I have been a graphic designer for over 25 years. At 42 years of age that is over half my life spent as a low-paid graphic designer.
I work in illustration, digital painting and photo manipulation, logo design, ad design, and page layout. I have done branding, business cards, magazines, web design, animation, 3D modeling, 3D animation, and now 3D printing. I have designed and cut for vinyl products of all kinds. I have designed for clothing and promotional items (screen printing, vinyl, sublimation, embroidery). I have also made these products from the actual design all the way to the finished item. I have designed car wraps. I have created graphics for all manner of presses and done the prepress work. I have run digital presses and have personally printed thousands of jobs from medical forms, business cards, rack cards, marketing materials, all the way up to full color magazines that are bound at the press. I have designed for all manner of substrates from thermal paper all the way to polycarbonates. Spot and CMYK colors.
I love drawing comic book art and creating art and products using comic book art and retro video game graphics.
I have designed for Fortune 500 companies in industries from healthcare, financial, manufacturing, agriculture, etc. for 14 years of my career.
Not only can I make the pretty pictures, I can make sure they output to a final product every step of the way, no matter what. I have solved countless prepress problems and post script errors with no reasonable solution but somehow made it work to make my employers and ultimately my customers happy. I have a history of figuring things out.
I know I’m not the best designer ever. Art and design are very subjective. I have fallen into ruts where several ads all hit the same “notes” but in different melody so to speak. Very similar, but different content. It happens to all designers from time to time. I would be an arrogant fool to claim “I’m the best” because I learn new things everyday so there is always room for improvement of one’s self and your skills. I have designed many things in my decades of work that I was unhappy with the final product. Sometimes you’re hearts not in it or it’s just mediocre. But I am very good at what I do.
I now have a large laser cutter so I am engraving and cutting a ton of things in different media. I have been working to get my own business off the ground in recent weeks so can finally get paid what I’m worth and be my own boss. I have never cracked even $19 an hour despite my years of experience and the wide range of talent in various media. My skills are worthless in terms of money.
I learn how to design and create in so many different media because I just like creating things. It’s also a very valuable to have so many skills as an employee until you realize they don’t want to pay you for that skill. These same skills that have saved my employer’s ass again and again aren’t worth much apparently.
I was a Kentucky Press Association multi-award winning designer who has been working for an independently owned newspaper for about 1.5 years.
Until today. I was let go. My second lay off in my career.
I was told it was due to “financial reasons” which no doubt did play a role. But I feel as though a letter I wrote standing up for myself led to my termination.
My employer had a private conversation with me several weeks ago and basically said we were laying off my fellow designer because “we don’t need two” with revenue being down. This designer had been working virtually for a few months and the owner doesn’t like that so that was her reason. She also asked me if I can do the design work for both of us even though there were no raises coming through. I told her “of course” because I have had that kind of workload in my career. I’m not scared of work, but compensate me for it. I also said that doing all this work with the added stress for no increase in pay would have to be addressed. I couldn’t even get the empty office as a perk (empty for 2 months!). My fellow designer and I design for the newspaper but the publisher also puts out several full color magazines per year. It would’ve been a tremendous amount of work, but if I were left alone I could get it done. At $15 an hour with overtime not allowed, even after laying off my friend and fellow coworker? You’re crazy.
I was directed not to tell my coworker because it was a confidential conversation. So now I had all of this hanging over my head. Even though I was keeping my job (which was great, I guess?), I knew my friend would lose hers soon. We just didn’t know when. I also knew of all the work that was coming my way and there would be no increase in pay. I had no health insurance or retirement at this place, so the low pay was close to the earnings at my previous employer (where I did have benefits).
It’s really difficult coming to work when you aren’t appreciated or valuable enough for a raise despite your exemplary performance. I get it on one level. If the money isn’t there, it just isn’t there. It happened at another employer years earlier. We had no raises for years despite the C-Level employees getting bonuses and raises. That is what this felt like.
I was a little bitter. I didn’t treat my coworkers poorly, but I’m sure everyone could tell that my heart wasn’t there anymore. I was grumpy and for good reason.
One day last week, myself and the other designer were tasked with detailing our work days over the previous 2 weeks. No one else in the office was asked to do this. We had to basically write down everything we did, everyday. I work in a galley that serves as a hallway from the front of the office to the back of the office. I have no cubicle or privacy, basically a desk built into the wall whose screen faces this hallway. My chair is always in the line of traffic. Everything I do on my PC is visible for everyone to see. I put up with every conversation and loud phone call as distractions. No one should have any doubt about what I do especially because they always had good results on time from me. Whatever they needed, I just designed it. My peer was just as dedicated and did great work as well.
