11+ Types of Graphic Design Projects Available for Freelancing

Graphic designers are as committed to function and usability as they are to style, a perspective that’s driving growth in an industry that could reach $78.3 billion by 2030. Companies want to tap into that expertise—and that’s creating a carousel of new opportunities for you.

How can you position yourself to connect with these potential clients?

Learn more about the benefits that freelance designers offer to companies and explore how graphic designers like you use Upwork to get ahead. You’ll also get resources to help you build the foundations of a business you can grow.

Understanding the freelance graphic design landscape

Companies work with freelancers because independent talent is timely, cost-effective, and flexible in ways that are often unmatched. For example, companies gain the benefit of:

• Access to specialized skills when they’re most needed
• A workforce that can be scaled up or down as required
• A talent pool that’s larger and more diverse than can be found locally
• A faster path to finding, hiring, and onboarding talent
• A fresh perspective that can contribute to more innovative design ideas

‍A study by Upwork found that independent professionals are more likely to keep learning than workers who don’t freelance, especially when it comes to technology, networking, and business management. That means freelance talent is often ahead of the curve when it comes to capitalizing on new formats, new platforms, and new tools.‍For many companies, that agility is a way to claim a creative edge. Attention spans have shrunk to just 47 seconds, according to one researcher—which means the competition for mindshare and market share is intense.‍

‍That’s where you come in!

“One of the biggest advantages of utilizing freelancers is finding a great variety of talent with different skills. And bringing on new talent quickly as our needs change."
— Carol Taylor, Director Content Experience, Microsoft

As a freelance creative, you have a unique perspective to share. Your work environment pushes you to learn and grow. By working with multiple clients, you challenge yourself to:

• Think differently. Projects from a variety of businesses and industries provide you with exposure to a range of audience groups and strategic challenges.
• Sharpen your most marketable skills. Focus on the type of project ideas that prove the most enjoyable—or the most lucrative.
• Bring fresh ideas to new projects. Use the diversity of your clients’ needs to test new concepts and refine how you approach different circumstances.  

How do you turn those strengths into assets that can bring in new projects and support a more resilient business? By stretching your skills into different design disciplines.

A look at in-demand design disciplines

Being a graphic designer already puts you in a good space: Graphic design is the most in-demand design and creative skill on Upwork in 2024. It also encompasses a very broad range of skill sets—some of which you may have, while others may be helpful for you to learn.

As a business owner, there are many different ways to extend your core skills into a more diverse range of revenue streams. For example, you can:

• Branch into different types of graphic design projects
• Stretch your skills into other common types of design and overlapping disciplines
• Test different ways to market your skills, such as selling digital products or consulting

Chisom Okwulehie turned a passion for art as a teenager into a successful career as a senior architect for a U.S. government organization—and, more recently, her own agency.

When the COVID-19 pandemic cleared time in her schedule for freelance projects, she started to offer a range of services on Upwork: architecture, interior design, graphic design, web design, and photo editing services. Demand for her architecture and interior design services took off, eventually leading to the launch of Juntero—a highly successful design and technology firm where she works with other skilled professionals to help clients build unique experiences.

Chisom Okwulehie (left) with her family

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How can you build a business that’s the right fit for you? In each of the following sections, we’ll look at a different area of design and the types of skills involved. Ask yourself:

• Which types of projects align with your existing skill set?
• What skills could you learn to expand your services into other areas you’re interested in?
• Why do certain projects or portfolio pieces catch your attention?
• What can you learn from these projects to improve your own business development?

For each skill category, we’ll also help you explore available opportunities by sharing projects from Upwork’s Project Catalog™ as well as links to active job posts so you can see what clients are currently looking for.

Animation and motion graphics

Often used interchangeably—inside and outside of the design industry—both animation and motion graphics add movement to objects or images to deliver information in a format that’s exciting and engaging.

However, there is a slight difference between the two types of work:

• Animation is a popular technique for storytelling. It might include 3D animation, stop motion, 2D hand-drawn animation, or computer animation.
• Motion graphics is a technique typically used to help explain ideas, often by animating text or objects in what could otherwise be a static image. Examples include explainer videos and the intros you see on YouTube videos.

Businesses use these formats to promote their products and services, whether through websites and apps, e-commerce stores, or broadcast and streaming services. A client may also hire you to contribute to another piece of creative work, such as composing intros and outros for a YouTube channel or making motion graphics for a presentation.

An animation or motion graphics production may tap into your ability to:

• Generate ideas and develop a concept
• Storyboard key scenes and transitions
• Design the visual elements that will be animated
• Select the color palette and typography that will be used throughout
• Match the style established by the existing brand identity

Check out the following packages from Project Catalog, or browse the motion graphics and animation jobs available on Upwork.

