Graphic design is evolving into a very profitable landscape. If you want to make good money as a graphic designer, you should practice in a specific niche. As they say, the riches are in the niches in this article, we’re going to cover 5 of the most profitable graphic design niches that we can see on the horizon.
Why Choose Graphic Design Niches?
Niching down, or selecting the graphic design niches that you will work within, is a crucial decision that can set you up for exponential success… or a lot of disappointment. Why should you consider graphic design niches, anyway? Niches help you target clients more selectively and give you a set of services to provide with an easily accessible industry scale.
There are many things to consider when choosing a niche and today, we’ll be focusing on 3 key factors: your skillset & passions, what’s popular right now, and how competitive it will be. Once you’ve got a good understanding of those things, it’ll be much easier for you to make an informed decision about which niche is the best choice for you and your business!
Introduction to Graphic Design Niches
My creative pros say that the riches are in the niches, and the graphic design industry is huge. There are so many different types of things that you can do in the graphic design niche, from billboards to print design to web design. All this great stuff is fine and dandy, but what’s important is that you find a specialty and find a niche in something that you can become well known in. So today, I’m going to talk about the five creative niches that you can get into as a creative. Whether you’re a web designer or graphic designer, or maybe you’re both, you can make massive profits.
What to Consider When Choosing Graphic Design Niches
For now, something important to note is that I’m basing these five niches on three core things: number one is demand – there needs to be a demand for what you’re selling if there’s no demand, it’s going to be hard to get it out there. If there are no people looking for it, it’ll make things challenging. So that’s the first thing I’m using to consider when picking these niches.
The second thing is how easy it is to create content for them. A lot of these different things that I’m going to talk about are very easy to create. It doesn’t take a lot of time or work, so you can create a lot of quantity and make up for the quality. Essentially, the amount of time you have to invest in volume is something that’s really important again as number two.
The third consideration is profit. When you’re doing design work and ensuring that there’s a sufficient spread on these, you need to be able to make a decent profit; otherwise, you won’t be able to maintain your business for long. These are the three things I want you to think about when I select these five graphic design niches.
5 Most Profitable Graphic Design Niches
For this article, I’ll be focusing on the five most profitable niches that we see in graphic design. Logo design, sales funnels, gaming,
Logo Design
The first of the graphic design niches that are great for creatives is logo design. Now, this is something I’ve been doing since the very beginning. This is actually where I started. I started doing nightlife flyers and logo design. Nightlife flyers can be a niche but right now I think that it’s not the pro there’s not enough profit in it and it requires a lot of work and it’s just really intensive so I want to focus on the logo design side of things. I think logo design is a great niche.
If you can develop great systems and processes, like I’ve been teaching here on channels for a long time, and walk your clients through them, you can make anywhere from $5,000 to $15,000 or more on a logo design. I typically charge anywhere between $5,000 and $15,000 for not just a logo, but also a brand designer rebrand or a new brand. This is just what I charge because I have a lot of profit in that, and there are always new businesses wanting to create new brands, as well as existing businesses wanting to give their brands a facelift.
We are currently going through a rebranding phase for our company and YouTube channel. We are no longer going to be called Adrian Agency, but Adrian Agency (more info on that to come later). So it’s time to go back to the drawing board and start looking at our branding for Adrian Agency. We will be revisiting our rebranding efforts along with some of our YouTube content. So there’s going to be a lot of changes coming and a lot of companies dedicate a lot of money to their branding, which is why logo design is a very good niche. That’s why I made it number one.
Sales Funnels
The second of these graphic design niches that I want you to think about is something that I would highly consider if I were to go back and start all over again. This is probably one of the first things I would focus on because there’s such a huge demand and the profit potential is so huge. And I just love the industry – that is sales funnels or click funnels. Clickfunnels is a trendy word, and funnels is a common term now that is used for websites. But essentially, what it does is it brings somebody who doesn’t know you from an ad, from a podcast, from somewhere online or offline, to this landing page. And you walk them through an experience – just like when you go into a restaurant. There’s an experience from meeting the hostess and putting your name in to getting a table and finally getting your food.
It’s the same thing online, from that first initial greeting to talking about what you do, what are the values and benefits that you offer to your audience, to obviously buying the initial offer that you have, which could be a low ticket offer or a high ticket offer, to buying an upsell or a down-sell. There are a lot of components to sales funnels but there are a lot of steps that happen along a sales funnel that you need to know and there are a lot of web pages that need to be created for that. It’s very easy to do and a lot of it is very graphics-oriented.
So sales funnels or click funnels or just funnels, in general, are a really good niche you can make a lot of money if you can actually outsource some of those outer things like the automation and the sales funnel email marketing and have somebody on your team do that for you and you just focus on the graphic design side whether it’s the ads for the funnels or the pages themselves. This is a really good opportunity; you can charge 5, 10, 15, 20 thousand dollars for a sales funnel. So this is another niche I wanted you guys to know about; something to consider.
