Submission Policy

Hi everybody! I was wondering what book have you used while studying graphic design at university? Anything that it's worth reading or any book that had an impact while studying? Many thanks!

I’ve had a few bad experiences with my boss over the last few months that have driven me to start hunting for a new job. I want to include some of the work I’ve done over the last year in my portfolio but other former employees have told me that he is, “resistant to the idea because he believes that everything created there is a product of everyone’s involvement and doesn’t belong in just one person’s portfolio.”

But this seems selective because the former Lead Designer told me they were allowed to include whatever they wanted in their portfolio.

What should I do here?

Hi everyone! I am currently studying graphic design and will be graduating in 2026. I’ve been working for the school I go to for over a year as a student assistant. A part of my job is making flyers for events. When the flyer is printed/posted online, it’s always changed. Sometimes a little, like changes in placement or additional information is put on the flyer. Sometimes it has changed a lot to the point that I don’t feel comfortable putting it on my portfolio. Is it normal for the final product to not look exactly how you sent it? I’m new to the graphic design job market and I’m not sure if it’s normal. I typically don’t get feedback but they end up getting changed. Usually, my boss doesn’t have time to sit with me and tell me what I could change and how to make it a better flyer. Thanks!

If you charge hourly, I’d like to know so that I can have some more reference points for my own pricing.

For example, I have 8 years experience, hold a senior level position, and charge $175/hour for design time. Anything that needs coding I then charge for a coder that I work with at their rate.

I’ve been a Freelance Graphic Designer for the past 18 years, 30 years in the industry.  As a freelancer I’ve scrapped together my own workflow using what I have available, rarely paying extra for anything.  I’m looking for a better way.

Currently, I record my estimates and jobs on paper and through emails.  I record my time on paper, and in Apple Notes.  I print my print-receipts and add pricing annotations from my estimates for tracking= orders. I then transfer my time and receipts to an outdated version of Quickbooks for Mac through which I then bill my clients. I take credit card payments using Square.

It’s a jumbled, redundant mess, but it’s my mess and it works.  I also wastes a lot of paper, toner, time and effort...and I’m ready to change it up.

How do you do it?  This is directed largely at other freelance designers in a similar situation who wear all the hats of their business, but welcome anyone’s input with some background on the matter.  I’m searching for a low-cost way to streamline it all.  Perhaps that simply means refining what I already have available and work with, but I’m curious to know what some alternate ways may be.

Thoughts?

I am in college studying graphic design, and one of my classes is traditional art. I am debating swapping this class to something else however, such as photography, since I think it would benefit my course moreso than traditional art (painting, modelling, drawing etc). If anyone is in the graphic design/ creative field, do you regularly use these skills? Do you think this class would be more beneficial to me than another one, such as photography, would?

Hey there guys. Im a Graphic Designer and i live in the worst economic country of the world: Brazil. One of the only ways to make money in this piece of shit is working for other countries. How can i find clientes in the US? Some Website? LinkedIn? Google?

Any clue is welcome. Help me to get rich and get out of this hell hahahaha

https://preview.redd.it/90l2hgt2pbge1.jpg?width=736&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=99c3b9b63f10743b333e6bd9d8da2f2257da42e6

I am making a website for a client, he wants me to use this graphic from envato elements on the home page and add images to it. How do I this, and what should I charge? He also may want this to be updated semi regularly, so I'd like to know how that would play out. Thanks

For reference, I have some graphic design experience (logos, posters) and some experience with video editing, but I'm not sure how to even start on something like this.

The graphic: https://elements.envato.com/art-gallery-museum-DSMH4CU

Not vent as in I'm angry I had to do a test or anything like that. I think it's normal for an employer to want to make sure their possible new hire knows the software they're going to spend 80% of their time on. And I'm not amazing at interviews, so I always appreciate the opportunity to at least show my technical skills. So far all the tests I've done have allowed me to go to the next recruiting step. So I guess I was always good enough.

Anyway, I did one today and I feel weird about it. It was a one hour test to replicate their kind of documents with their visual identity, etc. Examples and assets were provided, that was just fine. It was happening on site, on their desktop, so not only it was a different OS than the one I'm used to, the entire InDesign configuration was different, and half the shortcuts I use didn't work/weren't set the way I'm used to. I knew it was going to be like this but it's just so frustrating to feel held back because of something like this, to feel like I'm just discovering a software I already use practically every day.

The manager told me the designers there take less than an hour for a spread. I ended up doing a spread and half the cover in an hour, so I suppose I did okay but it's just very frustrating to try to do good work when you're jumping on someone else's workstation that you don't know at all. (All the tests I did in the past were on my own laptop even for on site jobs.)

