AIGA and Google release results from inaugural Design Census

Over the last 10 years, the American Institute of Graphic Arts (AIGA) has regularly surveyed designers about their salary, job title, company type, size and location. While the survey was a welcome dose of transparency into an industry with so varied career paths, it wasn’t very useful in understanding what makes designers tick.

This time, AIGA teamed up with Google to expand on the survey and reveal a more holistic picture of designers. The aim was to understand the broader economic, social, and cultural factors shaping designers today. Most importantly, they hope to get “real information into the hands of designers, policy makers, the media, and anyone interested in arming themselves with facts that can affect real change – personally, professionally, in the community, and in the wider world.”

A total of 9,602 designers participated in the survey, which, for the first time, was opened to people around the world. The new and diverse questions covered topics such as job satisfaction, commute time, coffee consumption, and even sexual orientation, in an effort to better understand the design community.

The organisers have posted the raw, unfiltered survey results and encouraged people to explore it, react to it, and share it. Visualisations of the data have also been posted in an online gallery.

“Hopefully the possibilities for comparative analysis will enable people to make more informed choices about their life and work,” says Amber Bravo, editorial and content strategy for Google Design. “It will help educators know where the jobs are and the skills that the next generation will need to be prepared for, and it will let us rally around our industry collectively as advocates for growth and change.”