The Business of Design:
The Design Council and the Design Business Association have released new in-depth research
into the British design industry: The Business of Design. (2.2Mb, PDF) There’re like the geese in autumn, these facts & figures reports. When you see them appear, you know the cold winds of government policy are a-blowing. Some findings I found notable: there’s a noticable bias toward male designers (61% of 134,000 designers), especially among freelancers (79% of 47,400 businesses). But ethnic minorities are represented at the same percentage as in the general population. The West Midlands
has nearly 4,000 designers, with a slant towards product design and industrial, but that’s only 6% of the national share. Nationally, the overwhelming majority of firms are very small, with the “big teams” being either London-based, or a corporation’s or local council’s ‘communications’ dept.. Very few firms develop and then keep intellectual property that they can sell again and again. Firms are very satisfied (90%) with the quality of the graduates
they take on. 19% of designers are currently “involved in design education”, although that includes simply offering work placements.
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by D’log :: blogging non-stop since 2000 » Green shoots
10 Oct 2006 at 09:58
[…] The editorial pages of the latest Digit magazine search for the green shoots of recovery in the British design industry; after years of slashed budgets, frozen wages, slower-paying clients, and freelancers left… “gasping under the weight of an influx of competition”. It gives a useful student-friendly summary of the key findings of the Aquent UK 2005 salary survey and the Design Council’s Business of Design report. In the larger companies, those that are “visible” in the statistics, the general verdict seems to be that business is slowly starting to improve. […]