What Graphic Design Is Actually Like

What does your company make, and what does your job actually cover?

We make cleaning products. Nothing glamorous. Dish soap, all-purpose spray, that kind of thing. Household stuff that sits in the cleaning aisle at grocery stores. I'm one of two designers on the brand team, and the other designer, a guy named Patrick, focuses mostly on digital stuff like social assets and email. My territory is packaging, print, and anything that shows up on a physical product or shelf. So, labels, secondary packaging, promotional displays, the little cards that hang in the cleaning aisle on a metal strip. Those are mine.

The way I think about it, my job is basically: take the brand guidelines we have, figure out how a given piece needs to work in context, and execute it accurately enough to go through legal, marketing, and supply chain review without getting kicked back more than once. That sounds administrative and honestly sometimes it is. Brand guidelines at a company like ours are really specific. There's a whole document, 47 pages, that tells me exactly which shade of teal goes on which product line, where the logo lives on each packaging format, what the minimum font sizes are for ingredient lists. A lot of my day is working inside that document, not around it.

What does a day during a product launch look like?

We're in the middle of one right now. It's a new scent variant for our dish soap line, lemon verbena, and it's supposed to hit shelves in June. The packaging needs to be finalized by April 15th so it can go to print. That timeline sounds comfortable but it's not, because the packaging has to be approved by four separate people before it goes to print. There's my manager Dana, who handles brand. There's the product manager Ravi, who cares about the claims on the back of the bottle. There's legal, specifically a woman named Tracy who reviews all the regulatory language. And there's the VP of marketing, a person named Greg, who has final say on everything and whose feedback tends to arrive at the last possible moment.

This week I sent the first round of packaging to Dana on Monday. She had notes by Wednesday. Most of them were small, specific things: the product name font was 0.5pt too small on the 12oz bottle variant, the "new scent" callout was too close to the cap line for the production team's comfort, and Greg apparently had mentioned in a meeting that he wanted the lemon verbena illustration to feel "more artisanal," which is, I mean, fine, but that's a style direction that doesn't come with a reference image so I spent Thursday morning pulling comp images of artisanal lemon illustration styles and making a quick mood board just to confirm what we were actually talking about before I spent three hours redrawing it.

That mood board thing is a move I learned from a friend who works at a packaging design studio. She said: never execute on vague feedback without getting the client to point at something. Because "artisanal" to one person is hand-lettered with watercolor textures. To another person it's just a different font weight. Getting aligned on references before you do the work saves you a full revision cycle. I did the mood board, Dana confirmed the direction, and now I know what I'm drawing. That's a half-day saved.

What's the part of the job you didn't expect?

How much time I spend making sure files are correct rather than making things look good. Like, probably 30% of my week is file prep, versioning, and supply chain documentation. When we launch a new product or a variant, I'm responsible for submitting print-ready files to our packaging vendor with the right color profiles, die lines, and bleed settings. If anything is wrong in those files, even a small thing, it can hold up production or cause a reprint. Our packaging vendor, a company out of Columbus, has a prepress checklist that's three pages long. I go through it every time. My predecessor apparently didn't always, and there were two instances in 2024 where packaging had to be reprinted because of file errors. I'm not going to be the person who causes a reprint.

So I'm organized in a way that maybe a designer at a studio doesn't have to be. I have a folder structure for every SKU, version control naming conventions, a master log of what's been submitted and approved and when. Patrick thinks I'm obsessive about it. I think I'm just avoiding a $40,000 production error.

Is there a moment from this job you remember clearly?

Yeah. November of my first year. We launched a bathroom cleaner line, and it was the first project I was lead on from start to finish. I'd been here maybe eight months. It was a simple brief, just a new scent for an existing product, but I owned the whole design process, the label, the secondary box, the shelf display header. And then one Tuesday I was running errands and I walked into a Kroger on my street and there it was, on the shelf, between two other brands I'd been buying since college. My design. On a physical bottle. In the world.

