This thread is kind of a tangled mess of topics…
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I think the coroflot salary survey is skewed down - probably a lot - by what I assume are a majority of users being recent grads seeking work. Most of the experienced designers I know tend to have salaries above the 90th percentile (I think that’s the $75k line) in the coroflot bell curve, salaries which seem to be barely represented in the coroflot survey, unless no one stays in the field past 5-10 years. Since you can’t parse out the relationship between experience level and salary anyway, the survey data leans toward not useful. Salary.com seems to have a better data set, especially for higher levels of experience, and seems more reflective of what I have seen in real life. The salary numbers on coroflot’s survey are pretty horrifying if you take them as being representative of experienced designers’ salaries, and probably do result in designers sabotaging their own salaries.
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I think design schools often do students a disservice by not focusing on business skills - which are arguably more important than the traditional skillset - and too often focusing on idealistic nonprofity/vaporware stuff, judging by student portfolios. Our occupation exists pretty solely because big businesses need people to make their products appear or actually be more valuable than they are, which means higher margins on goods sold and a greater competitive moat, which means there is a ton of value in our work. When I see statements like one of the above posters suggesting they’d do the work for free out of passion for design (might have been on another thread) it’s kind of mind blowing. Really? You’d sit in an office for 8 hours a day sketching, building models, analyzing research, doing in home research, etc for free, so your client can make more money than their competitors, all for no financial gain? Instead of being in nature, being with a spouse or kids, seeing the world, which you can also not be paid for and is probably more rewarding? It’s mind blowing when you hear that kind of madness. Just mind blowing. We are lawyers with drawing skills, and not enough of us act like it. Passion has its place, though, like being passionate about getting a reasonable cut of the proceeds, and being passionate about not delivering a $50k solution for $25k. Designers need to be a lot more mercenary.
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Fiverr. Do crowdsploitation sites like Fiverr even influence reputable clients’ view of actual design professionals’ billable rates?