Hello,
I’m a graphic design student and for my graduation project I have to write a thesis on a problem in the graphic design industry. I would really appreciate topic suggestions because I am stuck.
What graphic design problem?
Getting paid.
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- Oversaturation
- Crowdsourcing
- Being under-valued
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I think it’s your job to come up with a topic?
As I said, I’m stuck… it would help if you tell me what problems or challenges have you faced as a graphic designer?
I wasn’t joking about getting paid.
It’s a huge issue in the industry as the value of the work is often not understood.
It’s an interesting topic.
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I agree, I think it’s a real problem specially for intangible work! However, my classmate chose it as her topic & we can’t overlap topics. 
She thought of that? I don’t think it reflects too well on yourself.
Honestly, Graphic Design itself is already a big problem.
What do you mean?
I think that’s the biggest problem with graphic design right now.
Getting a job.
Do the research and do the math.
How many jobs identified as Graphic design are there? Be a little creative and include web and a few other niche spheres.
Now, how many design graduates are released into the wild every year from universities (we won’t even get into the self-taughts.)
That right there is a daunting problem.
Then check what the average turnover rate is in jobs. If only 5% of the available jobs per year turn over (and that’s a number I picked out of the blue but feels about right, covid notwithstanding,) what are your odds of landing one of those among all the students in that year? We won’t go into the ones from previous years that still don’t have jobs and are also competing.
To further the problem, how many studios have closed in the past 5 years?
How many opened 5 years ago and are still viable?
Quite honestly, if I were considering this career now, I’d reconsider. Sorry, but true.
Quite honestly too, I got out of the GD industry over 20 years ago and got into a very strange niche of the print industry - and never looked back.
Best of luck out there.
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This is very helpful thank you so much!
The print industry sounds interesting. I actually love doing print design, specially packaging. I thought of writing my thesis about print design and the awful assumption that it’s “dying” but my tutor advised me to look into other possible topics before deciding. I think oversaturation is a good topic and I’ll do more digging about it. Again, thank you for your help! Appreciate it
That’s a little too obvious given that it’s a common misperception that online or digital design is somehow replacing it, when, in reality, there’s more print design work now than ever before.
For a thesis idea, I might consider looking into historical trends, how the here and now is a waypoint along those trend lines and how those trends might be projected into the future.
I’m not referring to design style trends. Instead, I’m referring to changes that have taken place in technology and society that have affected the profession, are currently affecting the it and will continue to affect it going forward — things like, technology, societal changes, international competition, economic realities, etc.
A design problem that I have come across in corporate branding, which might be interesting for you as well, is brand consistency across language barriers and writing systems. E.g. how do you keep the look and feel of corporate brand material consistent no matter if it’s using latin letters, Chinese characters or Thai script. I used to work in Southeast Asia, and this was a very common struggle there. Unicode fonts (e.g. such as Segoe UI) solve some of the problems, but only few are really consistently designed once the writing system changes. Another problem is that in some countries the established layout norms are much different (which is for example why Chinese layouts often look very cluttered to Westerners). And for logos you also have the question whether a localized wordmark is better than an international one, which people might not be able to read but could have more branding power. I think it’s a topic with a lot of potential angles that are worth exploring.
Anyway, no matter what topic you choose, best of luck with your thesis. 
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