Charting Design: A Data-Driven Snapshot of Asia's Design Industry in 2024
by Amrutha Prabhakaran (1009609) & Karis Ong Xin Le (1009701)
Introduction
The design industry in Asia has experienced remarkable growth and transformation in recent years, driven by the rapid tech boom and an increased demand for design professionals in technology roles, especially post-COVID-19. This influx of talent has also sparked critical conversations around fair compensation.
In response, initiatives like Design Pay Asia strive to democratize pay data, offering actionable insights that empower designers to engage in transparent and informed discussions about salaries, fostering a more equitable industry landscape.
Our Objective
Help emerging designers make informed career decisions by visualizing key data points related to demographics, compensation, education, experience, career paths, and industry trends.
When we first examined the dataset, it became clear that extensive cleaning was required. This involved limiting countries to those with sufficient data, standardizing job titles, mapping the primary fields of work, grouping salary ranges, and converting them to SGD, among others. This stage proved to be the most challenging and time-consuming part of our project. Before diving into the analysis, we began by examining basic demographic data.
A) Distribution by Country and Gender
The survey data revealed Indonesia as the primary source of responses, with the largest participant pool among all countries surveyed. While male respondents dominated the overall sample, both Singapore and Thailand deviated from this pattern, showing higher proportions of female participants in their respective regions.
B) Distribution by Age
The survey revealed a predominantly young design community, with participants under 35 forming the majority. The 25-30 age bracket represented the largest group, while designers between 46-50 years were the least represented. This demographic profile is similar across all surveyed regions.
C) Job Titles Word Cloud
The analysis of job titles revealed a clear hierarchy in design roles, with "UIUX Designer," "Project Designer," and "Graphic Designer" emerging as the most frequently cited positions. Though dedicated UI and UX specialists still maintain distinct identities in the field, the overwhelming preference for the combined title suggests a demand for practitioners who can navigate both domains with equal proficiency.
Key Insights
A) Compensation patterns by country and gender
Our analysis revealed Singapore as the regional salary leader, offering the highest compensation across all positions, while Indonesia maintained the lowest rates. Notably, we found comparable salary levels between male and female employees across all countries, suggesting strong wage parity in the Southeast Asian job market. We noticed that in Thailand, while men and women earn similar salaries in general, the men have a higher maximum, indicating perhaps that more of the men surveyed were in senior positions or more prominent roles.
B) Impact of design education on compensation
Our analysis of Southeast Asian design salaries reveals intriguing disparities in the relationship between design education and wages: Thailand shows higher maximum wages for those with design education, while Indonesia, Vietnam, and Malaysia show minimal wage differences regardless of education. Notably, Singapore presents an inverse relationship, where designers without formal education generally earn more, with only outlier salaries favoring those with design credentials. Our assumption is that this is more of a reflection of the pre-COVID market. In any case, it's precisely these exceptional cases that inspire our pursuit of a master's degree – we're aiming to position ourselves among those high-achieving outliers!
C) Impact of Education and Experience on Annual Salary(SGD)
This Sankey diagram maps designers' career trajectories, showing how education and years of design experience flow into salary levels. For those with master's degrees like us, the visualization reveals most designers achieve salaries between $30-$60k, offering insight into typical compensation patterns for our educational background.
D) Company size vs. Top 5 industries
Designers command the highest salaries in education, retail, consumer, finance, and technology sectors, with retail and finance offering the highest compensation, while education provides relatively lower salaries. Notably, designers in the education sector typically work within smaller team environments. In Singapore specifically, designers earn higher salaries when working in large companies (10,001+ employees) within retail/wholesale and financial services.
E) Compensation by Primary Field
Our analysis of design compensation across different countries reveals that leadership positions generally command the highest salaries, likely reflecting the accumulated years of experience required for such roles. Beyond this universal pattern, compensation trends vary significantly by country. In Singapore specifically, Product Design and UX Research emerge as the second-highest-paid design disciplines after leadership roles, which may explain the growing attraction to these specialisations among designers. Interestingly, visually-oriented disciplines in Singapore – including motion design, marketing / graphic design, and UI design – cluster around similar compensation levels. However, these findings should be interpreted with caution due to the current limitations in our dataset. The sample sizes vary considerably, ranging from single responses in some categories to 369 in others, suggesting that additional data collection would be valuable to strengthen and validate these preliminary insights.
Data Processing Challenges and Insights
The complexity of working with raw survey data became immediately apparent in our analysis process. While we previously benefited from Chi-Loong's pre-cleaned datasets, this project required extensive data cleaning and standardization efforts. We encountered numerous challenges, from mapping free-text responses in 'others' fields to handling incorrect inputs (such as company names listed under 'primary field of work'). A significant realization was the subjective nature of many responses, particularly those relying on self-assessment, which required careful consideration when making assumptions during the cleaning process. Cultural context proved especially crucial - for instance, our initial assumptions about regional salary differences were challenged when visualizations revealed variations far greater than the expected one to two-fold difference. This experience highlighted the importance of thorough data exploration and understanding before attempting meaningful visualization work.
What it Means for Designers in Singapore
Considering most of us are designers who may develop our careers in Singapore, it is good to see that designers get paid the highest in Singapore amongst all the South-East Asian countries in this survey, there's not much disparity between genders and there are also opportunities to do well for designers without design education (which signals that companies value skill more than qualification). But the higher wages could also explain why an increasing number of companies are choosing to lay off their design teams and outsource the work to designers in the neighbouring countries.
Next Steps
Now that we know that it is a lot of hard work, we can appreciate the efforts by the DPA team to collate and make sense of the data for the benefit of the community.
We can look forward to DPA's full 2024 report on the market after the survey is closed.
