Where the Design Jobs Are

The shifting winds of the U.S. economy in the past year have left designers disoriented.

- Andrew Thompson

OFFICIALLY, THE LABOR MARKET is still on fire, with job-growth data from the Department of Labor continuing to surprise economists, adding more than 600,000 jobs in the first two months of 2024. But if you work in tech, the picture looks decidedly different. The tech industry-the terrain of many designers-lost more than 50,000 jobs worldwide between January and March of 2024, according to tracker site layoffs.fyi, as it continues to downsize following more than a decade of unfettered head-count growth and the rising specter of AI.

But the news for designers isn't entirely bleak. We've analyzed four months of listings on Google's jobsearch engine-which consolidates postings from thousands of sources around the web, including LinkedIn, Dribbble, ZipRecruiter, and listings on companies' own careers pages-to give a bird's-eye survey of the state of the marketplace for eight different kinds of designers: graphic, brand, game, product, UX, interior, urban, and architects.

We set out to provide the most comprehensive look possible at the prac tical elements of job descriptions in order to help designers think in broad terms about their next moves.

The result, after searching for jobs across each category in the top 50 largest metro areas in America (on the same day each month between October 2023 and January 2024), is a dataset of 63,000 jobs that reveals things like which skills designers need to have and where they are likely to get hired. So if you're a UX designer in San Francisco getting antsy about a dwindling bank account, start packing your bags-you may be bound for the Lone Star State.

Geography