10 paradigm shifts for graphic designers

written by Joshua Hoering

Becoming more strategic, collaborative, and valuable.

For $250, a business can pay a graphic designer to create a logo for their business. Or, for $10,000 a business can hire a graphic designer to form a design strategy that contextually places the business’s branding in a stronghold against the market it’s competing in. Businesses aren’t just paying more for the same thing, but for a designer to use specific skills, abilities, and knowledge in a strategic problem-solving way.

To have a seat at the table, strategic graphic designers of the future need much more than refined craftsmanship in a technical process to be so valuable in the marketplace; obtaining a strategic skillset isn’t often found in through higher education, but elsewhere.

The Traditional Designer Graphic

She is known as someone who works with a particular set of skills to reach a state of perfection from a design brief. Paul Rand, Milton Glaser, and Saul Bass are prime examples of traditional graphic designers. Their work is distinctively recognizable and they were hired for their refined aesthetics and reliable reputation.

Carolyn Davidson, original Nike sketch, 1971

In 1971, Carolyn Davidson met Phil Knight, then an assistant professor at Portland State University who was starting a new sports shoe company. Davidson was a student at PSU making extra cash freelancing graphic design services to pay for oil painting classes at the university. Knight hired Davidson for $2 an hour to come up with a logo that would be placed on all the shoes. So, she created several logos, showed, them to Knight, who took a look, pointed at the swoosh mark, and said “We liked this one slightly more than the others”, paid Davidson $35 and both of them went on their way. Davidson continued to study painting while Knight founded Nike, a multi-billion dollar company. With only recognition for Davidson’s drawing abilities, she created an iconic logo that would become a branding masterpiece worth a fortune.

Steve Jobs with NeXT

In 1993, Steve Jobs hired Paul Rand for $100,000 to create a logo for NeXT, Job’s business venture after being fired from Apple. Jobs asked Rand to design several logos, to which Rand replied,

“No, I will solve your problem for you and you will pay me. You don’t have to use the solution. If you want options go talk to other people. But I’ll solve your problem for you the best way I know how, and you use it or not, that’s up to you — you’re the client — but you pay me.”

— Paul Rand, 1993

Image courtesy of Wright auction house, Chicago, IL.

In 1996, Steve Jobs sold NeXT to Apple for $400 million.

Now, a logo doesn’t represent the value of an entire company, but from these two stories, we learn of two different types of graphic designers: the graphic designer who understands their value and the graphic designer who does not.

The Graphic Designer of the Future

When clients hire graphic designers to solve problems, graphic designers are handed design briefs (the client’s understanding of the problems). The graphic designer of the future starts from the design brief to a research strategy to investigate the client’s market, the user‘s needs, and to strategize a path toward solving the problem before creating anything.

Kees Dorst, professor at the University of Technology in Sydney wrote:

“When people started trying to understand design … the first model they devised was of design as a problem solving process.”

To become recognized for problem-solving processes, the graphic designer must take it upon themselves to understand different strategies for doing so. The Four Orders of Design is a structure that helps us understand the hierarchy of design, developed by Richard Buchanan. Deeper into his writing, he explains design is a process that involves systematic disruption and interactions between users before considering what is designed… meaning the results of effective design are equally as valuable as the tangible deliverable.

Four Orders of Design by Richard Buchanan

Design isn’t just a person at a desk pumping out logos. It’s a process where the graphic designer solves problems that disrupt systems in collaboration with the client and the end-user.

Tony Golsby-Smith, professor at Alphacrucis College put it this way:

“Design is the human power of conceiving, planning, and making products that serve human beings in the accomplishment of their individual and collective purposes.”

Empathy & Collaboration

So far, we understand Paul Rand and Carolyn Davidson as graphic designers who work to satisfy a design brief. If we are to find graphic designers who work collaboratively with the client, we need a new strategy that works systematically to disrupt systems and considers interactions between users.

Design Thinking is famously known as a collaborative problem-solving strategy championed by IDEO and Stanford’s Hasso Plattner Institute of Design (d.school) that emphasizes not graphic designers, but the end-user… this fits the bill.

Empathy is the driving force of Design Thinking, requiring everyone involved in the strategy to investigate human needs before ever solving the problem at hand. To be empathetic, people must seek to understand one another through mutual collaboration. Collaboration means designing together; not alone. To maximize the potential of Design Thinking, each person collaborating on the problem should have a different worldview, knowledgebase, and skillset to contribute to a more holistic solution. Therefore, the diversity of the group becomes as equally valuable as expertise in the group dynamic.

Strategies of Exploration

Beyond empathy, collaboration, and diversity of the group collaborating on a problem… graphic designers leading the process must have a library of design strategies to pull from to find solutions in linear and non-linear ways.

