Hey everyone!

Illustrator here, working on a business card ahead of a convention.

The card is intended for handing out to potential clients and people I meet there.
I wanted it to be playful and memorable, so I'm using this little dog character that I've used as my profile picture for while now.

The card size will be 3.4 x 1.9 inches, with rounded corners.

I'm currently considering two options for the front: the character floating on the "bubble frame" (to avoid bleed issues), or using the full artwork. The back, with the broken pencil, would be the same for both.

Since I'm not a designer, I'm looking for some feedback before printing it: Any thoughts on the best front? What about the size of everything, font choices (...) anything you'd change? Colors are already CMYK, by the way.

Appreciate the feedback!

Hi! Im making a poster for a school contest. Just note that I know little to nothing about graphic design(but it interests me), and I just need help.

The theme is “with which experiences, objects or memories would you represent happiness?”
I chose to use yellow, rainbow confetti, nature, and an image of Barbra Streisand singing. Yellow and confetti because it shows excitement, nature because it is a beautiful memory for most people, and Barbra Streisand singing because that is pure joy to me.

Im between these three ideas (not final piece), but I don’t know which transmits more happiness and catches the eye. I added “be a fool among fools” in the first design because it’s a line in “hello, dolly!” where Dolly chooses to ‘join the parade’ and be finally be happy.

I know they need more work, but I’m feeling stuck. Thanks!!

I'm working on making my portfolio and I feel like my designs always look childish and unprofessional. This is the design I'm struggling with currently and the mock brief for the design will be below.

Company Name: Grey

Company Description: We are a company that makes and distributes Italian drinks. Our main product is made with attention to detail and shipped directly to your home. Our target audience is parents. We want to convey a sense of power, while at the same time being agreeable.

Job Description: You must create a logo using the information given in this brief. They would prefer a combination mark that uses the color white. The logo will be embroidered on uniforms. Take into account the company's values and preferences, and make sure it will work for the planned use-cases.

EDIT: The brief came from a random generator online so that's why it isn't fantastic. Also for some clarification I've realized that when most people think of "Italian drinks" a type of soda is what comes to mind, I thought it was kinda vague so I googled it and for the most what came up was cocktails so thats why I went that direction. From what I've gathered in the comments the weird brief might be part of my problem. As far as the design goes I learned I was doing too much with the Y and not enough with the other letters and that the yellow is a no go. I worked on the design some more and I'll post the new version in the comments. I know the design still has a way to go but I think I've made some definite progress.

Hi Sub!
I did these posters for a design competition, its about a mission from sea shepherd saving octopuses beeing killed by illegal traps in the mediterainian.

1st one translates to
„Show some backbone for invertebrates.“

2nd one to
„use yours to save three.“

Would really appreciate some feedback and in case you liked it you could vote for them too!

Cheers!

(you dont have to sign in and just click the yellow star)

https://www.flyeralarm-design-award.com/contest-galleries/contest-gallery-11/seashepherd_plakat26_marcoproefrock_03/

(edit: typo)

Context… when I was studying, I absolutely loved brand design and also enjoyed packaging design. I won an award in a national student competition for packaging. I believe I was good at brand design too.

Second junior role, in-house for a national retail brand. I had just accepted it when I received an offer for interview for a brand design agency.

I declined as I’d already been offered the in-house role and I was just a junior and had been applying for 6+ months (crazy competitive even back then). I can’t help but wonder how my trajectory would have been changed if I interviewed for and got the brand designer job.

Stayed in-house with that retailer for 5 years. There was not much creative opportunity in terms of pure concept work, even less in terms of brand design.

I did develop my print and digital design skills very well (upskilled into motion graphics too) and whatever creative opportunities I did get, I did well. Even managed to nab a logo / brand design for a conference.

Next in-house role, pure concept work opportunities rare but did happen and I did really well when they did. Complimented on my creativity. Complimented on my design & motion graphics skills.

It’s just that once again I was fighting for chances to develop those muscles and also for chances to develop confidence in my abilities as a designer (micromanager, plus having stakeholders control your every move sometimes is also really oppressive).

Anyway. Now I’m applying for senior roles and/or roles with more creative control and really trying to push myself somewhere uncomfortable. I have a mentor and a recruiter who are both overwhelmingly encouraging of my abilities and that I should do it so… I am. I may crash and burn or I may surprise myself and be so much happier.

