Problems that face graphic designers

While the graphic design industry is lucrative, graphic designers often complain that their profession is misunderstood and sometimes not respected by uninformed clients. They complain that many clients don’t know what designing entails.

They feel that companies that use them as service providers for design don’t understand them. People don’t understand what they are selling.

One of the things graphic designers moan and complain about is “free pitching”.

Free pitching refers to a tendering or bidding process where potential design service providers tender for a design job after an invitation of tenders by another company. This is not ideal for independent designers and design companies.

They complain that free pitching forces them to invest time and resource on something that has no guarantee of securing an account.

An account in the graphic design industry refers to a contract that gets awarded to a successful design company to do certain jobs for a client.

Many designers complain that the amount of work, resources involved in making or putting together a pitch/tender can be crippling to small companies. This puts small businesses at disadvantage as they don’t have enough money to spend on preparing tenders.

They also complain that sometimes briefs are unclear and clients become reluctant to pay at the end of the job - basing their reluctance on a misunderstood brief when it is actually the client’s fault that brief was misunderstood.

Others complain and suspect that sometimes tenders are invited even when the service buyer has already appointed an agency or service provider. In this way their pitching just becomes a formality.

Some big and well established designers and design companies usually don’t fall for this. Even when they do, they only submit credentials and their previous samples.