So what’s the down low on the situation with the graphic design industry and the economic climate we find ourselves in at the moment?

Personally for Truly Ace I’d say that although I’ve been busy as usual over the last 12 months (pretty much as busy as I have been over the last 6yrs) I feel that I’ve probably had to work harder than previous years to ensure that ‘busyness’. For instance in Spring of 2008 I experienced an extreme dip in workload (50% reduction in monthly projects won) and spent between Spring and Summer of that year working extensively on my search engine optimisation and literally doubled my already fairly high levels of website traffic in that period of time.

The double traffic probably helped to establish work flow back to normal levels, yet for years I’d been tinkering along with much lower search engine traffic for the same amount of project work. Hence I deduce that yes I’ve had to work harder over the last 12mths to win sufficient projects to keep me busy all year. I suspect if I’d had this level of traffic two years ago I’d be literally swamped in a sea of project work.

The ideal of course is that when the economy improves that I’ll be flooded with loads of lovely work as a result of my improved search engine placement over the last 12months (which I’ve been pretty much maintaining since). I’m putting measures in place right now so that I will be able to cope if that happens.

I’ve asked around my graphic designer friends and many of them have said that they’ve definitely experienced a lull over the last year, but everyone I know is ‘hanging in there’ still. I’m not sure if they’ve managed to keep an even keel as I have by working harder (or cleverer?) or whether they are struggling more than myself, obviously one cannot dig too deep into their personal situation! (Nosey much?)

What’s been said in the design community about the economy?

1. Esteemed design blogger David Airey describes in his popular blog in November 2008 how he’s surviving the economic climate well so far and offers a nice summary and links from other bloggers on the subject.

2. AIGA the professional association for design published an article at the end of 2008 which predicts that the next two years will be tough for designers.
Their suggestions for maintaining a competitive advantage during challenging conditions include professional development to increase one’s skillset, maintaining one’s networking contacts, and developing one’s design practice.
Unfortunately as the article is about how ‘AIGA can help designers survive the recession’, the article is pretty biased towards their offerings. None the less, you may find it a useful resource.

3. Out in the design community a group of designers at a Graphic Design Forum describe how they have or have not been affected by the recession. One designer describes how in her office 8 staff have been cut and the rest have had to take a pay cut. Ouch.

Personally my own recommendations for making it through the economic climate include:
1. Work harder on your marketing activity. During good times most established designers don’t even need to do that much marketing and probably rely heavily on word of mouth and repeat business. Well now you probably do have to.

2. Talking of repeat business. Get in touch with your previous lapsed clients and existing clients. They most cost effective marketing is to existing customers who are far more likely to buy again if happy the first time around compared to the time and effort required to convince a fresh customer to purchase.

3. Up-sell and cross-sell at every opportunity. You liked your logo? Great, surely now you must need business cards, stationery. In fact sir/madam perhaps it’s a good time to think about a marketing campaign and I have some great suggestions for you. Want me to print all that as well? Get my drift?

4. AIGA are right. What other skills or services can you acquire that you can also sell? The more you have to sell, the more people you can sell to? Niche marketing/niche services are great, but in this climate it might serve you better to offer ‘more’ rather than less. If you are struggling, it’s worth a try anyway.

5. Encourage bulk purchase. Try to maximise the value of every single project so that you get a higher transaction value per customer acquired. That’s pretty much part of the concept of up-sell and cross-sell, but when up-selling and cross-selling focus on offering discounts and incentives for bulk purchase to encourage that further.

Bulk purchasing at a discount helps your customers to acquire services for less than they would normally pay for them (ie, helps them in this economy also) at the same time as allowing you to offer services at a lower price without compromising profits because you are increasing your transactional value per customer.

More administration time (because of a high volume of customers per £xxx) = less profits. Hopefully I’m making myself clear about how a higher transactional value per customer allows you to reduce prices without reducing profits! If I’m not, feel free to get in touch

This entry was posted on Thursday, March 26th, 2009 at 9:58 pm and is filed under General Musings On Life, Thoughts on Design. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.