You’re a graphic designer. You see the world differently. You’re creative. Innovative. You harbor an innate ability to connect the dots where others cannot. You craft and concoct wild-eyed graphics that rival the imagination. Your unique approach to design allows you to see what others often fail to see. Colors flow like rivers through your mind. They ebb and flow like the tides that rise and fall over time.
Yes. Graphic designers are far different. But that difference is both a blessing and a curse—a Catch-22. That’s because your creativity often masks your practicality. You can design and create effortlessly. But that same passion overwhelms your practicality. It takes a front seat to your ability to make money as a graphic designer in a profession you love. But love doesn’t always pay the bills, right?
It’s okay to love design and be creative. That doesn’t mean you have to go out and get a “real job”. It only means that, as a graphic designer, you must find real ways to make money. And there are many ways to make a lot of money (and to make it fast) when you stop and look. Although AI is taking over, graphic designers can still make boatloads of money. You just need to know where to look.
How to Make Money as a Graphic Designer
When you step back to look at it there are many ways you can earn a substantial income. This isn’t about making a few dollars here or there. It isn’t about taking on five-dollar gigs to earn enough to buy a cup of coffee. Nope. This is about cashing in. And you can definitely cash in as a graphic designer. You don’t need to be a design prodigy to do it. You only need to follow one of the paths blazed before you.
After all, you’re not the first graphic designer to struggle with making money. And you certainly won’t be the last. The best part? Many have paved the way. So many graphic designers are making a lot of money. And not just the so-called cream of the crop. Anyone willing to put in the work and understand a few of the fundamental concepts that allow you to earn.
Look at it like this. Your time is limited. You don’t have much. It’s finite. Not unlimited. So to make real money as a graphic designer you have to find ways to compress time. This is not just about working for a meager hourly salary. Sure you can do that if you want to. This is more about working once and getting paid over and over again. That’s where the real magic happens.
It doesn’t matter if you’re a graphic designer, web developer, video editor, or you’re in any other profession. You can make a lot of money as long as you understand this concept. It’s all about doing the work once and getting paid repeatedly. We call that passive income. But passive income isn’t easy to pull off as a graphic designer. Especially when you have bills to pay and endless obligations. But it is the best path forward.
1. Sales Funnel Templates
One way to make a lot of money as a graphic designer is to design templates for sales funnels. Sales funnels are these magical little machines that virtually print money for businesses. Millions of businesses around the world use them. And there’s always a raging demand for high-quality sales funnel designs. The best part? You don’t need to be a coder or a web developer to set these up.
All you need to do is use existing premade sales funnel templates to initiate your design creations. The drag-and-drop editor makes it simple to move parts and pieces around. You can easily change colors, fonts, add shapes and images, and so on. The beauty is that you can do the work once and get paid repeatedly for it. How? Through the funnel marketplace.
Designing sales funnels is a simple approach to making money in the graphic design field. It allows you to channel your passion into a money-making opportunity. While sales funnels are one of the best ways to make money online today, most sales funnel designs are underwhelming. And by creating beautiful designs you can help many businesses that are struggling with this design problem.
Once you get the hang of it you can design sales funnels for all types of situations. You can design landing pages like squeeze pages or reverse squeeze pages. You can design application funnels. Webinar funnels. 2-step tripwire funnels. Hero pages. Affiliate bridge pages. And all of the above. Create stellar designs and watch your income skyrocket.
2. Create Digital Fonts
Fonts are beautiful. Classic. They can be serifed or non-serifed. Cursive. Block. They can take on all shapes and sizes. Digital fonts are important in design because you can convey design style with ease. When you’re designing something geared toward the luxury market you can use a luxurious font. For kids? You can use fun fonts.
While most don’t know it you can design and sell fonts in many marketplaces. This is not the easiest way to make money as a graphic designer. But if your font actually gets footing, it could take off and sell like hotcakes. You’ll need to ensure adoption and promote that font if you want to make money selling it. But the time and effort is worthwhile.
You can design your fonts in Adobe Illustrator and sell them in many font marketplaces like MyFonts. This allows you to do the work once and get paid repeatedly. If you understand how to create fonts consider creating them and selling them online. Although you don’t need to be a graphic designer specifically to do this, it helps.
Because you need to understand how to create vector art in a program like Adobe Illustrator. Vector art is the basis for fonts because it can be scaled without losing clarity or being pixelated. You can also learn the basics of graphic design and then try your hand at creating fonts. It takes some creativity and a willingness to try different approaches to see what works best.
3. Tutor Students
You can also tutor students in graphic design to make money. You can tutor them in all aspects of graphic design. You can tutor them in the basic concepts and principles. You can delve into the concepts and principles that drive color theory, or teach them how to use certain shapes to emphasize designs. And you can tutor them to use specific programs such as Photoshop, Illustrator, and others.
Tutoring is a great way to make money when you need to earn some fast and don’t want to wait for one of your passive income streams to kick in. It doesn’t take much effort to do this especially if you’re a seasoned graphic designer. You can use a platform like Varsity Tutors or Tutor.com to find students that you can tutor in graphic design.