Example: Realistic 3D product animation by Milan P.

Portfolio item: Product presentation

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Example: An attention-grabbing vlog for YouTube by Clement L.

Portfolio item: Cadiz food tour

Drawing and illustration

Drawings and illustrations can make powerful statements on their own and, as a graphic designer, your focus will be on creating original pieces your clients can use as needed.

Businesses use original artwork as part of their marketing and sales efforts. They’re often an integral part of a larger project, such as an animated story, brand identity, book cover, or marketing campaign. Clients may turn to you to produce images for websites, social media advertisements, packaging, reports, and more.

As a graphic designer, it’s OK if you don’t have the strongest drawing or illustration skills. For some projects, it’s essential—but for other types of work, a client may need your assistance to:

• Come up with a concept
• Sketch out an initial design
• Manage a project to ensure the deliverable meets the client’s broader needs
• Do research to provide more context for an illustrator’s work
• Incorporate a drawing into a larger creative piece
• Prepare the final project for digital use or to go to print

The following services are available through Project Catalog. Or have a look at the drawing and illustration jobs available on Upwork.

Example: An amazing caricature by Ricardo G.

Portfolio item: Face caricatures

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Example: Amazing children's book illustration by Miss M.

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Logo and brand design

Businesses need a strong logo and brand design to stand out from their competitors, grab attention, and leave an impression. A brand’s visual identity is defined by its logo and brand design, which might include a customized color palette and typeface.

Your role, as a graphic designer, is to determine how to best reflect an organization’s personality and values through these visual elements. A client may engage your services to:

• Do the hands-on logo and brand design work, including designing logos that capture the essence of the brand
• Conduct market research into their industry and marketplace
• Develop a concept for the brand elements
• Create a style guide for consistency across different types of creative work
• Prepare branded visual elements for use in digital, print, and large format

Have a look at these two popular types of Project Catalog services. Or browse the logo and brand identity design jobs available on Upwork.

Example: An amazing logo designed for your business by Ignacio G.

Portfolio: Recent logo design

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Example: A professional brand style guide by Kiran K.

Portfolio item: Brand guide

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Print design

Print design refers to the layout and production of printed materials, such as magazines, posters, brochures, trade show banners, business cards, and postcards.

These materials are typically used by businesses to promote their services or products through in-person events and networking opportunities.

A graphic designer helps ensure the materials make the business look great while sticking to its brand design and messaging. A client may need your assistance to:

• Come up with the initial concept
• Create the design, including lettering
• Choose the different print elements, such as materials and finishing
• Produce print-ready files
• Collaborate with the printers to ensure the process runs smoothly

Check out these services, which are available on Project Catalog, or browse the print design jobs available on Upwork.

Example: A professional brochure design by Tanvir H.

Portfolio: Print design

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‍Example: Brochure or report which speaks to your partners and customers by Yana A.

Portfolio item: Corporate business report

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Packaging and merchandise design

Often intertwined with a company’s brand identity, packaging and merchandise design focuses on the experience customers will have when they encounter a brand’s physical or digital products—often the first points of contact between a brand and its customers.

Four in 10 consumers said branded packaging encourages them to purchase again. Your role, as a graphic designer, is to help deliver an experience that’s positive, creative, and eye-catching.

A client may look for your expertise to help with:

• Research into aspects such as the target market or positioning in the marketplace
• Conceptualization and design creation
• 3D visualization
• Preparing the design files for printing
• Selecting the right materials, which may include sustainability as a priority
• Creating mockups and checking for any quality issues with color or alignment

Example: Print-ready product packaging, branding, and marketing collateral designs by Syed Wasif M.

Portfolio item: Juice bottle labels

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Example: A professional packaging and label design for your product by Julia M.

Portfolio item: Branding and packaging design

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Digital graphic design

Digital graphic design relies on your expertise to create great visuals. It’s a vast category of work that generally encompasses any graphics produced for use on digital devices and platforms.

This includes:

• Web design
• App design
• Social media campaigns
• Online ads
• Hero images (banners) for blog posts
• Graphics and templates for email marketing
• Graphics to accompany podcasts or streaming video
• …and more

Businesses use these graphics to support everything from their content marketing efforts to sales strategy, which means there are a lot of ways to niche your services such as by style, how they’ll be used, or industry.

Check out the following in-demand examples of the many digital design services offered through Project Catalog or explore digital design job posts.

Example: A full set of animated HTML5 banners ready for Google by Frank M.

Portfolio: HTML5 and other Banner Samples

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Example: Social media content designs (post & story) by Tushar R.

