It’s wise for graphic designers to have a few different sources of income. It’s a profession well-suited to freelancing and requires skillful use of time management. If you have a little extra time in your week, consider setting up your own website and shop, or take advantage of one of these 10 sites to make a little extra dough on the side.
- Creative Market
Creative Market is a way for designers to create and sell digital files like templates, illustrations, logos, and web design. The artist sets their own price and keeps 70 percent of each sale. Unlike some other sites, Creative Market has no exclusivity limitations, meaning products can appear on another platform with no penalty. If the designer becomes a partner and refers a customer, they get an extra 10 percent commission.
Creative Market has over 200,000 products listed on its site, so visibility can be hard to achieve. In order to really stand out and make some money, a seller has to aggressively promote themselves, and join groups to have a better chance of being featured by Creative Market.
- EnvatoMarket
Envato is similar to Creative Market but has more technical product categories: website themes, code, video, audio, graphics, photo, 3D models, and flash. From a buyer’s perspective, Envato has gotten some flak for their sellers not creating functioning WordPress themes. However, in the graphic design section, what you see is what you get — so buyers are less likely to be misled by something that looks flashy that doesn’t work.
To create and sell graphics, sellers must get their files and design approved by Envato. Sellers set the price, and Envato adds their own fee. Sellers earn their item price, minus 55 percent if they’re non-exclusive to Envato. The fee drops to 12.5-37.5 percent if the seller is exclusive.
- Fiverr
Fiverr is notable for cheap, cheap prices. There’s a huge variety of products offered on Fiverr, and not much is priced above $5, meaning the payout for designers is small. However, it’s free to join, and percentage-wise, sellers keep 80 percent of each transaction — so there’s a $4 profit for each sale.
So there isn’t a huge payoff for selling on Fiverr, but the site is well-known, and if sellers are savvy they can make a decent amount of money for little effort. If, for example, designers want to sell a logo, they can create a template. By creating a vague symbol and a free-for-commercial-use typeface, a designer could simply tweak the colors and the name of the company for each client. The client isn’t getting a truly unique logo — but they’re also only paying $5 for it.
