Are you just starting up a career as a graphic designer or you are already into the graphic design stream and you’ve been wondering how to make money with graphic design?
Do you want to start earning $10,000- $20,000 monthly with graphic design? I bet you do!
Well, you are on the right page.
In this article, I’m going to show you how to make cool cash with graphic design or possibly start earning a living with it.
and also going to be giving you bonus tips on how to better your graphic design skill at the end of the article.
Graphic design as a career has so many categories in it you can choose and start making money with, it ranges from logo design, animations, poster design, 3D design, etc.
These are the 11 ultimate ways you can start to make money with graphic design. Whether you are just starting up as new newbie or a professional, this list will teach the basics of how you can start making passive income with your graphic design skills.
So let us begin!
11 Ultimates Ways To Make Money With Graphic Design
1. Logo design
You can’t talk about graphic design and logos won’t be a part of it. The logo design industry is flooded with designers(amateurs and professionals) and is one of the most focused areas in the graphic design industry that designers use to make money with graphic design.
2 out of 5 people in a room would be logo designers, and because of this, the competition is much.
But the competition shouldn’t scare you off, despite the huge number of designers in the logo design industry, only the skillful logo designers that know what they’re doing are recognized.
It is believed that by 2024, logo designers are expected to face strong competition for jobs. Despite its competition in the marketplace, it still stands to be one of the most paid graphic design job categories.
“The Futur”, a branding company in the US, charges up to $15,000 – $30,000 for a logo design. These figures aren’t static, prices may vary according to the client’s needs.
And guess what? The most expensive logo which is the Symantec Brand & Acquisition cost – $1,280,000,000
But don’t get your mouth watery because those big brands have built a lot of reputation over the years in the graphic design community, which is why their cost of designing a logo is that huge.
For an upcoming logo designer, you can actually start from 10 – 20 bucks per logo, over time you gradually increase the price, and possibly by then, you must have built your design skill to a pro level.
If you are good at drawing interesting shapes and icons that appear nice. Then you should give logo design a try, this definitely could be your field.
Poster design
Posters are a very important tool in the marketing industry (digital & real-world marketing). Virtually all online businesses and brand use poster design to help get pivotal messages across to their target audience.
This could be in the form of ad campaigns, event posters, research posters, etc.
It is nearly impossible for companies and brands that want to create awareness for a new product or service to not want to make use of poster design for the cause of their business promotion, it’s impossible.
So, this could be a great opportunity you could use to make money with graphic design effortlessly.
The cool side of designing posters is that poster designs can be made to bring in passive income while you are in bed eating Doritos. If you own a site, blog, or even a store on Etsy or Fiverr.
You can simply upload your customizable poster design template, you get paid a fee whenever a user buys your poster design template they simply wipe off the text, change the colors and the poster is how they want it to be.
just a minute here. A brief poster design advice-
For a poster to achieve its full effectiveness, it needs to follow the design principles (very important)
. Hierarchy
. Alignment
. Fonts
. Contrast
. Balance
. Focal Point
Shirt printing
Every graphic designer needs that side hustle that he can be bringing in addition to passive income monthly because let’s be truthful to ourselves, sometimes we don’t just meet up bills with one income stream.
If you find yourself in this position as a graphic designer. worry no more because you can begin to make money with graphic design by printing cool graphic content on shirts
Shirt printing is totally not a bad idea for you to start making money with, just take a look around you and see the number of people putting on shirts with graphics on them.
In fact, people find it interesting to buy a shirt they never intended buying to buy just because of the cool write-up or graphic design art on them. Let us take for example the popular best-sold Rotweiller Givenchy shirt that was popularly worn by celebrities.
Imagine why multi-million companies are making money with graphic design, people love art cool artwork and they will buy if you put it up for sale. Millions are made from shirts with graphic design elements on them.
So what is stopping you from starting up yours, besides, people who put up those designs on those shirts are graphic designers, no doubt.
You can start earning up to $400 – $1000 per shirt. That’s right!
Sticker sales
Might sound common to you and you might be thinking ‘’oh man, I’m definitely going to earn nothing from the stickers sale’’. You thought wrong.
Stickers are simply graphic design products that are used for the purpose of decorating our environment, gadget, laptops, and phones.
Even brands use stickers as ways to create continuous exposure of their brand to customers which helps familiarize them with the brand while using their logo and color to grab their attention easily.
People love to see tiny pieces of art and I bet you that they would want to buy and stick them up on their cars, fridges, laptop, and other surfaces.
You can sell a sticker for the price of $3-20 per pop.
