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!
