Hi Chemical,

graphic designers can make money, depends on what direction you go into. I’m a freelancer and there is tons of potential in my city, although I’m not where I want to be financially, I’m still pretty new at the game.

Graphic Design may not be as ’fun’ as being a fine-artist, or an illustrator, but it definitely pays the bills better in most cases.

Overall, theres tons of opportunities in different graphic fields (animation, branding, website design, publication design). Do some more research. Your portfolio is nice.

Oh and punctuation is your friend in message boards, especially this one.

lol thanks i shall fix it up.

You might read Browning’s “Fra Lippo Lippi” — If you want to make money, there will be some cherub-painting.

don’t say lol.

thanks charles and to fred ....

I had a similar conversation with a fine art professor once. He pointed out that if I look at the parking lot, the fine art faculty were driving beat up vans from the 1970s and 80s, and the design faculty were driving new Volkswagons, Beemers, and even Porsches. The starting salaries in design do suck, but so do plenty of other jobs, but at least as a designer you get paid to do creative work and not schlep coffee and bagels all day so you can go home and do illustration work on your kitchen table all night.

and much praise to james. well another part of this post is seeing if people either agree with my style staying in graphic design or would i fit better in a different category.

Do what you love to do. Find a way to do that and you’ll be successful. Maybe not rich and famous, but successful.

Sharon

…another part of this post is seeing if people either agree with my style staying in graphic design or would i fit better in a different category.

Four years in art school will leave you looking back at everything you did before and shaking your head. Styles and attitudes change, and you’ll never know what happens. I started as an abstract painter, switched to digital media design, and finally ended up falling in love with print and type design.

The important thing to do is choose a school where you can experiment with everything and where the fine art and design departments overlap. Take a look at the work of seniors and recent grads—if it looks like most of the work was done entirely with a computer, that means you be stuck doing most of your work on the computer, and trust me, you’ll miss out on a lot. And think about big schools so that you don’t miss out on important classes because of scheduling conflicts or course cancellations due to low enrollment.

I’ve only been a designer for three years and my salary has more than doubled and I am now working for a Fortune 500 company with plenty of room to move up.

I was a fine arts major with a focus in design... It’s definitely a good avenue to travel. I find it extremely fulfilling.

Make sure to take some business or marketing classes on top of your design classes though, those will be extremely beneficial.

How much money you make typically depends on what you’re designing. If you design album covers and concert posters, you’re most likely going to make a fraction of what someone designing annual reports for the medical industry is making. Of course, most people would find the former more fun than the latter. Where I live, designers right out of school would make somewhere between 30K and 45K a year, with most people somewhere in the middle. If you need more money than that, going down the motion graphic and/or interactive path might be what you want to do — a lot of people bill $60-100/hr after a few years in these industries. If you live in rural Mississippi, those numbers would be much lower, though.

The most important thing, though, is to not listen to “experts” too much, whether they’re random people on the internet or teachers at your school. I had a million people tell me “you have to get into web,” or “you should do more illustration,” etc. while I was in school, and I took them very seriously for a long time. If you love doing something, you can figure out a way to make money with it.

Whether hand to mouth... or stop it, I can’t take any more, it is a fine ride if you love what you are doing! Thirty years in the business and continue to be on both sides of the fence.

Michael

…another part of this post is seeing if people either agree with my style staying in graphic design or would i fit better in a different category.

Based on the work in your portfolio, I think you should also consider studying illustration. It looks like you have some real talent for that, and the work in your gallery is closer to what an illustrator would do than a graphic designer.

I’m not discouraging you from studying graphic design, I’m sure you would do well in either profession. Your best bet would probably be to take introductory courses in several disciplines and see what you like best.