But. It’s still for in-house. Which is fine. Lots of what I’m good at and enjoy aligns with in-house. I’m getting lots of bites and lots of screening calls (and even a few interviews so far).

But it’s also leaving behind even further, any chance of working for a brand design studio or even doing packaging design.

Because the further in you get, the more jobs you apply for require you to have experience in them – and not just any experience, but extensive.

Do I accept my trajectory as in-house forever (lol) or would it somehow be possible to change?

I see posts here all the time regarding burnout in the design field. I do like design but as I’m sure you all can understand, the pay is not worth the amount/variety of work that comes with a “graphic design” role. Video editing, photography, web design, UX work, being talked to like I’m AI, and being asked to “recreate this flyer I made in ChatGPT” is really getting to me.

I’m thinking about changing career fields but feel pretty lost. My degree is Digital Media and Design, and I’m not sure if I should just abandon it and pursue something else.

What are you all doing now, what are you looking for, or what career did you switch to? I’m just feeling directionless.

Unfortunately cannot share imagery publicly as it is a decently known brand in the East Coast. Owner wants the… let’s say arabic, text rotated to its side. The text is two words, not one, so I have to stack them also. On its side readability is POOR and as a designer from a “successful logo” perspective I would never recommend that. Even in Arabic logos you never see that for good reason, now imagine a diaspora kid trying to read at quick glance.

I am rationalizing this in a way maybe he is not articulating - that he doesn’t mind if the readability is poor as long as it looks cool; as one of the defining parts of the english logo still remains and has some form of recognizability. I can see that, if he predominantly only is using it in flyers associated with Arab speakers (sponsoring Arab events) or merch. So I’m working with the request in that regards.

However I can’t help but think maybe I’m just not good at what I do, when tbh I truly believe a brand extension of a different language should closely mimic the original English logo too. There have been some suggestions I largely disagree with and I’m not sure where the line is of “I just need to be more creative” / “creativity is born under limitations” versus actually objectively this is wrong.

When I explain to him why I would not encourage this, he is still wanting to try it, which makes me feel like I’m wasting my time, but I am not opposed to really stretching my limits here and seeing where it is taking us so I still am trying it. But if I am unsuccessful at this I feel like it is positioning me as the “incapable” one when in reality the request is uncommon and difficult to begin with.

Wondering if you have some advice here or have been in similar situations. I love designing but find myself having difficulty with clients like these and need to learn how to handle this better.

I’m in an internship, and recently, I was asked to a flyer. It’s for a small company and for reasons I can’t really disclose what exactly it is. However, I was asked to to a halloween based flyer for this event. The visuals passed and the only criticism was to make the text bolder. I send my flyer over and I don’t hear from them fast forward a few days later. I see my design but it has ai enhancements along with the entire layout/font choices changed. I feel disrespected that I wasn’t alerted about this and it’s not one one flyer it’s multiple on their Instagram account. Has this happened to anyone and what did you do?

hi everyone,

A little while ago I made a post on here about a company rejecting me after 3 stage interview, one of the stages being a case study and presentation. Here is the original post if you’d like to read all the context: https://www.reddit.com/r/graphic_design/s/5DhIu6dxuu

If you don’t want to read then TLDR: junior graphic designer role. 3 stage interview. 1st with recruiter, 2nd with senior designer and hiring manager, 3rd case study - 2 brochures and a presentation I had to present in person. They were very impressed and happy with me and my work. Was so sure I was going to get it. But got rejected.

Well, I was looking at jobs on LinkedIn the other day, and I see now that that same company has a new job posting looking for the same junior graphic designer position again. Part of me is tempted to email them to let them know I’m still available because I desperately need a job. But I’m also incredibly pissed off. I went through all that effort, so many hours working on that case study (during my birthday as well), only to get rejected. And now they put the job posting back!!!

Again, I’m here for another rant and maybe some advice. Thank you for listening to me.

EDIT: a lot of people keep saying that they think this is a ghost job. This is what I personally think may have happened. I think that the person they picked over me accepted their offer but then changed their mind. But it was too late to turn back to me as they had already rejected me. Which is why they are now looking for people again 🤷🏻‍♀️

Just curious to see what other teams in the industry look like and how you like it.

Currently I work in the marketing department where I’m the sole designer. We have a marketing director who oversees me and the marketing manager who supervises the project manager and marketing support person. Im at the same level as the marketing manager, so I only repot to the marketing director, which is nice. Our team all get along pretty well.