Portfolio item: Social media content and reels design

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Non-Fungible Tokens (NFTs)

An NFT is a unique digital identifier that uses blockchain technology to store value. This means NFTs can be collected, sold, and traded—much like a physical asset. An NFT can be any sort of digital asset, but most of the focus has been on creating NFT art.

NFTs have created a new category for digital art as well as new opportunities for graphic designers. However, while the artwork can be a core component, the process of turning digital art into an NFT takes an understanding of other technologies, such as blockchain and smart contracts, as well as a process called “minting,” which connects the artwork to a blockchain. It also requires familiarity with setting metadata and attributes—information that helps define each token’s unique properties.

As a result, you may choose to focus on digital art creation, collaborate with others to create NFTs, or educate yourself about the technical aspects.

The following projects are among the many NFT-related services available through Project Catalog. You can also check out current NFT art jobs.

Example: Base NFT character concept design for possible NFT arts collection by Pavel G.

Portfolio: NFT arts

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Example: Original, Hand-Drawn 100, 1K, 10K NFT collection by Damian A.

Portfolio: NFT artworks

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Generative AI

Generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) is a new—and controversial—area of design. Many creative professionals are combining their design expertise with AI-generated art to experiment with new ideas, streamline processes, and find more efficient ways to do work.

“DALL·E and Midjourney offer powerful tools and are great enablers, but they are just tools. The skill will be in how we imagine their use and steer them with prompts and questions.”
— Stuart Watkins, CEO of creative agency DevStars

Generative AI doesn’t produce novel work or ideas. Instead, tools are trained, using tremendous amounts of data, to recognize and predict patterns. Different AI models can be trained to produce text or images, as well as video, audio, or 3D graphics.

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We’re just beginning to understand how generative AI will impact creative work—there’s no established template for you to follow. If you’re willing to push into the unknown, the category is wide open.

Example: Unique custom images for your business with Midjourney AI by Nadezhda P.

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Example: Custom AI-generated artwork using Stable Diffusion trained on your images | Upwork by Ilya G.

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Building and home design

Whether potential clients are real estate companies, construction firms, or individuals, people turn to designers because they want to enjoy the spaces where they live, work, and play.

Environmental design projects typically require specialized design or technical skills. These may include architecture, interior design, landscape design, or building information modeling (BIM)—a process that creates a digital representation of a building’s data to support construction, operation, and maintenance efforts.

However, there’s room in the building and home design space for your graphic design expertise. Clients may look for your assistance with projects such as:

• Architectural visualization, a 3D rendering of an architectural plan that helps architects share what a finished product will look like
• Signage and wayfinding systems to help people navigate physical environments and understand the spaces they’re in
• Graphics, murals, or other types of wall art to customize a space and complement the interior design
• Design of patterns and textures for wallpaper, flooring, tiles, or fabrics

The following projects are among the many types of services offered on Project Catalog for building and home design. You can also check out remote home design and building design jobs.

Example: 2D floor plan and detailed working drawing in AutoCAD by Israt Jahan L.

Portfolio item: Office and control building design

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Example: Amazing photorealistic renders of bathroom from your design by Artem S.

Portfolio item: USA bathroom

Industrial design

As with environmental design, an industrial designer has a specialized skill set—they support the creation of a broad range of products, from small toys and jewelry to furniture, cars, and large appliances. These products don’t just need to have good form and function; they also need to match user needs, meet market expectations, and clearly explain manufacturing requirements.

Graphic design is a complementary skill set that can support industrial design in a number of different ways, such as:

• Visualizing product concepts with 2D or 3D modeling
• Creating the logo, brand design, packaging, or other collateral to support a product launch
• Designing the user interface (UI) for a product, such as visual clues that will help users understand how the product functions
• Designing manuals and user guides to help customers understand how to assemble and use the product

The following are examples of the many types of services available within the industrial design category on Project Catalog. You can also browse current industrial design jobs.  

Example: CAD designs for jewelry models with two product shot renders by Rebecca R.

Portfolio item: 24-hour custom jewelry CAD design support

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Example: Help turning your great ideas into reality. Fusion 360 by Emil L.

Portfolio item: 3D furniture design Fusion 360

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Diving into UI and UX design projects

While the demand for graphic design talent is high, some designers with an interest in product design choose to pivot into two other sought-after skill sets: user experience (UX) design and user interface (UI) design.

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UI design puts the spotlight on the look and feel of a product—aesthetic considerations such as layout, font, graphics, and color scheme.

UX design considers how someone will interact with a product, how easy it is to use, and how it makes users feel. While a UX designer considers how visual elements can influence user experience, that isn’t their main focus. Instead, they often use a simplified layout (a wireframe) to engage with a product’s structure, functionality, and user journey.

How graphic design, UI design, and UX design overlap

Graphic design, UI design, and UX design are closely related, often overlap, and may be done by the same professional. However, they are distinct design disciplines.

