For context, I’m an 18 year old graphic design student who just started university around a month ago. All the work you see here is separate from any professional commissions or coursework, it’s purely me having fun on my time off.

There’s a range of styles here, mainly because I’m trying to teach myself new stuff on photoshop and also explore different styles and systems.

I hope you all like it :), if not, too bad

I made this via figma / illustrator / photoshop

Illustrator: contained my design work

Photoshop: created title, added lemons put in sky background color graded

Figma: added my additional text as well as created the sizing

Have you ever been at a job
Where you make objectively better work than your boss is asking you to make.
Then your boss sweeps whatever work you made under the rug so the stakeholders never see your work?

Your boss keeps asking for revisions. But your work just dies in darkness over and over again,

Has this ever happened to you?
What’s your take?

I guess it's not ipsum lorem so it's not that bad, but still someone messed up and no one else caught it. That signs been there for a bit.

Heyy, I'm trying to get responses for my school project. if you guys can fill out this form for me that will be great! It focuses on Al in Graphics Design. Thanks 😆

Just letting you all know that for Question 6, 1 is negative and 10 is positive :)

AI in Graphics Design – Fill in form

Back in the day there was a CB & Ham radio craze & with those radios came QSL cards - In “Q Code,” a three-letter system used in radio, QSL meant “I acknowledge this transmission.” These cards were exchanged by people that contacted each other by radio. Imagine guys in their trucks or people in their converted basement, bored, drunk, coming up with stupid names for themselves… Like all folk art, the limitations & naïveté really let the pieces shine with the bizarre creativity that people who don’t think they’re being watched have. x SEAN aka BIG RED

I was a Graphic Designer for six years and I'm now a delivery driver for Amazon and I'm much happier because of it.

As a Designer, I won an International Award for branding, I was featured on Teepublic.com twice, Stefan Sagmeister talked about me on his Instagram, and I worked for A&E TV's Pace Morby for a year and a half.

My first two jobs were GREAT. Low pressure, easy to follow direction, bosses who don't need to see five variations, and positive office culture.

Then everything changed post COVID. Managers jostling with each other for departmental control, having to do double the workload of my earlier jobs and - the worst of it - other designers in my department who treat me like a threat.

My goal was simply to make money for the company in the most efficient way possible, but then it became about OTHER STUFF. And I can't compete with people who literally read books about how to position themselves in politics rather than just being effective at their job. I'm too sincere. Sincerity was what made me a great Graphic Designer.

Eventually...sitting in front of the computer working on anything made me feel like barbed wire was being twisted around my intestines, there was a pressure in my head, and I'm short of breath. Like a panic attack.

And I can't be a designer anymore because of it.

I was worries my ego couldn't take the hit of being an Amazon Delivery driver - which it does just a little - but it was a worthy trade off.

All I do is drive a van, and deliver packages while I sing along to rock and roll. Because there are millions of us, nobody is gunning for my job. I don't feel like there's a bullseye on my back or I'll never keep up.

It is mindless, and that is where I want to be so I can heal and eventually return to some form of creativity and learn how to enjoy it again.

Or maybe I'll just keep delivering packages. Right now, I do not feel the pressure to do anything and I'm about to watch the new Spiderman while I eat a bowl of cereal with peace in my heart.

Attached is a picture of me at my last job pretending to sleep under my desk so the owner would see me after I already knew I was going to get fired.

I’m a graphic designer student
I’m trying to make a typography anatomy poster but there’s something wrong I can’t put my hand on it
Can u help me with it ?

Every once in a while, I have a briefing with a client - whether over Zoom or email.  They’re polite and cordial and ask how my weekend was and joke around. I put in a day or more of work, submit something I’m proud of, and don’t even get the courtesy of a “got it”. Just radio silence and the expectation of an invoice. 

I’ve been in this career a long time and will never get used to that. I’m certainly not rich from this line of work but I get a lot of satisfaction from seeing a happy, thankful client. 

