Arek Dvornechcuck
Branding Expert
I'm a branding expert and graphic designer based in NY. I specialize in the development of brands: brand strategy, identity & web design. Need help with your project?—Get in touch
Freelancing is perfect for graphic designers who want to make money by providing different services to their clients.
Offering strategic consulting is a great way to make money by providing your opinions on brands using your creative thinking skills.
Selling online courses is one of the best ways to make money if you are confident about your graphic design skills.
I'm a branding expert and graphic designer based in NY. I specialize in the development of brands: brand strategy, identity & web design. Need help with your project?—Get in touch
Whether you are a beginner or an expert, there are many ways to make money as a graphic designer.
However, most graphic designers don’t have an idea about these methods.
Knowing various methods to make money can help you test things out and find your passion.
Is graphic design a good career?
Yes, graphic designing is one of the best careers for people with an aesthetic eye.
It's a career that allows you to work in a variety of industries with a lot of exciting projects.
With a lot of different ways to make money, it can be a bit overwhelming to find the best method that suits you to make money as a designer.
So, in this blog post, I will be going through the top 10 best ways to make money as a graphic designer.
If you are a designer who likes to work with clients and help them improve their graphics-related tasks, freelancing is a great choice.
Freelancing is the best way to make money if you like to work with clients.
No matter what design skills you have, there will always be people who are looking for the skill you have expertise in.
Be it logo designing, image retouching, 3d animations, or NFT designing, you can literally do anything that you prefer as a freelancer.
To get started as a freelancer, you must first choose the service that you like to provide.
Once you have chosen and gained experience in your preferred service, you can create a portfolio for yourself on websites like Behance and Dribble.
People are constantly looking for talented freelance designers on these sites.
So, showcasing your skills on these sites will eventually get you clients and you will start making money.
In addition, you can also work on freelance platforms like Fiverr or Upwork.
Accordingly, if you are a designer who likes to work with clients, freelancing is an excellent choice for you.
Besides design, you can offer strategic consulting—which is a great way to make money if you’re looking for high paid jobs.
This is a great way to run discovery sessions and get paid for your creative thinking.
Offering strategic consulting simply means you will sell a few hours or a day of your time to someone looking for your opinions about their brand strategy.
A lot of businesses around the world are looking for talented graphic designers to get strategic consulting.
If you are interested in learning brand strategy from scratch, check out my article, where I wrote about developing brand strategy.
Also, check out my article on how to sell strategy and get paid for creative thinking-this way you can build trust and convince these clients to hire you for design work.
The third method you can earn money as a graphic designer is by creating and selling an online course (Checkout my courses).
Selling online courses is the best way to make money if you are confident about your graphic design skills.
Millions of students worldwide are looking for graphic design courses, and online education is one of the hottest industries right now.
Selling online courses is a great way to make money if you are good at a certain area of graphic design, for example, branding (like in my case).
You can also create courses about:
One major benefit of creating courses is that you don’t have to be an expert -you can share the specific knowledge and skills you have.
There are thousands of students who are just starting to learn graphic design.
Therefore, creating a graphic design course will be really helpful for those people who are starting out.
If you want to learn more about the best platforms to launch your online course, check out this article, where I wrote about the best online course platforms.
Overall, selling online courses is a great way to make money as a graphic designer.
Another way to make money is to create and sell templates. For example, I sell a style guide and proposal templates in my shop.
Creating and selling templates is the best method you can make passive income as a graphic designer.
With this method, you can create templates for ebooks, websites, landing pages, etc.
There are a lot of small businesses and creatives who don’t have the necessary graphic design skills to create their own designs.
Accordingly, they are looking for templates and guides to help them customize and improve their products and services.
All you have to do is create a portfolio shop and add a set of sample templates to your portfolio.
Once you are done, you can start making money without doing anything else but marketing your own templates.
Other than that, you can also create mockups on websites like creative market, yellow images, Webflow, and Squarespace for people to buy.
Overall, creating and selling templates is a great way to make passive income as a designer.
Branding is one of the best ways you can make a ton of money as a graphic designer. Also, check out my brand master bundle.
Selling branding packages is one of the most paid graphic design jobs out there.
A complete branding package can cost from 5000 to 30000+ dollars depending on the designer's experience level.