There is a store in Tokyo “B-side label” that makes very interesting stickers, this store simply creates cute zombie artwork: (zombie dog stickers, zombie cat stickers, etc), and the store used the revenue from their sticker sales to build a huge amazing physical store.
This is a graphic design business you can start up, grow bigger and make money with and without breaking a sweat and you start making more profit passively over time.
Sell on Fiverr
I’m sure you probably must have heard about Fiverr. In case you haven’t, it is basically an online platform where mostly content creators like graphic designers go to sell or buy services.
The Fiver community is a place where you can easily make money with graphic design given that you have a service you offer. You could land yourself a long-term graphic design job or a freelance graphic design job depending portfolio or maybe how lucky you are.
Fiverr community is a huge playground where countless services are bought and sold. Having that in mind, the Fiverr community has every service categorized for easy tracking for its users.
As a graphic designer, you can begin to earn money online with graphic design by simply designing graphic artwork- posters, printables, logos, illustrations, and infographics.
Firstly, you begin by creating your Fiverr account and adding up your contact details for easy contact whenever a buyer that is in need of a graphic designer like you want to reach out for a service to be done.
Ranging from logo design, animation, poster design, 3D design, CGI effect creators and so many more. You can render these services to people who want them and are willing to pay good money for them.
If you are a new ‘seller’ on Fiverr, you are required to create a ‘gig’(which simply means the service you are offering). when this gig is created, you put all the required information that your gig needs, and then you publish and wait for a contact.
Always remember that the kind of conditions you apply to your service will influence the potentiality of someone hiring you as a graphic designer.
In Fiverr, the more services you successfully carry out, the higher your level gets. Hard work and dedication are required from you too.
You can read more about Fiverr seller level HERE
Sell on Etsy
Etsy is just another unique platform like Fiverr that you can join and start making money with your graphic design skill. Etsy allows users to upload their services for buyers to see and then contact them.
You can find brilliant graphic designers and other service persons on Etsy, you can buy already-made items, handcrafted art, furniture, and a lot more.
It’s simply just a place to find people with fine craftsmanship.
As a graphic designer, this is also an open-door opportunity for you to grab and start making money.
Social media ads
This is another BIG option for you that most designers do not know yet. You can earn money online designing Social media ads. Social media posters are in high demand in 2022 because not only does it create awareness for brands online but good design is most likely to attract the target audience.
Good design influences the viewers to take action to click that “Buy” button, it takes a good designer to be able to make the viewer take such action using good design to manipulate the emotion of the viewer and make them take action.
Social media marketers are looking for graphic designers with incredible skills to help them design ads for social media marketing, advertising, and promotions.
Top social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and YouTube are used to advertise millions of products daily on their platform. Graphic designers are the creators of those ads you see at the start of every youtube video.
Marketers on these top platforms are always on the lookout for graphic designers who could influence potential buyers to come and get their products and services using visual tools like social media ads.
It is believed that amazing-looking ads on Instagram have a very high potential of making buyers click on the designated link that will redirect them to a product page and voila, a sale has been made.
That was all done by our powerful graphic design visual persuasion.
Social media marketers are willing to pay huge money for a graphic designer who could create killer ads that would drive customers to get their product.
And if you are good at it, these marketers would do everything they could to make you stay because they know the type of ads you create is crucial for their business to strive forward and will help them get more customers.
Social media ad design could come in various forms- infographics, posters design, flyers design, and promo base designs( these are flyers designed for product promotion).
Make money selling graphic design template
You could make money with graphic design by creating various types of graphic design templates (posters, brochures, business cards and many others
You can select a niche or theme for poster design and create an easily customizable template. All that is required from the user is to edit the information that was set by default and input the information of their brand and ta-da it’s done.
This could be the header title, the slogan, the focal point image or text, contacts information, etc.
Not everyone has the time to start creating a design from scratch, in most cases the brand or individual might have little experience in graphic design so they rather find a template to work with ASAP.
Templates are time-savers, they just need to simply change a few elements in the template to fit your taste. For example, a company might download a logo template and decide to change the color of the template to the brand’s color just to maintain cohesion with the existing brand.
Examples of template download sites are Vecteezy and Freepik. they have premium templates and a lot of free templates too. I’m sure these guys are making a lot of money with just template sales.
Selling online courses
Selling online courses is another great strategy to use in making money as a graphic designer. Traditionally one has to go to a graphic design school and choose a graphic design course to help improve their graphic design skill.
This time, it has changed, now you can easily get online courses for different careers online. graphic design included.