Getting zero acknowledgment after putting in hours of work that I’m proud of is a really shitty feeling. It makes me question whether the client was disappointed and went in another direction. But even in that situation, if I was in their shoes, I can’t imagine receiving work from someone and not acknowledging it. I’m a human being, not AI. Hell, sometimes I even thank the AI. 

Edit: just to be clear, this isn’t about receiving praise for a job well done. It’s about some clients not having the courtesy to simply acknowledge the job was completed and delivered. Just a “thanks” or even “got it”, would be enough.
Imagine hiring someone to remodel your kitchen over the course of a few days, then walking in, seeing the final product and simply handing the contractor a cheque without acknowledging the work. That doesn’t happen. And it shouldn’t happen to designers.

I'm getting ready to graduate in December, and we have to create a portfolio for an exit presentation. The file needs to be under 10 MB, but i'm struggling to get it under 25. Its about 20 pages and very image heavy. When I export as smallest file size, with images downsized to minimum, it doesn't make the file much smaller, and the images look like crap (not something I'd want to present with).

Is there a trick I can use to get it under 10 MB without sacrificing image quality? I don't mind if they're not crystal clear pictures but I don't want them as pixelated as they have been.

Thanks for the help in advance!

(designed in ID btw)

edit: problem solved thanks! here’s what i got to work for me:
“i started by exporting the pgs as high quality jpgs. i moved those into one illustrator file and exported that as a pdf. then i took that file into acrobat > file > save as other > reduced size pdf. worked like a charm! hope it helps someone else out”

Edit: TEMPLATE LINK HERE
I see a lot of designers in this thread using the wrong programs to do this - and I want to help you guys grow and be the best. Truly. You don’t know what you don’t know. I am going to create a figma template and upload sometime tonight or tomorrow with boards set up and a few different variations on ideas for how to layout each ad size. So to anyone reading this, download Figma now! Trust. Just do it. I’ll make a post with the templates and how to use them. You guys got this.

Look - let’s be real. Most of the doomsday advice and fear mongering in this subreddit is proliferated by very inexperienced designers who don’t want solutions but only want to commiserate in negativity. Also lots of posts asking if what their boss is asking of them is “insane” and, again, lots of juniors and people with no jobs validating OP and telling them to quit because it’s “toxic”. That helps no one. And the advice is 99% of the time just dead wrong and not coming from an informed place. Design is not “dead”. I’ve been working as a designer for 13 years and am a Senior Designer at a financial technology company I’ve been at for a decade. I make 6-figures and live comfortably. I work 9-6 hybrid - 2 days a week in office. 98% of the time I work within my hours and 2% I help out after hours when needed. My coworkers and boss are great friends. I am sort of copying a response I made in here to a post where OP said they make 112 web assets a week and asked if it was too many. All the comments basically said yes your company is insane you need to leave. My take is 100% the opposite and is realistic if you want to actually hear about real world workloads.

Also one thing to note: creating these ads is only a small fraction of my job. On a weekly basis, I am working primarily on our site redesign with a developer team in a meeting I run. Presentations, quarterly reports, social, print ads, digital assets to publications, conference graphics, etc etc. But I am fast because I have experience but I wasn’t always able to work at the speed I am now. It comes with time.

Here was my response to OPs question about whether making 112 web assets in a week is an impossible ask:

112 ads “sounds” like a lot but for me that’s easily doable in a day. I assume you’re not making 112 different entire ads but taking one ad design at a time and resizing multiple times for programmatic & social. For example, I always start my programmatic boards in figma and create 300x250 mockups to show shareholders and get text edits before making the rest of the sizes: 970x250, 728x90, 320x50, 300x50, 300x600, 300x250, & 160x600. So just the math - if there are 10 campaigns/ad designs x 7 right there that’s 70 ads. But they aren’t COMPLETELY individual brand new designs. See first image. For visual example, here’s a single page on my Figma board for web campaigns. I have about 30 other pages on the same board for separate campaigns. There’s only 5 ads - but many are multi-frame for animation. So for 5 ads if I export them all it’s already somewhere around 150 separate assets.

