Design Salary Guide – Are You Earning the Right Amount?

“We are interpreters – not merely translators between sender and receiver. What we say and how we say it makes a difference. If we want to speak to people, we need to know their language. In order to design for understanding, we need to understand design.”

– Erik Spiekermann

Design salaries vary a lot, depending on the position you have, and depending in which country you work from. There is a huge discrepancy for the same position – lets say for a Junior Art Director working from Montreal, and one working from Sofia; and there even tends to be a huge discrepancy based on the advertising agency you work for.

We are not going put freelancers in the same equation, because every single one of them has a different pay rate, depending on their portfolio, experience, how long will the project take, and many other variables that we need to take into account – but we will however present to you a salary range just as a comparison.

What we are going to do is help you realize what the range of the salaries are, and what is the middle 50% where the majority falls into. Before going any further, you must take this into consideration – every ad agency has their own set of rules, a hierarchy with an art director, and a design director where both can do the same job, or they could both have different responsibilities.

1. Art Director

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Salary Range: $5k to $150k

Middle 50%: $40k to $75k

What does an art director actually do to deserve such a salary? Well, he overseas the visual style and imagery for everything. Magazines, websites, newspapers, pamphlets, videos – everything that falls into the visual range, it’s his job to make sure it’s always top notch quality, or at least what the clients wants to see.

He usually overseas a team of designers, issues tasks, coordinates the team for utmost efficiency. Do you think it’s that easy to become an art director? Preston Ames, was inducted in the Hall of Fame of The Art Directors Guild in 2013 for his excellence service in the field, but he didn’t do this overnight. It took him years before getting a lucky break and actually succeeding and getting seen – “For much of his early career, Ames worked on a wide range of mostly B-movies, often without screen credit, but he slowly developed an individual style and by the late 1940s he was beginning to get more important assignments, especially in the new field of color filmmaking.

His most notable successes in Hollywood took place during MGM’s second golden era of musicals, and his greatest work was often produced while working with director Vincente Minnelli. Their portfolio together includes such titles as An American in Paris (1951), The Band Wagon (1953), Brigadoon (1954), Kismet (1955), Lust for Life (1956), Designing Woman (1957), and Gigi (1958).“

2. Product Manager

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Salary Range: $9k to $175k

Middle 50%: $68k to $92k

A product managers responsibilities will differ from company to company, project to project, thus making it really hard to create an accurate estimate. A product manager is responsible for both the design and the user experience – everything must be in a hell of a shape to satisfy the needs of the customer. He is the one that takes care of the business end of things.

A great product manager has to maintain communications between all sorts of departments, and he has to assure the company that they will reach the goals set at the beginning of the project. Production designer, and manager Robert F. Boyle, also inducted into the Hall of Fame of The Art Directors Guild in 2012 has brought wonders to our eyes – “In the late 1950s, Boyle rejoined Hitchcock at Columbia on North by Northwest (1959), and received the first of his four Academy Award® nominations for this comedy-thriller that takes Cary Grant and the audience from the United Nations building to Mount Rushmore, with a well-known stop in a very flat cornfield.

In 1963, Boyle worked again with Hitchcock on the eerie picture The Birds, a tour de force for the director and Boyle as well, who were faced with new logistical and technical challenges in figuring out how to convincingly create vicious attacks by hundreds of birds. Boyle’s work as one of Hollywood’s most accomplished Production Designers continued through the 1960s and 1970s when he designed Cape Fear (1962) for J. Lee Thompson and In Cold Blood (1967) and Bite the Bullet (1975) for Richard Brooks.

He was also Production Designer on Leadbelly (1976), a lowbudget film by Gordon Parks about the blues singer Huddie Ledbetter, and Don Siegel’s The Shootist (1976), a revisionist Western which starred John Wayne as a dying gunfighter, and for which Boyle was honored with his fourth Academy Award nomination.“

3. Mobile UI Designer

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Salary Range: $5k to 130k

Middle 50%: $40k to $75k

Freelancers: $65k

Mobile UI designers have flourished with the explosion of smartphones, but what’s their tasks? Well, they create, from scratch,  the user interface for mobile apps, or operating systems. It’s really important to have knowledge about how it actually is to navigate from the mobile users point of view – they key here is to innovate, to bring something new to the table, to set a milestone for other designers.

Every firm has junior, mid-level and lead positions for mobile UI designers – of course, freelancers don’t have this; freelancers tend to have more jobs for this kind of task. For some peculiar reason big corporations, big ad agencies choose to outsource this kind of job to other smaller companies, or freelancers. I haven’t really figured why, but as soon as I find out I’m going to tell the world about it.

We managed to just scratch the surface on this, but it may give you an idea of what to expect from the field of designing. If you have any useful information, what salary is in your area, please let us know by posting in the comments section below. We would love to hear from you!