In order to start providing branding packages, you need to be good at designing logos, fonts, patterns, and color schemes.
This is a great way to start making money if you are an experienced graphic designer.
If you are a beginner I highly recommend these branding courses for you to get started.
Once you have the necessary education, you can create a portfolio, gain experience and start selling your branding packages.
Overall, selling branding packages is one of the high-ticket graphic designing services you can offer.
Are you comfortable being in front of the camera?-Then creating a Youtube channel is one of the best ways you can start making money as a graphic designer.
Creating a Youtube channel is the best way to share your knowledge/ experience, gain subscribers and monetize your content to earn money.
Youtube is one of the best platforms that allow you to make a ton of money by sharing your interests with other people.
To get started you can create a youtube channel and start uploading content.
However, in order to become eligible to earn money from youtube videos, you need to have 1000 subscribers and 4000 watch hours.
Once you fulfill these requirements, you can monetize your channel and start making money.
Here are some ideas you can try out on your Youtube channel,
Other than monetizing your videos, you can also use sponsorships, and affiliates to make money from Youtube.
So overall, if you are ready to be patient and continuously grow your audience, creating a Youtube channel is a great way to make money as a graphic designer.
If you are looking for an easy way to make money, then selling stickers, t-shirts, and mugs would be a great choice for you.
Selling stickers, t-shirts and mugs one of the easiest ways to make money as a designer.
It's pretty simple to create these products as you only need Photoshop or Canva to create them.
Selling stickers has become an income source for many graphic designers with the popularity of TikTok small sticker shops.
Other than that, people are also constantly looking for beautiful t-shirt designs and mugs.
These products continuously gain the attention of people and therefore graphic designers can make a lot of money by selling them.
You can either start your own online store or use third-party vending websites like Etsy, RedBubble, and Society6 to start selling these products.
Accordingly, selling stickers, t-shirts and mugs is a great way to make money with less effort.
Moving on, designing fonts is also a great way you can start making money as a graphic designer.
Designing fonts is the best way to earn money if you are interested in typogrpahy.
Most companies pay special attention to hiring people to design unique fonts as they play a huge part in any website.
There are a lot of different ways that you can make beautiful fonts-you can even use your own handwriting to create various types of fonts.
Check out this article if you want to learn more about designing your own fonts.
Once you have created a font, you can start selling them on websites like Etsy or Creative Market.
Most of these websites pay around $100 for the fonts you design.
Besides that, you can also try to find a job as a font designer as font designing is an extensively growing market.
If you are a graphic designer interested in typography, designing fonts is an excellent way to make money.
The last method on my list to start making money is by writing guest posts.
Writing guest posts is one of the best side hustles to earn money as a graphic designer.
Guest posting is a great way to earn money by writing about your knowledge and experience.
There are a lot of opportunities for graphic designers to make money by guest posting.
However, you need to use search engines like Google, and platforms like LinkedIn to find these opportunities.
Cold emailing the owners of the blogs you like to work with is a great way to get clients and start building your portfolio to get more guest posting gigs.
Once you find a good opportunity, you can start making money by writing about the skills you already have.
So, writing guest posts is one of the best side hustles to make money as a designer.
If you are looking for a fun way to make money as a designer, selling digital comics would be a great choice for you.
Selling comics is a great way to make money from your creative thinking while having fun.
Comic drawing is a billion-dollar industry and it has continued to grow over the past years.
People of all different ages watch comics as they are fun and offer a chance at escapism.
As a graphic designer, you can use your creativity to make comics and start making money from the market share of the comic industry.
An interesting fact about selling comics is that you don’t have to pay for physical stores or convince people to pay for shipping when selling digital comics.
Check out this article if you want to learn more about creating and making money from selling comics.
Overall, selling comics is a great way to make by using your visual sense.
Getting started and earning money as a designer is a lot easier than you think.
All you have to do is to practice, build a portfolio and sell your products or services to make money.
In this blog post, we have discussed the top 10 best ways to make money as a graphic designer.
So, if you are just starting out, you can now choose your path, work on building your portfolio and gain experience to start working as a graphic designer.
Also, check out this article where I wrote about how to become a graphic designer.
If you are an experienced designer, you can try the above-mentioned methods to start making money.