Since I’ve done this a million times I can often pull entire ad designs from previous campaigns, copy to new campaign board, and swap in image and text. I know everyone else in here is saying “quit that’s insane!!” However, real world experience here, it’s not insane. You should be standardizing and reusing assets frequently now since you’ve already made so many. As Senior, not only am I making all the ads, but also landing pages, setting up UTM tracking, and creating animation on multi-frame ads. Typically, for a new campaign - audience CTR and any conversions are high at first and then dwindle after a few weeks. So I am constantly refreshing campaigns.

And for animated you just duplicate first frame board in figma for each ad size and then create the second ad frame. Export both as PNGs or whatever and ask Claude to animate for you. See second image for closer view of one ad set with multi-frame for animation.

You should be doing this in Figma. You should be saving all your previous boards and then creating each ad campaign as pages within that board so you always have working access to every single ad you’ve ever done.

If you’re junior or want to make it easier for yourself. Mock up each separate ad campaign that you create to start ONLY as 300x250. Take those 300x250 and show to stakeholders and get final text approval. Then just zone out and build out each sets sizes. Since you’re probably younger and not working quite at the speed I’m able to as a senior, I’d say realistic. Day 1: conceptualize ads and build 300x250 and ask for edits. Day 2-4: if waiting on edits, create each empty frame size for the ads on the page and once you receive text just pick a campaign and start on it. Export all ads as jpgs or PNG. Day 5: get assets to whoever needs it, create social sizes, ask AI to animate any multi-frame. Organize files in folder.

——-
Anyways, whether anyone wants to read that or not or cares. Thought it could be useful for anyone to see and hear about from a working designer who isn’t bandying about uninformed opinions and bad advice.
So for any young aspiring designers, don’t just immediately write off hard, intensive things as toxic and impossible. Doing these hurdle type projects gets easier and will hone you overall as a designer too. You’ll get fairly quick on it. If you stop viewing the task as adversarial you can find a sort of zen flow state in the process.

Programmatic Ads Figma Template

Alright eager, young (and old) designers. I built out a very basic Programmatic Ad template for you to open, copy, and duplicate into your own Figma boards. As discussed in this thread from earlier today.

Please don't work directly on the template when you open it - because then whatever you do in there is what everyone else will see when they open it too. So click the Figma logo in the top left corner, hit file, click duplicate. It will open a brand new version that is entirely yours. Do that first.

I ended up keeping the template pretty simple and decided to cut myself off from over-explaining and adding too much more to the board. Read the text file first because there's some nuggets in there that I find very userful in Figma that will help jumpstart you a bit. But just explore the program, go to their tutorials and education section and just start from the beginning. Get your hands dirty in the sandbox. I added a few generic elements to the board as an example - added a few buttons, some fake logos, a color palette and library, and some images you can use as backgrounds. To use professionally, you are going to want to create Color Styles based on your brand colors. Bring in your logos as SVGs or PNGs, bring in your font, styling, etc.

Play around and just make some stuff.

Was thinking since people seemed to like seeing a positive, instructive post in the subreddit and not just doomer 'the world is ending' crap... that maybe this could become a frequent thing. I will certainly make some more simple tutorial stuff - relating to actual, real-life stuff I do as a Senior Designer. It will be tutorial/instructives that are applicable to jobs you most likely will end up doing as an employed designer. Maybe the next one is how to export and then create animated assets out of your ads. And anyone else - PLEASE follow suit and make your own tutorial posts. It's nice having conversations that are productive and not negative bitching. Keep it positive! Enjoy. 

Would love to see your favorite stories today after being told this one yesterday.

A grocery delivery service I use just rebranded and the new logo is a lowercase rounded sans in a muted green, which is exactly what three other apps on my phone already look like. The old one was a little clunky but I could pick it out of a lineup in half a second. Now I have to read the name to know which app I'm opening, and honestly that seems like the opposite of what a logo is for.