It’s for a poster so needs to be legible.

Help!

I’ve been drawing these animals about 10 years now. It started as an exercise in minimalism and constraint, trying to create a recognisable animal in as few brush strokes as possible (with a Pilot Parallel pen). Over the years the list of animals grew to 60 so I figured I’d compile them into one nicely designed ebook.

I always thought the space between graphic design and illustration was an interesting one. Whilst work like this doesn’t make me particularly hireable in the corporate world 😬 I’m still very proud of this project.

Hello! I am in a design class at college and we were assigned to submit our resume as a “layout” challenge. The professor stressed that there should be no design, no colors, no imagery, etc. as it is a RESUME (serious business!).

I am an older adult (44yo) student and as such, I have had experiences that contradict his. I worked for 20 years as technical / desktop support for Mac users - which meant ad agencies and other creative outlets. I worked for a dot com right before the bubble burst and supported 12 creatives. I worked at BBDO NY and supported an entire floor of creatives. And more. So, I’ve seen resumes in some of these places. They surprised me because they were design-y. Colors, fonts, images, icons… etc.

I told him and he was genuinely surprised and asked if I could provide any examples. As I haven’t been in those jobs for about ten years now, I cannot.

So, I am turning to Reddit to ask if anyone has a resume with design elements that they can share with me. Please redact contact info if possible. I would love to show him three or four. I googled and found templates but something feels weird about trusting Canva and Wix for knowing what is really done in the world.

Thank you kindly. My professor also thanks you.

Oh, if there is a place for this for real where I can get them elsewhere I would be fine with that of course. 💜

Please, in short sentences 😉

I currently work in an agency. And have worked in other in-house marketing teams before. But lately I’m struggling with being creative constantly. 9-5. 5 days a week.

Each hour of my day is blocked out for something. And I’m finding it hard to pull the creativity from nowhere.

It doesn’t help that the way they work at the agency isn’t how I would work. They look at design concepts before figuring out the message and intent of the brief. Which to me feels like double the design work.

Hello I would like to see some suggestions and maybe some ideas

https://jjjavier00.wixsite.com/artmemer

Imagine the deadline is tomorrow, the artwork is ready to go and just needs to be signed off. Sometimes we’ve spent days working on an artwork, sometimes months. That is irrelevant.

It’s finished, we’ve made all final amends. We’ve had multiple revisions by multiple people. Everyone has seen the drafts and are happy to proceed.

But my manager will always find something to fix last minute before sending it off to print. Sometimes he would say things, that’s him “just thinking out loud”. Sometimes he’ll say “it’s getting there but it’s not quite there yet, play around with it, tweak it”.

I’ve tried explaining to him politely that we literally don’t have time to play around with the artwork because of deadlines. I’ve had to press him and say stop. But I know if I don’t say that, revisions will never end.

How do I make him understand? He’s been in the industry long enough but keeps coming up with those, no matter how many times we face tight deadlines.

I'm a newby designer and struglling to keep track of my screenshots and photos that I take for inspiration.

I would like something where you can easily in a very few clicks keep a screenshot or picture, and be able to assign it different tab. Pinterest is way too time consuming for this. I usually copy-paste inspiration in a figma file, but then I can't associate each image to multiple purpose (tags).

For example, sometimes I take a screenshot of something that is :
-idea for instagram template
-cool brand colors
-Cool font
-Fits X theme
-Etc.

I would like this screenshot to appear in each of these categories, etc. And for each category to show the screenshots of that category.

What do you all use for this? Thanks!

All I have right now is a compressed .pdf, and I hate it lol. Looked into WordPress but don’t love the viewers get ads. I have Adobe CC through my job currently but haven’t looked too deeply into Portfolio. Just wanted some opinions.

No, this isn't an opportunity for you to shill your services to me in my DMs.

To preface, this is a project for a logo and some very simple social media assets/colors for about 2,000 USD. Not a ton, but certainly not amateur hour for a logo. This person's portfolio seemed really strong. Solid designs, really professional, great renders, and lots of obvious creative skill.

We kicked off the project this week and I was sent a few rough sketches. Okay, I think, they're not great visually but they're just sketches to form a direction. We discuss and move forward, and today I'm sent a logo that was a complete slap in the face. Like, really, really bad. It's flat, ugly, horrible design direction (like genuine amateurish mistakes even I would know not to do), just overall terrible. They want to move on to finalizing it now.

I don't know if this is some sort of scam or she's parading other people's work as her own, but the direct comparison between what she showed as her own work and what I received is unbelievable. I'm not sure what to do, because my confidence that she's legit is on loose ground. I also don't want to throw good money after bad and am 1k in on this as is. I haven't said anything yet but honestly, given very little work has actually been done so far, I'm tempted to ask for a refund.