I took a photo and then I didn't know what to do. I sent it to my mom. I didn't post it anywhere, I just kind of walked around the store for a while and then went home. It sounds silly to describe it but it's the thing that makes the revision cycles worth it. Like, I made a thing that exists. It's not a file on a server, it's a bottle of bathroom cleaner in a Kroger. People picked it up. People bought it. They have it under their sink right now. I think about that on the weeks when my job feels like nothing but commenting on PDFs in Workfront.

What's yours?

How invisible the good work is. When the packaging is right, nobody notices it. The product just sells. Nobody in a marketing meeting says "great job on the hierarchy, the eye flow to the scent callout was really effective." They notice when something's wrong, when the label peels weirdly or the color looks off in fluorescent light. The craft of making something that disappears into a shelf and still does its job, that's a specific skill that my colleagues in product and marketing don't really have a language for. I've had people compliment the illustration on the lemon verbena packaging, which is nice, but the illustration is maybe 15% of why the design works. The hierarchy, the negative space, the type sizing on the claims, that's the other 85%. And nobody sees that. I sometimes show Patrick a layout and he'll go "oh yeah that's clean" and then talk about something else. He means it as a compliment. It's just not the same as someone actually seeing the thing you did.

You spent seven years in agency print production before freelancing. What made you leave?

The ceiling. I was doing production work, which means I was taking designs that other people created and making them print-ready. Cleaning up files, setting up specs, talking to vendors, catching errors. It's important work, someone has to do it well, but I kept being passed over for anything titled "designer" because my job title was "production artist." Even though I was doing design work on the side, even though my portfolio was strong, the internal perception was that I was a technician, not a creative. My manager at the time, a person named Hector, was genuinely trying to help me but he'd tell me things like "we need someone with more concept experience" and I'd think: I've been watching concepts get developed here for seven years, I know where every concept fails before they start drawing.

So I left. I gave three months notice, built up a small client base during that period, and started freelancing when I was 32. The first year was very lean. I made $48,000. The second year was $67,000. Last year was $104,000. I'm not saying that to brag, I'm saying it because when people ask whether the jump was worth it, the money is part of the answer, and the money took three years to get good.

What does your client list look like now?

About 60% of my work comes from three recurring clients. One is a small Portland restaurant group, family-run, they own four spots in the city. I do their menus, their social graphics, occasional signage, and whatever one-off things come up. My contact there is a woman named Dani who is the operations director and who communicates almost entirely in voice memos. The second is a regional outdoor apparel brand, sort of outdoorsy, Portland-adjacent, catalog work and brand collateral. And the third is a nonprofit that does climate literacy education, I do their annual report, their event materials, and donor communications.

The other 40% is project work from new clients, mostly through referrals and through a couple of designer communities I'm in. That 40% is where I've learned the most about client management, because new clients are where scope creep actually lives. My regular clients know how I work. They send me a brief, I send back questions if something's unclear, I give a quote, they approve it, we have a project. New clients frequently arrive with a mental model of the project that doesn't match what they described in the brief, and discovering that gap is usually how a three-day project becomes a seven-day project.

How does scope creep actually happen?

OK so I had a project in January that's a good example. A small food brand out of Seattle, they needed a rebrand. New logo, new color system, new typography, applied to packaging for three products. They found me through a referral from Dani, which should have been a good sign. The brief was clear. The timeline was eight weeks. The quote was $8,400. They signed the contract.

Week three, I presented logo concepts. Three directions. They liked elements of direction two and elements of direction three and asked if I could "combine the best parts." Which, fine, that's normal feedback, I can work with that. I did a synthesis round. They approved the logo direction with two minor refinements. Then their founder, a man named Garrett, who had not been in the original briefing, joined the next call to "take a look." And Garrett had thoughts. Garrett felt the logo was "too modern" for their brand positioning. Not the synthesis logo, actually the original directions, all three of them, which were all different levels of modern. Garrett wanted something that felt "timeless and craft-oriented."

