As a senior graphic designer, you are in charge of all design operations in the company. It is your duty not just to function as a graphic designer but to head the design team and mentor other junior graphic designers. A large part of your responsibility includes generating fresh concepts for every project, managing the design process from conceptualization to delivery, and overseeing the collaboration between your team and other teams like the marketing and sales team to ensure quality delivery. It is your job to ensure that deadlines are met and that the clients are completely satisfied.
To work as a senior graphic designer, you must have a minimum qualification of a bachelor's degree in graphic design, design and visual communications, or other related fields. An eye for detail, proficiency in tools like adobe creative suite, ability to generate creative ideas, and great communication skills are needed to function as a good senior graphic designer.
The average senior graphic designer makes about $$33.69 an hour and $70,085 a year.
How to Become a Senior Graphic Designer
There is more than meets the eye when it comes to being a senior graphic designer. For example, did you know that they make an average of $33.2 an hour? That's $69,057 a year!
Between 2018 and 2028, the career is expected to grow 3% and produce 8,800 job opportunities across the U.S.
What Does a Senior Graphic Designer Do
There are certain skills that many senior graphic designers have in order to accomplish their responsibilities. By taking a look through resumes, we were able to narrow down the most common skills for a person in this position. We discovered that a lot of resumes listed analytical skills, artistic ability and communication skills.
How To Become a Senior Graphic Designer
If you're interested in becoming a senior graphic designer, one of the first things to consider is how much education you need. We've determined that 72.5% of senior graphic designers have a bachelor's degree. In terms of higher education levels, we found that 4.1% of senior graphic designers have master's degrees. Even though most senior graphic designers have a college degree, it's possible to become one with only a high school degree or GED.
Choosing the right major is always an important step when researching how to become a senior graphic designer. When we researched the most common majors for a senior graphic designer, we found that they most commonly earn bachelor's degree degrees or associate degree degrees. Other degrees that we often see on senior graphic designer resumes include master's degree degrees or diploma degrees.
You may find that experience in other jobs will help you become a senior graphic designer. In fact, many senior graphic designer jobs require experience in a role such as graphic designer. Meanwhile, many senior graphic designers also have previous career experience in roles such as art director or graphic artist.
Senior Graphic Designer Career Paths
In addition to switching up your job search, it might prove helpful to look at a career path for your specific job. Now, what's a career path you ask? Well, it's practically a map that shows how you might advance from one job title to another. Our career paths are especially detailed with salary changes. So, for example, if you started out with the role of art director you might progress to a role such as creative director eventually. Later on in your career, you could end up with the title director of communications and marketing.
Average Salary for a Senior Graphic Designer
What Am I Worth?
Top Colleges for Senior Graphic Designers
1. University of Pennsylvania
Philadelphia, PA • Private
2. Carnegie Mellon University
Pittsburgh, PA • Private
3. University of Southern California
Los Angeles, CA • Private
4. Harvard University
Cambridge, MA • Private
5. Duke University
Durham, NC • Private
6. Northeastern University
Boston, MA • Private
7. New York University
New York, NY • Private
8. Boston University
Boston, MA • Private
9. Northwestern University
Evanston, IL • Private
10. University of Michigan - Ann Arbor
Ann Arbor, MI • Private
Top Skills For a Senior Graphic Designer
The skills section on your resume can be almost as important as the experience section, so you want it to be an accurate portrayal of what you can do. Luckily, we've found all of the skills you'll need so even if you don't have these skills yet, you know what you need to work on. Out of all the resumes we looked through, 9.2% of senior graphic designers listed adobe creative suite on their resume, but soft skills such as analytical skills and artistic ability are important as well.
Choose From 10+ Customizable Senior Graphic Designer Resume templates
Zippia allows you to choose from different easy-to-use Senior Graphic Designer templates, and provides you with expert advice. Using the templates, you can rest assured that the structure and format of your Senior Graphic Designer resume is top notch. Choose a template with the colors, fonts & text sizes that are appropriate for your industry.