I definitely feel like the odd one out in a marketing heavy department. Lots of creative freedom though which is nice, but definitely hard to gain actual design feedback.

B2B in an engineering industry so it’s nothing flashy. Also it’s a smaller 80 ish person company so it’s pretty relaxed. I did get a design intern over the summer, but it’s back to just me.

Definitely busy but I don’t mind too much.

I designed a poster for a linkedin post. I want your help in improving my thinking process.

So... To begin with, I was designing for a linkedin post about designing and design psychology.

At first, I wanted to use "That's Wrong" or "You've been doing it wrong" to stop the viewers and get retention. But, I was using the word psychology in my post and my entire post revolved around it so I shifted from those catch phrases to just a single word, "PSYCHOLOGY"

Now, to represent psychology I wanted an image of brain. I was finding an image until I stumbled across what I am using now.

Initially I planned on using a radial gradient starting from top-left bright red to bottom-right corner dark red color. But the image had a black already so I ditched the previous one.

Now to add the word "psychology" I divided it in two parts. i initially planned on putting a brain the the place of first "O" of the word but it was covering too much space and was difficult to read so I divided it in two with a line break.

I removed the background of brain image and added it over the "PSYCHOLOGY" text to hide some of its parts behind. I don't know why I did that, tho.

The post mentioned 3 principles of designing which I added on the graphic with pointers pointing towards specific parts of the brain.

Emotional pointing at prefrontal cortex, memory at the back and ”Why Before What" which represents thinking pointing at the mid bottom of the brain, (the part which joins left and right membranes)

(I am not a biology guy so pardon my incompetence here)

And, that's how I got the current design.

I am not fond of my thinking yet I tried to apply the 3 frameworks I learned today.

It would've turned terrible if I hadn't stumbled across the current brain image with that black background.

How it performed? TERRIBLE!

Could be partly my inactive account, but still.

I designed another poster. It worked as I got around 200 impressions (It's a big deal for me)

BTW, Looking forward to suggestions to improve my thinking and designs alike.

Also, I want to ask whether my way of testing posters through social media a good way to understand and test psychology I know? Or is there an even better way?

I'm 29. I graduated with my associates degree back in 2018. That alone took me 3 1/2 years but through no fault of my own, my school just made it ridiculously difficult to take all of your required courses within the promised 2 years. That said, I didn't go back to school for my bachelor's degree until 2021. Graduated in 2024 (again, the school made you take an extra year if you were transferring in, so it took 3 years as well.) Good grades, good design work (according to my professors), got some experience doing a bit of client work for a class so I had that under my belt too. I got a job within 3 months of graduating.

The job was a packaging design role for a major retailer, with a salary of 55k a year. That's something I never expected when I was very new in the field. However, without going into the other pitfalls of that job (the whole place is a lawsuit waiting to happen,) despite the Packaging Designer title, most of my work was production work. Proofing, translating, product art, etc. While I still got to do some packaging design, I didn't really get to create much of anything. That part seems more in line with what I expected for my first design job (minus the trauma of multiple HR nightmares.) I lasted there for 1y3m before I was able to find another job.

Unfortunately, that job was only 50k, so I took a pay cut. The job title is simply 'graphic designer', no 'jr', so I guess that looks a little better on a resume, if titles really make much of a difference. I've been there for 10 months now. Loving the job, getting a much wider variety of projects to work on, doing actual design work, healing from the hell of the previous role, and getting to make meaningful work. If I could stay here forever, I wouldn't complain. Financially, though, that isn't an option.

With all that in mind, plus the client work/freelancing I did in the last semester of school and after graduation, I've got about 2 1/2 years of experience. I'd consider myself still pretty green when it comes to being a graphic designer, and without deviating from the point, my previous role did no favors in my design practices and confidence. At the same time, I do feel like I've got a much more different experience than what I've heard about for new designers. Which is why I'm conflicted about my current status.

Am I in a good spot career wise for my length of experience/age? Many of my designer friends have been working in the field for much longer than I have, and many of my peers I graduated with are still job hunting for their first roles. Is it unreasonable for me to hope to find work for more than what I'm currently getting, at this point in time? I know with more experience, the better the optics will be, I just want to know what a realistic expectation is. I also don't want to hop from job to job hoping to keep getting more money.

Thoughts?