What would be appropriate in this situation? Even garbage AI logos look better than this.

Edit: I can't DM everyone, sorry, lol! It has their watermark and I'm not trying to shame or ruin anyone when I don't even know if they are a scammer, maybe just misrepresenting themselves to get work.

Hey everyone - I had a question for any freelance designers. I currently have 2 regular clients, one of which submits payment via wire transfer. But the other one insists on using checks, and unfortunately their most recent check that they mailed out to me was lost/stolen in the mail & whoever ended up with it cashed it. Luckily they were able to report fraud and get the funds back to reissue the check, but I'm just nervous now about being paid via check moving forward. Has anyone experienced something like this as a freelancer? Is there anything I can do or request from the client in order to make sure payment is more secure moving forward?

Hi everyone!

We’re looking for a very reliable graphics printer that’s suitable for printing high quality text and images for a school.

Things we’ll be using it for are:

• Student merit awards
• Invites for parents and the community
• Cards
• High quality prints
• Stickers
• T-shirt transfers
• School play tickets and posters

White printing would be great.

We’re looking for as close as we can to commercial printer quality without the commercial cost and size.

Thank you

When I was declaring my college major 10 years ago I figured I could get a stable enough job at a company where I could support myself. I’ve been employed since I left college, but (no surprise) the pay is pretty shit, and living with constant financial stress is starting to not be worth it anymore.

My family has suggested I move to cheaper city, but that means less job opportunities, so its a hard tradeoff. I know that the job market as a whole has sucked, but with the rise of AI and companies wanting to cut costs, I think it has hit the design world particularly hard. Now, instead of a company hiring 4 designers they hire 2, and the same pool of job seekers are fighting over fewer positions.

Every senior designer and mentor I’ve talked to has told me that the world is moving more towards freelance/gig work. Some people think I’m crazy for deciding to be a designer and hating the freelance model, but it’s so unfair to me! You have to pay absurd costs for health insurance, no paid time off, no retirement benefits… I don’t understand how people survive years like that.

How are you guys dealing with all of this? Are you happy and confident in your job status? Are you planning to stay forever? Do you think I’m overreacting about AI? Thanks for reading.

Has anyone here created a personal photobook (hardcover). What printer have you used or heard of thats the best for something like this thats just a one off print?

I’m in the US and looking at Walgreens or Walmart to print. But trying to see if theres better options or smaller sites out there that allow for more customization like paper finishing etc.

So I've only ever worked for 1 company for graphic design and I have no idea if what they do is standard for every company. I would like to get a better idea of the expectations. My skill level is around junior level if not a bit lower. At work, I don't really work on any projects. Just campaigns where I have to make a bunch of informational social media posts and flyers. At the moment, I'm the only graphic designer on board with the title Marketing Assistant but I believe this title is just due to me absorbing the tasks of the other designers that left. I started out as an intern but I now do social media graphics, flyers, motion graphics, emails, copywriting, banners and a few other non design related things like reporting, creating forms, handling workshops etc.

So the main things I want to ask is:

1. What are the time expectations for your tasks (motion graphics, social media graphics, flyers etc)? Do you get punished if you take too long?

2. How many things would be expected to work on in a day?

3. If you make posts for social media, how many are posted during the week?

4. For interns, do you ever get training or design guidance or do you start off as if your another designer?

5. For remote workers, are you given a laptop? Of not, what does your work do if you had to take time fixing a computer issue?

6. For Canadian junior or interns, what is your pay? What did your first raise look like?

I've been working at my job for two years but since I started out inexperienced, I still feel like I am since there are no seniors to learn from. It's been mostly self learning but I feel my expectations assume I know everything what I'm doing.

A mix of web design, brand design, graphic design....I've been applying to jobs non stop with nothing in return. How can I fix it? Should I do some packaging design project or something? Design a soda can?

https://brookesteele.xyz/

I've been a designer for a long time. I have run into many health issues and no longer work, but like to do some design on the side (it's in our blood right?), I have transitioned to Affinity software and find that this suits my needs. The issue is I have a large back catalog of design projects in Adobe formats. I have pdfs of these, but I want to have some workable files to as I upgrade to a new computer that won't allow me to work with The old Adobe CC discs I have. Is there an easy way to change over my library to work with Affinity software? I am talking mostly Logo work (ai. eps files) and Indesign files for posters, Booklets, tradeshow art etc.

My main concern is when I get a new computer I won't be able to go back to Adobe files, to convert them when I have CC still. I am too close to this problem and can't see a solution, can you help shed some light on this for me? How can I do this and have access to old files if I need one to use? Thank you so much.