Digital Design & the ecommerce industry: 2020 salary review

It's day 3 of our 2020 specialism salary reviews - today, we turn our attention to digital design! The creative core of any ecommerce business, designers are often tasked with creating the brand vision and tone. Are they being suitably rewarded for this?

For this series, we're using unseen insights from the 2020 ecommerce salary survey & insights report to really explore how the industry is developing for the different people within it. This blog post will feature insights from our questionnaire respondents who work in digital design, UX and UI only. Having worked on digital design & creative roles for many years, we're delighted to continue helping you with these important insights. Let's get cracking! 

Digital Design salaries by job title

To kick us off, let's look at changes to the salary benchmarks for each of the core creative roles we recruit for. 

• Junior Digital Designer: £24,000 - £28,000 (2019: £22,000 - £25,000) 
• Middleweight Digital Designer: £28,000 - £40,000 (2019: £25,000 - £35,000)
• Senior Digital Designer: £40,000 - £70,000 (2019: £35,000 - £70,000)
• Lead/Head of Digital Design/Art Director: £60,000 - £100,000 (2019: £55,000 - £100,000) 

This is very positive! All seniority levels/job titles within digital design have seen an increase either on the lower end or higher end of the salary benchmark. There have been no decreases, so it looks like designers have something to be happy about!

Within our creative design specialism, we also work on UX roles – here’s the latest salary changes for these job titles…

• Junior UX Designer: £22,000 - £35,000 (2019: £25,000 - £40,000) 
• UX Designer: £35,000 - £55,000 (2019: £35,000 - £55,000) 
• Senior/Lead UX Designer: £65,000 - £90,000 (2019: £70,000 - £90,000)
• Head of UX: £80,000 - £120,000 (2019: £90,000 - £120,000) 

For professionals working in UX, there have been more changes. A UX Designer can expect to see the same salary benchmark when looking for new roles, though there have been changes to the salary benchmarks of the other titles. Will this be reflected in the salary changes of this specialism overall?

Digital Design salaries – has there been an increase?

Will we see an increase in salary within the digital design specialism? We asked all respondents how their salary changed in the last 12 months, and here's the results when we take the respondents from the design specialism only...

• 61% saw their salary increase - this is a slight decrease from 65% in 2019
• 33% told us that their salary stayed the same, which is a 1% increase from 2019
• Finally, 6% of respondents shared that their salary had decreased - this was 3% in 2019

For those who told us their salaries decreased, they outlined a few reasons for this. One respondent was made redundant, so took the decision to freelance while another moved from a permanent role to contract roles.

Expectations for digital design salaries in 2020

We asked our respondents how they expect their salaries to change in the next 12 months. This questionnaire was sent to respondents at the beginning of the year, so we understand quite a lot has changed since the Covid-19 crisis that followed. However, it's still important to examine how people would expect their salary to change in a 12 month period. 

• It will increase: 70% - lots of optimism for this specialism!
• It will stay the same: 15%
• I’m not sure: 13%
• It will decrease: 2%

Download the 2020 ecommerce salary survey & insights report!

If you're a digital designer, we hope reading this has given you food for thought. Stay tuned for the next salary review, coming very soon. While you wait, why not download a free copy of the full report for all of the industry insights?