I had never been asked to do that by any employer. I was insulted. I have worked in both a corporate environment and at mom and pops shops and that has never been asked of me. So I politely and professionally expressed my insult. I detailed everything I did over the entire month, week by week (we publish our newspaper once per week) as best as I could. I forensically broke down my time and inserted all the interruptions that had nothing to do with my job. Searched my extensive notes to account for my time. I also noted all the time I searched for assets for designs, created new assets, and searched for inspiration. I included all the times that I had to design something for myself to knock the cobwebs out and find a solution to a design problem that had me stuck. I copied and pasted the repetitive things again and again because I wanted my employer angry that they wasted my time and hers. It took 5 hours to reconstruct all that time.
I told her that I felt very unappreciated. I also did not think it was very professional to ask anyone, let alone a professional like myself with absolute candor, to justify their job. I’ll tell you if I’m not doing company work. I will tell you if I am just “dicking around”. I’ll call myself out on my short comings when it happens. I’m not afraid of being honest and to hold myself accountable for my mistakes and actions. That’s just how I am. And it was very unprofessional to tell me that my colleague would be losing her job “sometime” but then ask me not to say anything to her. I should have never known about her fate until it happened.
Cut to today.
I was out of the office on Friday with a stomach bug. We can work from home, but I was not going to deal with work when I felt this sick. I would not be rushing to get work done between bathroom visits. I had nothing pending. I stayed home on Monday because my 8 year old caught the same stomach bug and thanks to that there was now an abundant amount of laundry to wash. Plus I wanted to be there for my kid. I did not technically work on Monday, but I also logged on to help my colleague sort out a few things since she was covering for me.
This morning my manager comes in, asks me how I felt, how my son was feeling, and to see me in her office (all in one sentence). She was upset so I knew that something was up. I figured since I rarely miss an actual day of work, they needed me to get back to my normal schedule. Wasn’t expecting the lay off.
I’m not mad at my manager or my coworkers. As much as I was unhappy with my financial situation and how things were run in the office, I did like the laid back environment. We were a tight crew. They were all great and I will miss them. I believe in the integrity and the unbiased office as we put out a good newspaper even though we were a “liberal rag” that actually had several vocal conservatives on staff.
I have zero respect for my boss. She is so revered in the community by so many yet reviled by others. I don’t think she is a monster by any means. She can be very nice and thoughtful. But she was also the type to have a graphic designer draw up plans for her to save paying a surveyor or engineer $5,000 (she would just pay us our $15 hourly rate). Anything to save a buck. I guess that’s how successful people become successful, right? Just exploit for profit. I understand that it’s “just business”. But if you won’t let us change things up and get your ego out of the way, it’s no wonder the newspaper was doing worse. So many people and businesses would not advertise due to my boss owning the damn thing. These people have history with my former boss and whether justified or not it was to our detriment as a company. We were also losing a major magazine that we published this summer due to her ego and the bad blood with another organization. This was causing us to loose advertisers for the magazines AND the newspaper. Small towns are like that.
I may also be wrong in my assessment of my now former boss. Maybe I am just hurt and I’m lashing out? Maybe she struggled with this decision? But I feel she was not used to a peon speaking their mind and standing up for themselves (no one ever does stand up to her) so she swung the executioner’s axe my way instead of at my colleague’s neck. SHE was insulted that I stood up for myself, which was basically the first time in my career.
I’m a people pleaser, always to my detriment. Which is why I have been in entry level wages my whole career.
The funny thing is my colleague knows about her potential lay off and has been interviewing for better creative jobs for much greater pay (and virtual work). As much as I don’t want hardship for my former coworkers, I kind of can’t wait to see what happens when she finds a better job and leaves them with ZERO graphic designers. We took that newspaper from the 90’s to present day with our design work.
That place will fold this year. 140 years of publication gone because of some old business woman with a huge yet fragile ego. If she were a man, I would be saying the same things. I hate to see that newspaper go under, but I can’t wait to see the shit-show as it happens.
I apologize for the rant and appreciate anyone who read the whole thing. Time to work on my website and get more designs ready for the laser…