Terry Winograd, professor of Computer Science at Stanford University writes:

“There is no direct path between the designer’s intention and the outcome. As you work a problem, you are continually in the process of developing a path into it, forming new appreciations and understandings as you make new moves.”

The emphasis on process, not the design brief, is important here. The graphic designer must be capable of leading strategies and processes even if they’re messy. And, they will be messy. But as a facilitator of the process, these strategies become the tools the graphic designer uses to lead.

Throughout any of these processes, the graphic designer keeps their attention on the why and how; not the product. In doing so, the graphic designer gathers insights to explore the psychology behind what the intended audience or end-user needs. Strategies for finding these insights are not traditionally taught in higher education design programs but they are finding their way into programs. As a result, the responsibility of having these strategies ready is still on the graphic designer, which can be learned through workshops at IDEO, books, graduate-level classes at universities, and from experience working in the field.

Deliverables

When strategy becomes a primary responsibility of a graphic designer, deliverables look different. Graphic Design is largely known as a service industry where clients pay for typography, photography, and illustration. These deliverables are all visual. In the scope of Design Thinking and the Four Orders of Design, the deliverables of strategy & research are insights that look like excerpts from interviews, analyzed data reports, survey results, customer user journey maps, and the like. The difference between delivering visual products and insights should not be confused as any less work. The value of the insights guides decision-making, so the return on investment (ROI) is huge. All of these deliverables should be charged from the grahpic designer to the client with a mutual understanding of their value contributing to solving the client’s problems.

Customer User Journey Map from Nielsen Norman Group

Pricing, Negotiating, and Sustainability

Charging clients for strategy and research can be foreign for graphic designers, so understanding a variety of pricing models, how to negotiate, and working toward a goal of sustainability can help.

There are 5 models of pricing:

1. Cost-based pricing is frequently used to maximize profits and requires graphic designers to add up all their costs associated with offering a design and adding on a percentage for profit.

2. Fixed pricing charges the client a set price for a service offered, regardless of how many hours are expended or how many resources are involved.

3. Hourly pricing requires graphic designers to charge time and expenses for designs in an invoice to the client of all expenses required (such as mileage to client’s business, paper costs, etc.) and for each hour of work at an hourly price depending on the services purchased.

4. Performance-based pricing required graphic designers to invoice clients based on the performance of the design delivered.

5. Value-based pricing requires graphic designers to determine a price based on the perceived value clients will receive from the design.

Of these five models, value-based pricing most accurately represents what is being purchased from the graphic designer because the problems being addressed are understood systematically. (Liozu, S., Hinterhuber, A., Boland, R., Perelli, S.)

Beyond pricing, graphic designers must be adept at negotiating prices to make a profit, which provides the value of their work. Having a framework that communicates a process that can be trusted by a client is more important than a portfolio. (Enns, B.) While the portfolio provides a body of work representative of the past, an articulated design process promises new results that shouldn’t be like anything else since the results are tailored specifically to the client’s intended audience.

Finally, a sustainable business practice is the most important principle to remember. Becoming a sustainable graphic designer means business is continuous and reliable while finances are operating on a profit margin. Graphic designers are often driven by passion not profit, but keeping a business healthy and thriving requires a reciprocal relationship between the graphic designer and client. If designers deliver valuable results, clients will refer designers to other potential clients.

Good work will bring more good work.

Beyond Client-Based Work

There will always be dips in business. When graphic designers are not working with clients, they can be networking to build new partnerships, but they can also utilize their skills and abilities to build additional streams of revenue to supplement their income.

‘Passive income’ is a popular topic; it’s debatable whether they are effective or not. Creating an online store that sells digital or physical products is a route that requires work on the front end but it serves the end goal of marketing their work and serving as a useful or beautiful product that is enjoyed by others. It’s even possible to sell products to other graphic designers. Dustin Lee makes six figures selling Photoshop actions, Illustrator tools, brushes, textures, patterns, etc. through his web store Retro Supply.

Dustin Lee’s “Retro Supply Co.” at https://www.retrosupply.co/

Developing online classes through services such as Skillshare, Lydia, and Udemy allows graphic designers to teach profitable skills to other graphic designers. Graphic designer Ohn Mar earns $1,250 — $3,500 per month from her classes on Skillshare. As a result, sharing these skills also builds credibility for the graphic designer and their ability to lead others through processes.

www.skillshare.com

Hosting podcasts or videocasts using streaming services also creates the opportunity to teach others, but hosting a show that creates or contributes to the broader design community is easier than ever before. Debbie Millman has been posting “Design Matters”, a podcast where she interviews a different graphic designer every episode for over 14 years.

The income created by initiating multiple streams of revenue can pay off in the long run and may require little maintenance from the graphic designer. As these ventures are established, it’s worth noting the earlier and more strategic graphic designers initiate these ventures, the more they will make in the long run and could exponentially cause the graphic designer to become more valuable to clients.