As a graphic designer, the shift to UI design is a relatively short pivot; the roles are unique, but there’s a lot of overlap between skill sets. A UI designer may need additional expertise in areas such as interactivity and prototyping, but professionals in both positions need an understanding of:

• Basic design principles
• Typography
• Color theory
• Layout and composition
• Visual communication
• Responsive design

Adding UX design to your portfolio is a bit more involved. Both UX and graphic designers benefit from expertise in design principles, visual communication, and branding. However, even where skills overlap, a UX designer will generally need to understand different aspects.

For example:

• User-centered design (UCD), for a graphic designer, means knowing how to create visuals that connect with the target audience. For a UX designer, that understanding should encompass the target audience’s needs, pain points, and behaviors to create a seamless experience.
• Prototyping is fundamental to the UX design process. This may involve multiple iterations of wireframes and interactive prototypes, as well as repeated rounds of usability testing. Depending on the area of specialization, a graphic designer may not need to include prototyping in their workflow.

H3: How to leverage your graphic design skills into UX/UI design work

UX and UI underpin products that are essential to our day-to-day lives, playing an essential role in everything from industrial and environmental design to web and app development.

To learn more about what clients are looking for in these fields, explore the UI/UX job posts currently available. Here are a few examples of the in-demand UI/UX services available on Project Catalog.

Example: Website landing page UI/UX design in Figma by Writi D.

Portfolio: Beacon landing page design in Figma

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Example: UI/UX design for app and web by Mohammad S.

Portfolio: Health and fitness app

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Tips to build a successful design business on Upwork

It’s easy to get started on Upwork as a freelancer, but setting up an account is just the beginning of your entrepreneurial journey. Here are three key steps that can help set you on the right path toward success.

1. Create a thoughtful Upwork Profile

“I’ve redone my profile probably 75 times. Within your own specialty, you need to position yourself according to what your market wants and cares about.
— Peggy P., Freelance Copy Editor and Proofreader

Your Upwork profile is your first introduction to potential clients. A basic profile needs to include five things:

• A photo of yourself
• A title for your profile that shares your key skills and expertise
• An overview that briefly describes who you are and what you can offer to clients
• An overview of your work history
• At least one skill tag (selected from Upwork’s skill categories and specializations)

Push your profile beyond basic by finding creative ways to share your accomplishments and highlight what makes you the right partner for a company’s next project.

To learn more, read 7 Designer Profile Tips + Top Design Profile Examples.

2. Add a great-looking portfolio

“We all start somewhere, and you may need to fake it until you make it. I started with no portfolio: I did work for family and friends, I did work for myself. Those are the projects I used until I became a more seasoned freelancer.”
— Morgan Overholt, Freelance Graphic Designer and owner of Morgan Media LLC

Your graphic design portfolio isn’t just a showcase of your greatest work. It’s an opportunity for you to connect with potential clients and make an impression before they’ve even made contact.

If your portfolio doesn’t do a good job of selling your skills and services, you’ll never hear from those businesses—they’ll find someone else.

As you think through the pieces you want to include in your portfolio, consider the following questions:

• Which selection of projects best reflects your range of skills? Whether you plan to focus your efforts on one particular area of design or diversity across several skill sets, the projects you choose should help convey how multitalented you are.
• What can you add instead of, or alongside, strong visuals? Design projects tend to look great—but you may also have projects that can’t be shared, or that are more functional than pretty. Content such as testimonials or infographics that show only the results can be just as compelling.
• How can you tell a story about each portfolio piece? It’s helpful to provide the information and context behind each portfolio sample. For example, you can follow a basic case study format by explaining what the project is, any challenges you ran into, and the results.
• How frequently can you add new work? As you work with more clients, gather new skills, and branch into new types of projects, it’s important to update your portfolio and keep it fresh.

To learn more, read How To Make a Freelance Portfolio on Upwork.

4. Decide how you want to run your business

Your freelance business will be as unique as you are, from the clients you choose to work with to the range of projects you decide to work on. For more insights into how to manage and grow your business:

• Explore Upwork Academy, a selection of learning paths that take you step-by-step through the building blocks of your Upwork presence.
• Learn how to promote your freelance business beyond the Upwork site, including email marketing and referrals.
• Continue to refine your profile, portfolio, and proposals to make a strong impression and differentiate yourself from other freelancers.

Find design work on Upwork

With a well-executed profile, a polished portfolio, and a competitive selection of skills and services to offer to potential clients, you’ll have a solid foundation to help move your freelance business forward. With curiosity about different areas of design, persistence, and hard work, you’ll be on your way to reaching your goals.

Want to learn more about Upwork? Learn how you can do the work you love on your own terms.