Tutoring is an easy way to make money. But it does limit you based on your time. Meaning that you can only earn as much as you can work. You’ll also need to collect great feedback if you want to get the best tutoring clients. It takes time and a lot of effort but it is well worth it. Especially if you’re passionate about teaching others.
4. Online Courses
One of the best ways that you can make money is to create online courses. Online courses allow you to turn your knowledge and your skills into an actual income. And they allow you to make money while you sleep. In other words, you can generate passive income through online courses. That doesn’t mean it’s easy. But the concepts behind it are simple.
You can create a graphic design course that teaches students all the tricks of the trade. And you can sell that online course in many ways. You can use existing platforms like Udemy, Teachable, Kajabi, and others. But if you want to make more money with your online course, then you should build it yourself on a custom domain. And you should do it using an online course builder like this one. This way, you get all of the income it generates.
When you build your online course on a custom domain it also looks far more professional. And you don’t need to be a web developer to do this. You only need to use premade templates and a drag-and-drop editor. It’s the same way you would create sales funnel templates. The same software. All you need to do after that is to promote your course.
To promote your online course you need a good lead magnet on a landing page. That lead magnet must know the prospect’s problem. And it must agitate their pain. The lead magnet presents a solution to the problem and a way to alleviate the pain. It’s different for every industry. You must be creative and come up with a good hook. Once they download your lead magnet, build rapport through email marketing.
5. YouTube Channel
Can you make money with a YouTube channel? And can you do it as a graphic designer? If so, what would you create your videos about? The best part about graphic design is that it’s a highly visual trade. You can easily film yourself using popular software programs like Adobe Photoshop, Illustrator, and others. And you can use that as an opportunity to teach others about design.
If you don’t want to show your face you don’t have to. That’s the beauty of teaching graphic design. It’s visual and you can simply show your screen. All you have to do is create a voice-over or speak as you work on the project or teach people how to do certain things. You can teach people how to edit photos, create illustrations, or do any number of other things.
However, YouTube is not a quick way to make money. It takes time to build an audience on YouTube. And it takes dedication. You must commit to weekly uploads and ensure that your content is highly engaging. You must keep people’s attention and get them to watch as much of the video as possible. Because that’s an important ranking factor for your video.
You can monetize your videos on YouTube once you hit a certain threshold. Typically, you’ll need about 1,000 subscribers and 4,000 public watch hours in a year. You can also use YouTube shorts as a way to spur your channel’s growth. Plus, you can use YouTube to make money in other ways. You can use it to sell online courses, do affiliate marketing, promote digital products, membership sites, and more.
6. Digital Products
Another approach to making money is to create digital products. What kind of digital products can you create? The choices are limitless. The best digital products help people solve problems. Think about the problems people have in terms of graphic design and create a digital product that solves one of those problems.
Digital products can be sold day and night on autopilot. They’re typically sold through sales funnels. You can even create digital products quickly by using Private Label Rights (PLR) products. PLR allows you to sell other people’s products using a white-label approach. That means that you take something that’s already created and slap your branding on it and sell it as your own product.
PLR is one of the quickest ways to create digital products that make money in any industry or niche. For example, you can sell icon packs, UI elements or kits, Photoshop templates or actions, illustrations, vector art for logos, and more. There are many approaches you can take. Either way you approach it make sure that you create some sort of lead generation offer to help sell that digital product.
7. Freelancing
One way you can earn money is to simply do freelancing. Freelancing as a graphic designer is simple. That’s because there’s always a demand for good graphic design. All you need to do is get on one of the popular freelancing sites like Upwork or Freelancer and start bidding on projects. You’ll need to build up your profile and collect good feedback. That’ll happen over time. In the beginning, it will simply be a grind.
Freelancing is always a great way to make money. But it does limit you to your time. Since your time is limited, you should try to supplement any freelancing with other methods that allow you to disconnect your time from your ability to earn money. That’s where the real magic happens. Use your graphic designing skills to create great products that can be sold again and again.
You can also create a custom ecosystem for finding freelancing clients. You could build a sales funnel designed to accept applications from clients. We call this an application funnel. This way you flip the tables on the clients. It means that you’re vetting your clients and getting them to prove they’ll be the right fit to work with. This weeds out a lot of people when done the right way.
8. Theme Design
You can design themes and sell them in multiple marketplaces. Theme design is ideal for a graphic designer. It allows you to do the work once and get paid repeatedly. Again, this should be the aim. So if you’re good at designing themes, consider doing this. What kind of themes can you design? You can do WordPress themes, WebFlow templates, generic website themes, and more.
You can sell your themes on Envato, TemplateMonster, ThemeForest, and many other sites. It takes time to build up the ratings of a theme for sale. As long as the theme is good people will leave you great feedback. You can also find different ways to promote your themes to help spur initial sales and reviews. You can use paid ads, social media marketing, set up a sales funnel, do email marketing, find affiliates, and more.
Theme design doesn’t require a lot of work if you’re already an established graphic designer. However, some theme design and setup might require some light web development skills. You must understand how to put the theme together in a way that makes it simple for others to implement that theme. Aside from that, it’s very straightforward.