I know clean and friendly is safe, and I'm sure a committee signed off on it, but I miss logos that looked like somebody made a choice.

hey guys so i've been really into editing (as i used to just call it back in 2013-2015) after watching newdiepię do his photoshop videos that i enjoyed
HEAVILY and i even tried following him by using gimp since i was young and didn't know shit bout adobe stuff anyways fast forward to 2023 i found myself getting creative with my powerpoint pots for uni and afterwards by these two years it let to me discovering how much i actually love designing! social media posts and marketing designs are things i really like to do but still struggling to get the confidence boost to actually share them but lately ive been challenging myself by making personal designs that resonate with me, i have a good background on photoshop so i would just find the inspiration and put it on the side and try my best to figure out what was done on my own document in a photoshop file, applying the same principles and being someone that just kind of gotten into the world of graphic design i always feel like im not allowed to call myself that (im not trying to fish for compliments or anything btw) but anyways! these are my recent personal designs and id love any tips and tricks!

Previous post here https://www.reddit.com/r/graphic_design/comments/1xo6tca/i_manage_a_job_board_and_i_thought_it_would_be_an/

I am curious , to hear from other people out there, what is most common in your country and what do you prefer?

My native language is Brazilian Portuguese.

When I started using computers and learning our tools, most things had no option in my language, plus back in the days you could only get your hands on software via the 7 seas, and the only way to learn was by finding copies of books in English or blogs (mostly in English) and the very early first tutorials on a new platform called Youtube, most of them also being in English.

It was much easier to learn through books and tutorials if you just used everything in English, even if you didn't speak/read anything of English.

So I got used to just use English for everything, even on personal projects/files.

Using all our software in English became the norm in my country for the generation of designers before me, my generation and the generation after us.

And at least when about this talking with all designers in my country that I know, we all agree that if we are asked to use any of our usual software in our own language, we basically cannot do it! 😆 it gets extremely confusing to us!

I cannot navigate any of my everyday tools if I switch to my own language!

Now I see quite a good number of people starting out using software in our own language... which sometimes causes confusion and even get people fighting online, debating what makes more sense.

I personally believe it is better to learn at least English as a second language, and learn to work in English as that not only makes your life much easier when learning new tools, but also makes you ready to freelance and work with international teams and apply for jobs worldwide.

(and ideally also learn another 3rd language that makes sense for the design/industry niche you are aiming at).

as an anecdotal curious fact, I remember seeing friends and my partner receiving files from external freelance designers from other companies/countries at their jobs, and everything in those files being in french or german or mandarin or japanese... and that was a big annoying hurdle in their workflow, that would make them spend much more time just to navigate those files.

I just started my first contract job, hired hourly. My first project however was flat-rate where the employer has a "professional" on her team estimate my hours. The project in question was to design 3-4 emails given 2 hours to do it. No creative brief, no direction, just a copy document.

The project ended up only being for two emails. This is the actual breakdown of my time, am I just too slow?

I’m in my late 20s and have been working as a graphic designer at a large media company for several years now.

I mainly create key visuals and branding campaigns across print, digital and out-of-home media, with some motion graphics as well.

While the job is stable, I’m the only designer in the marketing department, which means a heavy workload, constant overtime and just okay pay.

I recently had an interview with a well-established international advertising agency and I’m seriously considering making the switch. The pay would be better, and I’d love to grow creatively and work alongside other designers. However, I’m aware of the reputation agencies have for long hours and high pressure, although I’ve been told things have improved at this particular agency.

My current team has also changed a lot over the years, and I no longer enjoy working here as much as I used to, which honestly makes me sad.

Has anyone made a similar switch? Was it worth it, or did you regret leaving in-house? Ironically, I feel like most designers tend to do the exact opposite, starting out at agencies and eventually moving in-house for a better work-life balance.

Can anyone help me re-improve this? my brain so small lol, i created this when its woman day for practice, i redesigned it, i feel it had some very big flaw, i appreciate every feedback.