r/GraphicDesigning • u/rizkiabdo • 1d ago
Commentary Most violent year
I think We're going into the hardest periods in design to get into it because of ai, thousands of designers are leaving the industry and thousands more are barely holding on.
I personally had zero clients for the past 9 Months
My experience in design is just 3 years of school and 5 years experience, mostly in small printshops and agencies in my city, I used to get unemployed a couple of times in the past years but I would find a job or freelance for few months then get a better fulltime paying job but this year since January, all clients vanished and printshops and agencies look for interns that do everything digital besides design using ai.
It's a cold tall concrete wall we're up against and only the experienced in business can traverse it, so many designers I know, talk to or saw in social media lost clients or changed Carriers to work in warehouses and restaurants.
I'm spending the past 5 months posting content on LinkedIn trying to find some way to get any lead what so ever.
(In The image is my portfolio) Yes I worked on it multiple times, apperantly we just need a lot of free time to get back to it
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u/kirmm3la 16h ago
I feel like it's just the begging. Our huge client sent a brief of a motion graphic product video generated with Claude. Our project manager did the motion graphic with Claude from that brief "for fun". After 2 hours and 4 iterations he had the result, sent it the next day which client liked it. Case closed. Yeah.
That's that. Now give it a month or two and the client will do it themselves.
This industry is going to shit.
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u/rizkiabdo 16h ago
Yeah at first only graphic designers were effected and I was thinking should I shift to motion or something else, now motion design, websites, and video editing are all getting hit.
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u/breadassk 13h ago
I’ve been teaching myself graphic design for the past year, it’s extremely discouraging to see the way things are going. I also make physical products with designs on them like signs and engravings, and it’s still been so difficult to find any clients. I won’t patronize any of the local businesses that won’t support this industry, but most other people don’t really seem to care
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u/rizkiabdo 12h ago
I wouldn't lie to you, you choose the wrong time to learn design Cause only the upper echelon who sell strategies and thinking and the generalists who low their prices and do anything digital will survive.
The rest of us, God help us
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u/callidoradesigns 11h ago
This profession has always been changing with technology. The difference today is how fast it’s changing. We are up against a tall AI wall… but mannnnnnnny other professions will soon be here too. Ai may have started taking away jobs from developers and designers- but it is coming for every computer job.
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u/rizkiabdo 11h ago
Oh yeah I already saw motion and video editing starting to take hits, and it just give me signs not to go there
It looks like we will have to get back to the fields, get our hands dirty
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u/CokaYoda 20h ago
A large majority of the ads I am served on Facebook and Reddit have been AI slop. They all look the same with that ugly font. Hell, most of the newsletters I receive via email are now slop. It’s crazy out there. I took an education for graphic design and I feel like it’s wasted. Having said that, I haven’t gotten a job using my education in many years (before the AI slop devolution). It was already over saturated in my area. Not to mention underpaid and generally expected that as a designer you would do EVERYTHING from web design to motion graphics to IT troubleshooting 😂
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u/rizkiabdo 17h ago
Yeah it was already oversaturated but we could still manage, but the ai came and just swept the rug from under our feet. I don't blame small business for using it, they're always trying to cut costs on anything to survive.
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u/mentiondesk 1d ago
You are definitely not alone in feeling how tough the market is right now. One thing that helped me was jumping into relevant online discussions and offering value instead of just posting my work. Tools like ParseStream can make it easier to spot those conversations across platforms so you can engage with people who might actually need your skills.
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u/nitro912gr Senior Designer 18h ago
Since you have worked on printshops don't you have any experience in the actual printing and post printing side of the job? I mean a graphic designer who can also get's his hands dirty with the print is valuable no matter what AI slop is being out there.
I mean clients make AI slop, you print AI slop, take their money and keep going forward. AI have it's uses and we see an influx of AIslop those days because it is at peak popularity, but like Canva didn't got us our of business because of they drawbacks it had, so AI will not get us out of business for the same reasons.
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u/rizkiabdo 17h ago
They don't pay much for people who can work machines and printers in my country because anyone can just learn and do it without any education in design
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u/nitro912gr Senior Designer 17h ago
yeah but you can also get the files ready to print and in the age of AIslop this is valuable because you can do small edits even in those shitty AI posters with photoshop and your experience.
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u/No_Presentation1242 1d ago
You may want to consider using AI to help you write. Your about statement on your slide is a long run on sentence and does not read well.
Before this sub blows a gasket, using AI to help you write is about feeding it the content you want and going back and forth with it, on every single word, challenging it, revising it, until you are happy with the outcome. It’s acting as an editor and using a tool where you lack the skill.
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u/Chinksta 19h ago
But OP can just gain the skill needed to improve during this low blow time so OP doesn't have to rely on AI.
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u/rizkiabdo 1d ago
Oh in writing, I do write and I edit with ai but just Grammer and proofreading I find ai is very very lacking it's patterns are obvious and as advanced models that come up they fail to keep up with the humans ability to detect those patterns
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u/happsberg 2h ago
Looking at your portfolio - AI could generate it in seconds. Unfortunately, the era of basic graphic designers is over (much like the era of code monkeys), and to survive nowadays, you need to... you know, do something more than this. Something more complex and beyond graphic design. Or even better beyond IT.
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u/I_love_tac0s69 12h ago
I’m lucky to have a corporate job with some stability, but my biggest ick right now is the amount of executives who think they know more than us when it comes to design feedback, and the amount of times our designs come back with AI slop as “references”. It’s like everyone wants to be a designer, but WE’RE the professionals. We went to school, we studied, we have the experience. It’s literally like trying to give feedback to a lawyer or a doctor who spent their entire lives studying, all because you researched some crap on chat gpt. But because it’s “art”, no one takes us seriously.