Senior Graphic Designer Demographics
Senior Graphic Designer Gender Distribution
After extensive research and analysis, Zippia's data science team found that:
- Among senior graphic designers, 46.8% of them are women, while 53.2% are men.
- The most common race/ethnicity among senior graphic designers is White, which makes up 76.1% of all senior graphic designers.
- The most common foreign language among senior graphic designers is Spanish at 48.4%.
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Best States For a Senior Graphic Designer
Some places are better than others when it comes to starting a career as a senior graphic designer. The best states for people in this position are Washington, California, Alaska, and New York. Senior graphic designers make the most in Washington with an average salary of $94,690. Whereas in California and Alaska, they would average $81,987 and $80,312, respectively. While senior graphic designers would only make an average of $79,627 in New York, you would still make more there than in the rest of the country. We determined these as the best states based on job availability and pay. By finding the median salary, cost of living, and using the Bureau of Labor Statistics' Location Quotient, we narrowed down our list of states to these four.
1. Washington
$94,690
Avg. Salary
2. District of Columbia
$92,635
Avg. Salary
3. New York
$79,627
Avg. Salary
How Do Senior Graphic Designer Rate Their Jobs?
Top Senior Graphic Designer Employers
We've made finding a great employer to work for easy by doing the hard work for you. We looked into employers that employ senior graphic designers and discovered their number of senior graphic designer opportunities and average salary. Through our research, we concluded that CBRE Group was the best, especially with an average salary of $75,248. Robert Half follows up with an average salary of $74,167, and then comes Aquent with an average of $91,962. In addition, we know most people would rather work from home. So instead of having to change careers, we identified the best employers for remote work as a senior graphic designer. The employers include Broadridge, Cree, and Verizon Communications
Most Common Employers For Senior Graphic Designer
| Rank  | Company  | Average Salary  | Hourly Rate  | Job Openings  |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Aquent | $91,962 | $44.21 | 25 |
| 2 | Abercrombie & Fitch Co | $84,755 | $40.75 | 20 |
| 3 | Lockheed Martin | $84,544 | $40.65 | 16 |
| 4 | Fastsigns International | $81,869 | $39.36 | 12 |
| 5 | Hasbro | $81,179 | $39.03 | 19 |
| 6 | Computer Science Corporation | $78,977 | $37.97 | 15 |
| 7 | CBRE Group | $75,248 | $36.18 | 70 |
| 8 | General Dynamics | $75,046 | $36.08 | 12 |
| 9 | Minuteman Press | $74,914 | $36.02 | 15 |
| 10 | Parigi Group | $74,880 | $36.00 | 11 |
Becoming a Senior Graphic Designer FAQs
How long does it take to become a senior graphic designer?
It takes three to five years of work experience to become a senior graphic designer. A person can start a career in graphic design either by learning graphic design principles themselves or by enrolling in a graphic design course.
How much does a senior graphic designer charge per hour?
A senior graphic designer will charge about $50 an hour, on average. This means the average salary for freelance senior graphic designers is around $100,000 in a year.
However, it can be difficult to estimate salaries for freelance or crowdsource senior graphic designers because they get paid job to job rather than a set salary. There are many variables, such as time input versus output and opportunity.
Is graphic design a dying career?
No, graphic design is not a dying career. However, it is a rapidly changing industry that will require significant upskilling to keep up with the changes.
The biggest area of growth in graphic design is in digital graphic design. As businesses transition from print advertising and publishing to digital and online marketing, this will increase.
What can I do after being a senior graphic designer?
There are many roles a person can move into after being a senior graphic designer, including the art director and UX designer.
Since graphic design is a rapidly changing industry, there are numerous opportunities for graphic designers to pivot in their careers, but this does require significant upskilling to keep up with the changes.
What do you need to be a senior designer?
You need the right educational background, extensive work portfolio, and several years of work experience to become a senior designer.
Most senior designers have a bachelor's degree and design or related fields. From there, prospective senior designers will need to put in at least five to eight years working as a designer. Usually, this is the time it takes to advance from a junior designer position into a mid-level designer and finally to a senior designer position.