So I had a decision to make. I could go back to the drawing board, which was not in scope. I could push back and explain that the brief they gave me was modern and the logo I made reflects the brief. Or I could have a reset conversation about what "timeless and craft-oriented" actually means before anyone draws anything. I chose the reset conversation. I sent Garrett and the original client a one-page document recapping the approved brief and asking, specifically, whether the positioning had changed since we started. They came back and said yes, actually, their marketing person had done some research and they were pivoting slightly. So the brief changed. And a brief change is a scope change. I sent a revised quote for an additional $2,200. They approved it. The project ended up at $10,600 and finished two weeks late.

That's scope creep in real time. It wasn't malicious. Garrett wasn't trying to get more work out of me for free. The brand just changed direction mid-project. But without the contract and without the reset conversation, I would have done three more rounds of logos for free and resented them for it.

What's the hardest part of freelancing that isn't the work?

The dry spells. Not financially, I've built up enough of a cushion that a slow month doesn't panic me anymore. The psychological dry spells. The weeks when three projects finish, you send the invoices, and then you sit there and your inbox is quiet and you think: is this it? Is the pipeline empty? Usually something comes in within a week. But the gap between "I just finished a big project" and "I have a new big project" is where my brain goes to its worst place. My partner Yusuf has heard me describe this enough times that he now just says "pipeline dip" when I go quiet on a Sunday, and I say yes, and he makes me a coffee and doesn't ask follow-up questions. That helps more than it should.

The other thing is isolation. Agency work is loud. There are always people around, there's always someone to show a layout to and get an immediate reaction. Freelancing is quiet. I have my studio in our second bedroom. Some days I don't talk to another designer until 4 PM when I have a check-in call. I joined two online communities for freelance designers, one focused on identity work and one more general, and I go to a monthly co-working meetup at a coffee shop near the Pearl District. It helps. But it's not the same as having a team. I miss having a team more than I expected to when I left.

What's yours?

How much the work is about translation. Not just design, not just visual thinking, but translating what a client feels into something they can approve. My restaurant client Dani knows exactly what she wants. She just doesn't have design language for it. She'll send me a voice memo that says "I want the new menu to feel like a dinner party at my aunt's house in 1987." That's not a brief. That's a sensory memory. My job is to ask the right questions, figure out what that means in terms of typeface and color and paper weight and texture, and then make something that when she sees it, she goes "yes, that's it." Not because she can explain why, but because it matches something she already felt. When it works, it feels like mind-reading. When it doesn't, it feels like I'm designing in a foreign language.

What's the shape of agency design work that people don't see from the outside?

Context switching. I'm on four accounts right now. A regional bank, a mid-size hospital system, a consumer finance company, and a craft brewery that's trying to expand distribution nationally. Those four clients have almost nothing in common. Different brand guidelines, different audiences, different regulatory constraints, different taste in typography. On Tuesday I was writing a social media ad for the bank that had to pass through their compliance team, which means the language is audited against federal banking disclosure rules. On Wednesday I was designing a tap handle for the brewery, which is a physical object that needs to work at a 60-degree angle under bar lighting. These are not adjacent creative problems. You don't carry momentum from one to the other.

What I've learned to do is treat each account as a mode switch. I have a folder system where each client has their own space, their brand guidelines, their approved assets, their ongoing brief notes. Before I go to any account, I open their folder and spend five minutes reading context. It sounds obvious but a lot of designers skip this and then either accidentally bring the wrong aesthetic sensibility to a brief or miss a constraint they should have known about. One of our junior designers, a woman named Priya who started in January, was working on a hospital brochure and used a typeface that's technically not on their approved list but is extremely close to one that is. The client's brand manager noticed. Caught it before print, but that kind of thing costs time and erodes trust with a client you've spent months building.

What's a real day look like when an account is in active production?

The brewery is running a spring campaign launching April 1st. We have two weeks. The deliverables are a series of six social posts, a point-of-sale display for bars, and a print ad for a regional food and drink magazine called The Growler. The brief came from the account manager, a colleague named Felix. Felix is good at extracting what clients actually want, which is not the same skill as designing, but it means when his briefs come to me they're usually solvable.