The Gaming Industry
The third niche–and this is something I have seen growing because of the metaverse and NFTs and crypto and all this stuff that’s happening right now–is the gaming industry. I think the gaming industry is still young; we’re only seeing the beginning of it. I know we’re 20 years into gaming and there are a lot of people that are actually making really good money now, but everything from the game design to character design to animations for them, to the promotions of those things. I think that the gaming industry is an underserved market and I see a huge demand for it. I believe that video games make so much money, so there is huge profit potential in this industry for you.
This is not one of the graphic design niches that I’ve stepped into, but I have people that I’ve coached and mentored who are in that space. A lot of these games need brands, they need logos, they need names, they need identities, they need websites. Right? They have to promote the stuff. So if you get into the gaming industry – if you love games and you’re a gamer – this is a really great opportunity to take something you’re passionate about and do design for that industry. It’s a multi-billion dollar industry. You just saw Microsoft bought Activision for billions of dollars.
So there’s obviously a huge demand and a growing market for this, so this is something that I would highly consider. If you create a game or graphics for a game, you can actually get royalties; you get an initial commission for doing the work, and then you can get royalties for how many games sell, how many times it’s used, etc. Then if they have sequels to those games, who do you think they’re going to call first? Especially if you help them become successful. This game is really important, something to think about. But I would definitely consider number three: gaming.
Stock Graphics
The fourth niche for graphic designers that I think everybody should be looking at is what I’m going to spend a lot of my time this year doing myself because I love doing design and I want to spend more time doing it, especially with what I have going on in my life right now. This includes stock graphics, stock illustrations, stock photos, and stock videos. If you love to create and you love making things, you can put these on marketplaces like iStock and Shutterstock and adobe stock and actually get paid some pretty good money.
The beautiful part about stock graphic design niches is that with every download you get paid, so you put it up once and you get paid over and over again. I know a few people who have done stock graphics and they make six figures a year just on stock images. Stuff that they’re not using. You may have thousands of files or hundreds of files that are just sitting in a drive, whether it’s in storage or on a cloud drive, that’s just stock graphics. Those can be sold and used. People will pay you for this stuff, and you don’t have to do any new additional work.
So this is something that can get you started. Something you can put some existing stuff that you’ve already created – maybe work the clients that you design for didn’t like, maybe it’s logo concepts, things like that. Think outside the box: what can you take that you’ve already created for a client, potentially a client that they didn’t like or didn’t use? You can upload it to a marketplace and sell it over and over again. Maybe it’s a website design, maybe it’s a Photoshop file of a web page layout or funnel layout, something like that. Just something to consider that I think would be super helpful: it’s passive. People can be downloading it and you can be paid while you’re sleeping. Stuff like that is super important, which leads me to number five.
NFTs
The fifth thing I think is getting really big due to demand, how easy it is to create them, and the profit potential. That is NFTs: the king of profitable graphic design niches. Now, I personally think that if you’re going to do an NFT campaign, you need to link up with somebody like myself or somebody that’s a marketer, so you can put multiple pieces together. Because it’s not just about the artwork; it’s how you promote it. So having a good web page, having a good marketing strategy–these are important elements. You even need to develop a white paper. If you’re just going to be a graphic designer and create NFTs and just throw them up on OpenSea and hope that people buy them, that’s not a marketing strategy. You need a marketing strategy behind this stuff, but the profit potential is insane.
It was in January I bought my first series of NFTs, which was not on Zedge. I’ve talked a lot about Zedge but this was actually on the Magic Eden so it’s on the Solano blockchain. I bought what’s called a solder land bunny. What I liked about the solar land bunny when I read the project is that it incorporated two big things: one, gaming; and two, play to earn, which is something that’s going to be big in the crypto space. When you’re playing these games, you actually earn crypto, so this is something to think about as a holder of this specific NFT.
I’m going to get a percentage of the profit for holding the Solderland Bunny. This is just an example of a utility of what that NFT is going to be used for. It actually has a practical application; it’s not just a piece of artwork because you’re famous. It’s actually something that’s going to be used in the metaverse or in an NFT crypto kind of universe where they’re building these Solderland Bunnies and you’re going to have mines and all these fun things that you can do.
So you want to put some NFTs on an exchange? Great! But why would someone want to buy your NFTs specifically? What kind of benefit can you give them for doing that? The cool thing about Solderland Bunnies is that they were put together so well, and the team behind it was so good. As a result, 6,666 of them sold out in less than five minutes! Can you imagine selling something for about a hundred to two hundred dollars apiece and selling over six thousand of them in under five minutes? That’s the power of crypto and the NFT space right now – the demand is insane, the profits are insane.
There are people that are 16-18 years old that are selling NFTs and making millions of dollars, so that’s why I had to include this on this list. This is something you should be considering – you should be sharpening your ax and learning how to create NFTs and how to get them onto marketplaces. That’s hopefully what I’m going to be creating more content for you on, with what we have going on here.
Final Thoughts on Graphic Design Niches
As I said before at the beginning of this article, the channel is going to change soon. We’re going to have some new names, so stay tuned for that and be prepared. But I just wanted to say thank you guys for reading this article, and encourage you to check out our previous article about starting a creative agency or our Instagraphics Pro Network for some more helpful content. I’d love to hear from you and to thank you personally for your support. My name is Adrian Boysel. I’ll see you guys next time. And as always, keep looking up!