You can make money with the graphic design experience you have earned over time simply by creating definitive dummy courses for people who are just starting up their career in graphic design and they will be willing to buy them for a good price.
You can sell this course in form of eBooks, Videos, Audio, or podcasts.
Selling canvas prints
Have you seen those beautiful art pieces hanging on hotel walls, at a friend’s place or maybe inside the building of a business firm?
Those are canvas-printed artworks are graphic design products that are framed and hung on the wall, and are pretty much expensive.
Graphic designers with amazing photoshop skills, adobe illustrator skills, or blender skills are making mind-blowing profits with just canvas print design. you can also give it a try and start making money.
Those are basically digitally made images with photoshop that are printed in large size which are framed with glass and sold by graphic designers. A canvas print tends to sell higher if the design look nice and prices differ according to canvas size.
| Size | Frame | Size |
| 12 x 12 | 0.75 | $79.00 |
| 16 x 16 | 0.75 | $98.00 |
| 20 x 20 | 0.75 | $114.00 |
Price may change according to your location
The more you put more effort on your design skill and dedication, the better you get with designing good digital art work and the more the price your canvas print would cost.
Make money with graphic design by Selling PNG file
PNG files are rapidly becoming useful nowadays, most photoshop manipulation artist tare always in need of design png elements with a transparent background that they can use for their photoshop or adobe illustrator design projects.
Not everyone has the time to start cropping out that image from its background that is to be used for their design project. Especially when an image has a very sophisticated background for example when you are trying to crop out a female model with lot of hair.
We all now how frustrating it is especially for those who do not have nice photopn pen skill, they end up with bad looking jagged edges.
There was one time I had an album cover art design for a client and the design I wanted to create needed some surreal images there was not much time at hand, so I had no option but to make use of downloaded from pngwing
It’s a time saver. So, this right here my friend is another opportunity you can use to make money with graphic design.
Graphic design tips for beginners
As a graphic designer especially when you are a beginner, there are times you run out of ideas, and some problems you face feels like it’s unsolvable. But guess what we have all been there, it is 100% normal.
This is why you need these pieces of advice and tips that will get you going during hard times.
Clients
Clients sometimes can be a pain in the a**. Believe me! However , they are the reason why you stay up all day and night honing your graphic design skill hoping they land you you a job because of your good design skill.
We hate being judged even when we are wrong or when the clients tell you he doesn’t like the design you made. Those client negative feedback our client gives to our design is never the kind of feedback graphic designer want.
Designers hope they always get their first feedback as to be a “Yes i love it, Wow its really nice and I love the color.
You should always be ready to tolerate their bothering, asking you to make one final change to their work, telling you to do the impossible, or telling you to do something that isn’t logical in terms of graphic design.
Sometimes they feel they own your life and would want to talk you out and make you believe that you aren’t as good as you think.
But guess what? It’s totally normal.
You need to find a way to understand them, and what they need you to do, and ask them questions by taking design briefs.
Taking briefs will really help you to get in-depth details of what your client wants you to do.
Practice makes perfect
If you want earn money online designing then you need room for constant improvement. There is no doubt in getting better in graphic design if you practice regularly, when you practice on any aspect of graphics design be it typography and its usage, colors, hierarchy, alignment, etc. over time you will definitely get better.
It’s highly advised you practice daily as a graphic design beginner, you can get thousands of videos on YouTube that will help you get better in your career,
Just like how I did when I started up. I’m a self-taught graphic designer. I used YouTube tutorial videos to my advantage; today, I know a lot.
So if you want to get better, you really need to practice every day.
Delivery time
One thing clients hate is when you fail to fulfill your words. You should always deliver your job on time to your client or even deliver the job in advance. if you tell them 7days delivery time, make sure it’s 7 days.
When you deliver job on time, you give the impression of been a reliable graphic designer to your client. But when you go contrary to what is expected of you, clients will begin to lose trust in you. they will feel you aren’t serious and will try some other person.
Always try to keep up with time, remember that.
‘’Take a break’’
Graphic design is a thing of thought process, sometimes you overwork and you find yourself not being able to be creative anymore. You try hard to be c creative but have no ideas.
Your creative juice has stopped flowing. At that point, you need to pat yourself on the shoulder and say ‘’hey you really need to take a break’’.
You can have a walk in the park, chill out close to nature, and just stay away from the pc for some time, and I bet you when you get back, Ideas will start coming flowing in.
I hope this articles really helped you guys out. and please be sure to check out our other articles across the site.
Please do not hesitate to share your ideas on you can make money with graphic design on the comment box. Be creative as always!