5 Graphic Designers Challenges & How to Overcome Them In 2021

The hustle of working as a full-time graphic designer is packed with challenges and perks: exciting ideas, crazy deadlines, the joy of your ideation-taking life, impractical clients’ demands, and mountainous goals.

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But we knew what to expect when we clicked open our first design workspace on the graphic design tool. And the fact that we were in for a long and bumpy ride when we decided to manage our own design team was always clear to us like Acadia in Maine (yup, the national park).

With color pellets, our blood cells, and artboard our battlefield, in-fighting and fighting with our clients never felt a threat to us, graphic designers. Why? Because designs that could best convey the true vision of the brand are all we care for; and that’s where our true passion lies.

But that doesn’t we can’t do without fewer challenges or with more ways to help them overcome with ease. After all, a designer or not, we all love to save a little more with a little less hassle.

I hear you, and being a designer in past myself, I won’t leave my brethren alone! So to give you a little heads-up on what other challenges you could face on your designing journey daily, here’s my list of the top 5 challenges faced by the professionals of this industry — along with pro tips to overcome.

Just Too Many Designers. Everywhere!

Being a creative industry, graphic designing has its perks and fines with outsourcing. You could be a small-town guy, with only 2 years of experience, and may still manage to seize that once-in-a-lifetime opportunity of working with the top, multi-national lifestyle brands.

With zero logistics involved, gigs in this industry could go from one country to another in a matter of a few mouse clicks.

But there’re some drawbacks to it too. Anyone today can build a website, manage some brilliant graphics from here or there, make changes using free or paid graphic design tools, and upload some stolen designs to impress potential clients or pull off the same trick by signing up with a gig platform to score such opportunities.

Trust and originality are still taking heavy blows because of an abundance of petty designers who might not be on the same level as yours.

Pro Tip:
To help you build credibility for your designing brand, put up some authentic testimonials of your past clients. Holding copyright to your design showcase is another way to ensure that others won’t be able to market your work as theirs.

Getting the Right Price

Price negotiation is funny, challenging, and sometimes outright appalling when it comes to freelance graphic designing gigs and businesses. Because of the large pool of designers, a lot of business opportunities don’t bring in as much money as some might expect.

So, how can you make a client pay the right amount for your expertise? For that, you have to show what else you could bring to the table other than your design skills.

A little show of professionalism will do the job for you. And nothing shouts of professionalism louder than well-written business reports. Try putting aside some time to prepare the same at the end of every project.

These reports will help your potential clients to understand how your visual communication strategies helped your past clients scale their business.

Business reports might sound boring to many, but they’re still a major part of the corporate decision-making style. Not only this makes you look professional, but it also makes your clients believe that you’re a data-oriented person.

Pro Tip:
What would a typical report on designing include? You can mention what all design types your client requested, what was their vision and target audience, in how many days and revisions you delivered your work, links to web pages where these designs have been put for display, and lead generated and converted because of your work.

Finding Work Regularly

The above two factors contribute heavily to this one. You buy the best business laptop for graphic designing, and still might end up days without work and curse your mounting laptop EMIs.

The solution to the work-finding struggle could differ from one design business to other. But a typical one would include having a website/portfolio of your own, indulging in social media and email marketing, and registering on gig websites.

These three easy but effective steps can help you grow your graphic designing business by leaps and bounds.

Put an End to Unnecessary Gig Hunting.
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Pro Tip:
You can either outsource web designing work to a web designing agency or undertake it yourself? But how? Well, you can use a drag-&-drop builder DotcomPal.

Our web automation SaaS platform comes with an intuitive drag-and-drop builder and 300+ high-converting templates. All you need is to make a few drags and drops, and your graphic design website will be up and running in less than 5 minutes.

Never-ending Struggle with Creativity

There is no “one shoe that fits all” solution when you are asking how to fix this daily struggle for creativity to yourself.

It’s not manufacturing, where all you need is to program your unit and then supervise it for production. You can time your internal creative clock to suit the requirement of your overseas clients. But push too hard and you might end up with some crappy curves that everyone would detest.

Some graphic designers — and other creators on the whole — discover the time of the day when their creative tides are at their highest.

Having that figured, they plan their other work, like meetings, client interaction, etc., around that period.

ProTip:
You can use graphic designing prompts to get your creative juices flowing. Now, what exactly is a graphic designing prompt? A prompt is like a rough design idea that suggests you design a material (posters, brochures, logo) for a company or event of a particular taste.

E.g.: Design a poster for a new movie where batman decides to dump his Bat-suit for raccoon armor (yes, I do love Marvel a bit, but not more than DC).

You can visit Daily logo challenge, Dailyui, or Designercize to get your daily dose of design prompts.

Creating vs. Managing

Graphic designing and business management are two extremes that can be quite challenging to strike the balance between.

On one hand, you’ve to create thought-provoking visuals that cement the brand of your clients. On the other, you’ve to make excel sheets to schedule a bunch of different tasks.

In the morning, you’re struggling to strike the right balance between the Rule of thirds and white spaces while sweet-talking your client. And at night, you’re stuck checking the designs of others to make sure they are worth delivering before the deadline.

When you’re leading a team of 10+ creative people, performing even the simplest of tasks may get overwhelming. And when your first love lies in creating graphics, going days without performing the task could leave you unsatisfied.

The trick here is to hire people, other than designers, who are good at managing human resources. HR, business managers, finance handlers, project managers, etc., are some experts who can plan activities in a way that brings out the best of your workforce.

The experience of hiring and working with such professionals will come in handy when you have scaled your business to new heights.

Pro Tip:
You can host design contests to outsource some of your work to other talented people. Not only this will help you with easing some of your daily workloads, but you’ll also be able to make new contacts and build a team that’s only a ping away.

The graphic designing domain will send some unique challenges down your way that you might find hard to tackle. And the typical ones will always be there to test your patience too.

Above all:
To outgrow roadblocks, you should have trust in your team, maintain communication with the stakeholders, plan your daily activates the best way possible, and never lose sight of why you started this business in the first place. And what was that? To offer the creative creature inside you the many dimensions of artistic growth.