Sponsors of our forum, 20i, have just released an exclusive web designer survey.

Here are some key takeaways:
  
💰    90% of designers say clients regularly underestimate the true cost of professional web design.
🤖    75% report that competition from AI and automated tools has made their business more challenging this year.
🎯    3 in 4 professionals are finding it harder to secure high-quality new clients.
🤷    Over half struggle with a lack of clear career progression in their current roles.
🗺️    Nearly 80% of designers would relocate to a different city or state.

I don't know about yourselves, but this tracks pretty well!

Read the full results of 20i's web designer survey.

A lot of interesting stuff in there, some of it definitely hits home too!

I find the AI points fascinating, I think "entry level" design services could definitely be in a lot of trouble, I regularly hear small business owners talk about how they've been quoted X thousand pounds for a project, and then they've gone and created an indistinguishable replica for a fraction of the cost.

Beyond that though I am convinced there will always be a market for real, properly strategised, human creativity - in fact it may even become more premium if people begin to crave authenticity.

The stat about the number of lead referrals coming from AI really surprised me, I've always been quite sceptical of how much of a lead pipeline it would become, but it seems like it's growing.

Looking at GA4 I've actually had a handful myself of enquiries from ChatGPT myself recently. Best crack on with that GEO strategy after all! 😅 

On the other hand, there is still a lot of work for developers.

Web design has always been a bit of a weird one. As an example, you get people calling themselves web designers when all they ever do is use Canva or Figma or whatever. And then another whole bunch whose skill stops at configuring Elementor with Wordpress.

But if you understand how to exploit a niche and are really good at marketing there is still loads of works to be found.

AI is not a threat if you already have the talents.

Also worth noting that the survey appears to be US only which may skew the results.

@Jogeta316 Just had a look at the results, unfortunately it's very US-centric. Do they do one for UK/EU people? Bearing in mind 20i is a UK based company!

@BlueDreamer They did a UK-based one a few years ago: https://www.20i.com/blog/web-designer-survey/

@Jogeta316 thanks, yes I remember that one. 

@BlueDreamer It's mad looking through that older UK one and seeing how different things are now! The influence AI has had on people's morale and outlook is astonishing!

@Jogeta316 Yes Ai is having an effect, we'll have to see what happens there. Some devs I work with are always asking an Ai to generate code, the results are often laughable!

7 hours ago, BlueDreamer said:

@Jogeta316 Yes Ai is having an effect, we'll have to see what happens there. Some devs I work with are always asking an Ai to generate code, the results are often laughable!

I use it for simple task within larger projects. I use it for tasks I don't do very often. For example I needed a regex to format an output. I couldn't remember how to do this but claude gave me the answer in seconds. I could have read the regex documentation and figured it out myself but using an AI tool was faster.