AIBU to think I can have a creative career that pays well also??

[Alittleditsy]

I had a ten year career as a Womenswear designer in the Fashion industry. It was fun, creative and well paid, but after a while I found it less rewarding due to the pressure, politics, competitiveness etc. Working in Fashion often also means location wise you're tied to capital cities for work.

Now I'm trying to switch to a new career, and considering my options. I'm leaning towards Graphic Design as I already work as a freelance Illustrator anyway, have a lot of design experience etc, and Graphics really interests me due to the range of companies/fields you can apply it to.

A lot of creative careers are either paid quite badly, or not that hands-on creative. I would love to be hands-on designing rather than managing people/overseeing things.

Anyone have success in a creative career and get a good salary? I'd love to hear what you do for work!

The most well paid graphic designers I’ve worked with have been freelancers, and they work predominantly from home so location is not an issue (expected to travel to the office for briefings, meetings etc).

Building up your portfolio and reputation is key when starting out. When we find a designer that really gets our brand, consistently delivers on the brief and on time, they’re always our first choice and can command really good day rates.

It is definitely a creative career that pays very well, but you have to be very deliberate about making that happen.

I think @baaaaal has summed it up really well. This applies to most creative careers in my opinion - you go into it for the love of it, but it needs a clear plan of action on how to get to the top. If you don’t get to the top, you will not make a lot of money from it.

I went into music because I love it and it’s my passion, but I don’t always spend my days doing things I love. I do projects I don’t want to do, I apply for auditions and prepare for months or years for one single event I’m not actually that keen on, etc. At the end of the day I still love what I do, but it’s such a competitive field I need to follow a calculated plan instead of waking up in the morning and thinking ‘today I feel inspired to play X for a couple of hours and then go for a nice walk by the river’. Which is what most people think artists do with their days...

Hello there :) I am a Womenswear designer too, in London. Actually my title is a Senior Designer, but I only get 35k. This feels hugely unfair as I work on 6x accounts with no help at all - there is no junior or assistant. We have grown massively as a company in the last year, so maybe it is time for me to have that conversation with the boss... I used to work with someone who was on £65k. But she had 20 years of experience ( I currently have 7).

I also work in the music industry (tho paused when covid came along!). I am not a musician and have never played an instrument but I work as self employed technical crew.
It’s very competitive to get into but you can earn around £150-£600 per day depending on experience plus getting to travel the world for free.
Obviously it’s very difficult right now but we are all hoping that things change soon.
So even if you aren’t ‘creative’ as such, there are lots of supporting jobs out there where you can be in that environment and sometimes even earn more than the creatives themselves!

@baaaaal this is so interesting! Thanks for the insight!

So when you say you do covers, do you do the illustration and the graphics for that?
And is it for a particular industry/niche area of books?

I'de love to hear how you got into it, and how you find people who will pay you to design a cover! I have a contacts purely for illustration but mainly in marketing and agencies, none in publishing.

I've also never been a 'churn out 6 in a day' person. That's also the way with textile design a lot of the time - perhaps not 6, but if you can do 4 in day you're making much better money than if you can do 1.

UX / UI is definitely amongst the best paid creative careers. I think it's around £30k starting salary

Hello there @Acidburn !

That does sound unfair. I know salaries vary a lot in Fashion. If it's any help I worked at a supplier across about 6 accounts without an assistant and was on £45,000, I had about 7 years experience at the time. It was very stressful and too much work but at least I felt I was paid well for it.
A convo with your boss sounds like a really good idea. Or failing that, a move to a new company. Things are slow right now still but that will change. It sounds like your current company is very lucky to have you, and need to realise that!

I do a mix of graphic design, product packaging design, web design, and content creation/management. I also have done some social media management/marketing/Google ad management, but also find that boring - if a client wants it as part of a package I'll do it but I try to avoid it. I can turn my hand to other things like some basic video editing when needed.

My clients include a large insurance company, a fashion consultancy, a farmer, a magazine, the manager of a large home goods products distribution company, some osteopaths/naturopaths, a marijuana distributor, and others I can't remember.

I love the variety of the work. Today I'm putting together some email newsletters in Mailchimp, creating some Wordpress content, creating a logo, and mocking up some new designs for a collection of mugs, bowls, plates, teatowels and coasters. I've just sent back some photos I was sent to update a website and asked for them to be reshot from further away. I'm also going to pull together some metrics on how some newsletters/advertorials did last month.

I'd say having technical skills is important, and you also need to be ready to teach yourself new skills, attend training and/or conferences, do research, and be willing to do things you did not necessarily expect to do as part of your job.

With those attributes you can have a successful freelancing career IME.

I charge $50 an hour (I'm in the US), work from home, buy my own equipment. I made approx $70k last year.