The brief for this campaign says: spring, new seasonal release called Watershed Wheat, imagery should feel like the river, the brewery's taproom is near the Mississippi, they want a feeling of early April in Minnesota, which everyone here knows is not exactly paradise but is deeply felt. I spent about 90 minutes on Monday just looking. Not sketching, looking. At photography of early spring rivers, at wheat grain closeups, at how craft beer brands that feel earthy and regional have handled seasonal campaigns. I keep a swipe folder organized by mood, and I pulled everything tagged "earthy," "tactile," and "Pacific Northwest/Midwest outdoor." Then I sketched maybe fifteen rough directions on paper. Not in Illustrator, on paper. I went into software with five of those fifteen.

Yesterday I had three directions ready to show Felix internally before we present to the client. We do an internal review because my creative director, a man named Bernard, has a strong opinion about never showing a client a direction that hasn't been stress-tested by someone who isn't the designer. Bernard has a phrase he uses: "Can you defend every choice?" Not in an aggressive way, in a practical way. If the client asks why you chose that typeface, do you have an answer that connects to their brief? If they ask why the color is brown and not green, do you have a reason? He's right that clients feel more confident when you can articulate decisions. And I've gotten much better at it over eight years. I can tell you exactly why I set the headlines in a display slab and not a sans-serif, and that reason connects to the taproom aesthetic and the river photography and the history of mid-century regional beer advertising in the Midwest. Whether or not the client cares about that reasoning, having it makes the work stronger.

What happened when you showed Felix?

He liked direction two. He had one concern about the color palette, specifically that the deep ochre I was using might read "autumn" to some viewers even though we're aiming for spring. That's a legitimate note. I pulled up two versions with different warmth levels to show him side by side, and we landed on a cooler, greener ochre that reads more like early spring than late fall. That's a ten-minute conversation that improves the work. That's the good version of feedback. The client presentation is Friday.

You have an MFA in printmaking. How does that background show up in agency design work?

In ways that are hard to name. I spent four years in graduate school making physical things, etchings and relief prints and screenprints, where every mark is intentional and reversing it costs you an hour and a plate. You develop a really specific relationship to negative space and texture and the weight of a line that I don't think you get the same way from software. When I'm setting type in Illustrator, I'm making decisions that I trace back to thinking I developed standing at a press. I notice things about print quality and paper grain and how ink sits on a surface that my colleagues who came up digitally sometimes don't catch until they see the proof.

The downside is I spent four years getting an expensive degree that has zero direct utility on my resume. Nobody hiring agency designers cares about printmaking. I care about it. The work is better because of it. But I didn't go from MFA to senior designer on the strength of the degree. I went through five years of production work the same way a lot of people do. The MFA is in the folder labeled "personal history," not "credentials."

What's the ceiling in agency design?

In title? Senior designer, creative director, executive creative director. In practice, somewhere between senior and CD is where most people either leave or stay forever. I've been senior designer for three years. The CD role at my agency is held by Bernard, who is 54 and shows no signs of going anywhere. There's no associate CD structure below him. So the path forward for me is either lateral at another agency, freelance, or building something different. I've thought about freelancing. I've also thought about staying. The agency provides a structure I'm not sure I'd replace easily on my own. Steady clients, a production team, account managers who keep clients from calling me directly at 7 PM. Cleo, who went freelance, she's talked about the isolation. I believe her. Some of what I like about this job is that when I walk in, there are people here.

What's yours?

How often the best version of a design never ships. I have 34 files in a folder called "approved but wrong." These are designs that went through client review, got approved, went to production, and then six months later someone in the client's organization saw the thing in the world and decided it wasn't right. The work came back. Sometimes we revised it. Sometimes the campaign was already over and the client just made a note for next time. Those 34 files represent decisions that were made above my pay grade, or despite my recommendations, or just because the timeline forced a compromise. I keep them because forgetting them feels wrong. There's a billboard from 2023 for the hospital account that ran for four months with a headline I argued against in a briefing. It ran. It looked fine from the road. Nobody reading it knew it wasn't the right headline. But I knew. Bernard knew. Felix knew. We approved it anyway because the client's VP of marketing had family in the headline's target city and wanted the hometown connection. The work was fine. The right work would have been better. I don't know how to make peace with that ratio yet.