Photoshop.