@Alittleditsy thank you for your kind words :) yes actually, it is a lot of work. I am doing woven, jersey, soft separates, bottoms, denim and even a bit of Menswear! The entire team is me, my boss (Director and Head of Sales at the same time), and his assistant who knows zero about fashion. Today he asked me what fusing is :))
So i do not only design, but also do all the admin work - cutting swatches, taking photos, sending parcels. We have no Garment Tech, no office asssistant, literally no one else. All because my boss is greedy, and would rather make 2 of his employees work unsociable hours instead of hiring new people.. makes my blood boil. He has also been pretending all this time that we have not enough work to bring me back full time - I have been furloughed for over a year now, coming to the office 3 days a week only. Obviously I had to work from home the rest of the week, because I had lots of things to get done!

@ZZTopGuitarSolo it sounds like you've worked really hard and built yourself a really good, varied career which is creative and well paid, the dream! Any tips for finding new clients? Or is it mainly word of mouth do you think?

@Acidburn yep this sounds familiar. I think working across all of those product areas is especially hard as you're expected to stay up to date with trends in all of them, and let's be honest its hard enough to get through all the shows 4 times a year anyway, let alone all the other images, research etc.... I feel for you. Sadly a story of a greedy nasty boss in the fashion industry is something you hear quite often.... really hope that changes soon with the rise of more eco brands, slower fashion etc.

@CMeredithC

It is definitely a creative career that pays very well, but you have to be very deliberate about making that happen.

I think @baaaaal has summed it up really well. This applies to most creative careers in my opinion - you go into it for the love of it, but it needs a clear plan of action on how to get to the top. If you don’t get to the top, you will not make a lot of money from it.

I went into music because I love it and it’s my passion, but I don’t always spend my days doing things I love. I do projects I don’t want to do, I apply for auditions and prepare for months or years for one single event I’m not actually that keen on, etc. At the end of the day I still love what I do, but it’s such a competitive field I need to follow a calculated plan instead of waking up in the morning and thinking ‘today I feel inspired to play X for a couple of hours and then go for a nice walk by the river’. Which is what most people think artists do with their days...

Ah this sounds very familiar! It's been 10 years since I graduated - also a classical musician, but also quite a niche area.

I have to have be very structured about my work day and put in the hours. A lot of my work centres around creating things, and just like many of the other creative careers mentioned here you can't necessarily guarantee how long that will take and how productive you will be - plus how many successes you'll have for each unsuccessful endeavour. There's a lot of bidding for projects, applying, and unpaid work (though I do balance that, and only take on things for specific, tailored reasons). I do have to have multiple hats too - as per lots of these kinds of careers, I take on teaching too - which dilutes my creative time, but has also ensured I've had a steady income during lockdowns.

I love my career in general, but that doesn't mean I love every bit of it! At the moment there seems to be far too much admin vs. creative-ness (it does vary though!). It is also very adaptable - I've kept working (at various levels) while my two children were younger, and now they're both at school I'm building up my portfolio of work again.

Thanks for your reply, @CMeredithC -- that's very interesting. I find the internal workings of orchestras very interesting, though my only personal experience is as a not particularly committed cellist in a youth orchestra (where my main memory was that the brass section were the most badly-behaved... )

I remain very interested by the conservative machismo of orchestras like the Vienna Philharmonic and the idea that there's a 'male sound' they want to preserve, and the whole issue of blind auditions, and women allegedly being advised to take off their shoes because the telltale sound of female footwear biased juries.

I know more about the world of opera because of friends who work in it, and was very interested to meet astonishingly talented singers who decided to stay in a major opera house chorus because they didn't want the endless travelling of being an opera singer as normally understood.

Can I ask whether musicians often fail the probationary period for a permanent orchestra job?

ZZTopGuitarSolo it sounds like you've worked really hard and built yourself a really good, varied career which is creative and well paid, the dream! Any tips for finding new clients? Or is it mainly word of mouth do you think?

Word of mouth and reputation were key. I did two websites for free/very little, and spent a lot of time getting them to be real showstoppers. I still get work off the back of one of them in particular.

I found that going to certain events and giving out business cards also generated a lot of interest.

I have a few clients who I met through having children at school with their children, and once they heard what I did they hired me.

Mostly I just found that people would refer me on to more people, and in the process my portfolio grew and grew.

I've definitely learnt a lot as I went along. I started off confident with InDesign and Photoshop. I spent a lot of time learning Illustrator and Wordpress. Lots of trial and error testing things like templates and systems. Lots of listening to Lynda.com training sessions while walking the dog.

Imposter syndrome is a big problem sometimes, but over the years I've realised that actually I do a better job of a lot of things than many many other people who are charging the same rate.

There's a good FB group called Freelancing Females that is full of women who have excellent advice and support.