Designers are everywhere!

Published August 19, 2008 by Mathew Patterson

A little while back I posted a poll that asked 'Who do you design for?'. The idea was to find out whether you were mostly freelancers, design company owners or employees, inhouse designers or something else.

We've had over 300 responses covering all areas of design, and we wanted to let you know how the votes have played out.

Who do you design for?

	Votes	%
Run my own design company	81	25%
Freelancer designer	49	15%
Inhouse designer for a web/software company	45	14%
Inhouse designer for a non-web company	42	13%
Designer for a marketing agency	34	10%
Designer on the side, not my main job	32	10%
Work for a pure design agency	16	5%
Other	14	4%
Designer for an educational institution	12	4%
Designer for a government body	4	1%

Clearly the dominant group is designers running their own companies. 25% of you are in that position, which is fantastic.

One interesting piece of information is that the responses were heavily skewed towards owners and freelancers when the poll first went live. However, after we mentioned the poll in our newsletter, we had a big jump in the number of inhouse designers.

Perhaps inhouse designers are less likely to spend time on the blog? Inhouse designers (at web and non-web companies combined) make up slightly more than a quarter of respondents.

Designers in marketing agencies, and 'on-the-side' designers make up the other big groups. So what can we learn from this?

For one thing, clearly design is being integrated into all forms of business, so the opportunities for designers to work in a variety of areas are huge. On the other side, Campaign Monitor customers seem highly likely to be business owners as well as designers, which is a whole other area of expertise.

So we'd love your feedback on this: Should the Campaign Monitor blog stick to the technical side of HTML emails? Should we include more content of general interest to web designers?

Don't worry, Campaign Monitor will always be the place for in depth research and guidance, but our ultimate aim is to help designers build their businesses. If we can do that in other ways, let us know!

Don't forget that we also blog (sporadically!) over at Freshview about the company, and we could perhaps talk more about business on that blog.

Thanks to everyone who took the poll, we appreciate your time, and please do leave us a comment!

8 Comments

Posted in: Observations & Answers

8 Comments

Dean
August 19, 2008 7:00pm

I have a very long blog list that I skim through every morning covering the whole gamut of website development (and shopping bargains!) so I would prefer you to stick to the email side of things which is what I consider to be your area of expertise.

More general content should be covered at your Freshview blog (which is not in my list, I’’m afraid!!).
Soeren Sprogoe
August 19, 2008 7:33pm

Definitely stick to writing about the technical stuff, remain focused!

Remember that, like Dean, most of us track several blogs. And if one blog starts to branch out into other areas, it starts competing with those other blogs. And you often loose either some relevancy or quality when going for broader topics, instead of focusing on a niche and being the master of it.
Mathew Patterson
August 19, 2008 7:50pm

Thanks for the feedback guys, that’s the direction I expected so far!
Wayde Christie
August 19, 2008 7:52pm

Perhaps the odd article on email *design* might be of benefit. It’s pretty hard to find info on that subject.

Other than that, I completely agree with everyone else - stick to what you’re good at!
susan
August 20, 2008 4:41am

I was introduced to your blog as a freelancer when HTML email was a good part of my business. I just took a job at an agency as an interactive designer and still have an RSS feed to your blog since I’m the main email person here.

My vote is that you keep covering HTML email, especially the technical side. You’re the best resource out there and we need you! I also think email design is so different from web design that you should keep the gallery up as well (although, I have to say, a lot of the emails in the gallery would be shot down by larger corporate clients who have specific specs, ie no inline css).
Abby Larsen
August 20, 2008 6:14am

Here’s another vote for technical. I’d be curious to know how many folks who follow this blog are content creators as well as designers/developers. In my case, I implement the content but rarely create it. I just make it pretty and make it work. Your keeping content “regular” post, for example, would be useful for clients (I seriously thought about forwarding it) but not directly useful to me.
Jason
August 21, 2008 8:37am

I like the balance of design and tech. Its good to be informed on all fronts, especially since each side has an impact on the other.
Morley
September 27, 2008 7:27am

I agree with Soeren for the most part, with the small exception that I think you should blog more about ninjas.

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