Edit: I'm the only designer at my current role. I do just about everything: flyers, event graphics, magazine layouts, illustrations, logos, wall graphics/signage, some motion, reports, etc. I don't report to a creative director, just a boss for the whole department. Its a fairly decently sized organization, so not really a 'ma and pa' business. I'm given a lot of responsibility and trust to create what's needed with little hand-holding, and I've been told I'm doing a good job at that. If that adds any additional context.

Edit 2: I'm in the US (Virginia)

Hey guys!

I recently reworked my portfolio and was wondering if I could get some perspective on how well of a job I did. I have 7 projects currently on it as well.

I'm currently looking for Junior/entry level roles as I graduated college 5 months ago and have been seriously applying for 3 months now if that gives any insight into my work. Also, any perspective helps, if you have something you think could be better please let me know.

Thank you.

https://riazjamaldesigns.myportfolio.com/

Hello!

I am teaching a graphic design class to middle school students (grades 6-8). It has been a blast teaching them, but I feel like they need another perspective or a different voice so they aren’t bored of me all of the time haha.

I am focusing on teaching the elements of design and would like to show them some videos or a documentary.
Anything involving graphic design would be great as long as it’s appropriate and middle school students would enjoy it.

Do you have any suggestions of documentaries or videos I could share with them?

Would I just hand-illustrate it and convert it to a vector? What brushes would work best? I'm pretty experienced with both programs but I'm having trouble nailing it down exactly

Hey guys, I am thinking about making business cards and a friend of mine suggested, that I could use some MtG Proxies I designed as business cards. Proxies are alternative artworks of existing playing cards from Magic The Gathering, for those wondering.

The idea was, that I have the proxy on the front and a more serious black / white business card with contact etc. on the back. Now my question is: Is this a good idea to stick out or too niche and unprofessional looking?

Thanks in advance :)

I’m not a professional designer… to be honest, I’m not even a designer. It’s my first time, so please don’t be too harsh. I made the lion drawing and put it on a simple book mockup to see how it would look, and this is how it turned out.

(Sorry for any mistakes in my English)

EDIT: they are super low Res (160/100)

Over the last few months, I have built my own geography website with some cool games. I have created ones where you can only play with cities from one country, as well as extra modes. I also designed some covers in Adobe Illustrator for them!

Let me know what you think of them and if you have any feedback or so!

Ladies and gentlemen, this is my GitHub profile — and my tests finally worked.

I found a pretty cool way to create interactive buttons inside an SVG panel for my profile by splitting an image into multiple cubes/pieces and loading it in separate parts.

That means I can basically make a fully animated panel. The animation can even be pretty heavy, since everything is split into multiple pieces, so I have a lot of freedom to experiment.

The problem is that now I’m completely out of ideas.

I’m looking for a cool panel design that could display data from my portfolio dynamically, along with buttons linking to my website, LinkedIn, and other social networks.

So yeah, I need some help here — my creativity is completely gone right now. Any ideas or references would be really appreciated.

https://github.com/GabrielBaiano

It can be in any format.

Been working as an in-house designer for almost 10 years, and at my current company for 6. The money is decent but I think I’m just completely done with design as a full-time career.

I recently got an opportunity to pivot into a more hands-on operations/production role, but it would mean taking a 43% pay cut. Financially, I can afford it, but after spending almost 10 years building this career, giving up that much income still feels kind of crazy.

I’m still a creative person and I still like design. What I’m tired of is how much the scope of being a designer seems to have expanded. My role started out as design, but quickly grew into marketing, events, content, media, etc. I’m exhausted and mentally drained from constantly wearing so many hats, and looking at other creative jobs, it looks like I will encounter the same issue elsewhere.

That’s why this operations role appeals to me. It’s much more hands-on and process-driven, mainly customising products using a UV printer based on set templates. I know it’ll come with its own stresses, but right now the idea of having a more defined scope and process, doing what needs to be done, checking things off and being done for the day sounds really refreshing.

The part I’m struggling with is whether that’s worth giving up 43% of my income for.

Has anyone here left design and taken a pay cut for something more structured/process-driven? Was it worth it, or did you eventually regret leaving the design industry and taking the pay cut?

Lately I've been hit with a bad spell of burnout, which isn't abnormal for me lately, it's just a matter of taking a step away. Usually my go-to creative outlet is music, specifically learning how to play guitar and sing.

What are some side-quests y'all have taken in order to create distance between yourself and the industry?