The Social and Corporate Value of the Filipino Creative
In a 2022 data by the Department of Trade and Industry, the Philippines is the top exporter of creative services in all of ASEAN. However, despite the stature of the Philippines in its contribution to the global creative economy, the creative industry remains relatively unpopular — the digital creative sector continuously ignored.
As having been practicing graphic design for about half a decade now, this is a firsthand observation: for the bigger majority in the Philippines, graphic design work is a nonessential and dispensable commodity, seated last in line of functional and social importance. To the common Filipino, a graphic designer is just someone who designs tarpaulin posters for birthdays and events, creates logos and social media content for small businesses, and on occasions, designs prints on T-shirts.
It is undeniable that there is prevailing ignorance about the digital creative industry.
The thought takes me back to the countless times I had to struggle explaining to people what I do for a living. Having taken a niche on UI/UX, it is primarily difficult to explain even an oversimplified definition of my job. On the other hand, peers and contemporaries working in scientific fields remain oblivious to the intricacies of the creative profession — visual arts and design, illustration, animation, multimedia production— often seen as simply a hobbyist undertaking.
There is very little space for digital creative professionals in the country in terms of recognition. Apart from conventions and events put forth by members of the creative community themselves, there is very little avenue for creatives to tell their stories, to get acknowledged, and to be known for their contributions to society.
Digital art and design are not celebrated in the local academia, with the exception of just a few metropolitan institutions specializing in fine arts and multimedia. The government has done very little effort to empower the digital creative industry in the last decade. Society gives negligible value and recognition to them as they are met will little enthusiasm, resulting to a huge lack of space and representation, often times just seated behind the shadows of the bigger IT sector within which they are on the lower end of the sector’s salary spectrum.
Graphic design, video production, and animation are fields that are seldom intellectualized, hence the stigma towards them as being easy, complacent career tracks. In the Philippines, studying graphic design is mostly viewed as a technical-vocational non-tertiary endeavor, and there will always be non-designers ready to explain design to actual designers. It is popular belief that graphic design practice alongside other creative specializations are borne out of innate talent, uncomplex and unnecessary for academic logicalization.
Related: Must-have Competencies for Multimedia Designers
Such interpretation perpetuates stigma. It enforces the false idea that graphic design, for example, can be mastered with short basic training when in truth, beyond the software proficiency, there is a way larger complexity required in it that proves otherwise: design principles, color theory and psychology, Gestalt psychology, aesthetics and function, data visualization, visual and textual communication, and marketing and advertising fundamentals, to name a few — all of which are highly intellectual subjects, far from the stigma that creative practice is mundane and thoughtless.
This stigma towards graphic designers, and digital creative professionals in general, has also somehow cultivated a blatant practice in the local corporate scene where they are given low wages with little opportunity to climb up the corporate ladder. Salary Explorer website writes that in a 2022 data, lowest listed salary for a graphic designer in the Philippines today is at PHP 12,400 per month, about PHP 70 per hour.
On the contrary, the West is known by Filipino creatives to give the respect and rate they are due, with graphic designers in the US earning about PHP 3 million annually on average, and art directors earning about twice that at PHP 6 million per year, higher than the median annual salary of civil engineers and accountants, according to 2022 data by the U.S. News. In addition, there is fair recognition of the creative and design studies in the US and the Europe, with tertiary instruction in the field being nourished by world-leading institutions such as the California Institute of Arts, University of the Arts London, Michigan State University, Yale University, University of Oxford, University of Florida, Art Center College of Design, and many more.
Related: Design Thinking in the Harvard Kennedy School
The Filipino digital creative’s immediate solution? Freelancing. I have been doing freelance work for about half a decade now myself, with lead acquisition targeted towards clients overseas as they are the ones willing to pay proper rates. With the continuing popularity of freelance-enabling systems and networks such as Indeed, Fiverr, Upwork, and many others, Filipino independent creative professionals alongside other independent professionals including data entry practitioners, program developers, and the general virtual workforce continue to seek contract employment from the global clientele, and are becoming world-renowned in exporting services on a freelance basis worldwide.
In fact, Filipinos make up 19% of the global remote workforce in 2022, as written by finance news source Business World. This is documented in a burst of a 35% growth in freelance professionals in the Philippines over the past few years, placing 6th among countries in the world with the fastest-growing freelance markets based on earnings, according to news outlet CNBC.
With such notable contribution to the local and global economy, it is unfortunate how creative professionals remain pariahs. Filipinos continue to give the cold shoulder toward the creative industry. It is time that we give creatives their rightful space and representation, to acknowledge them as professionals of social importance and caliber.
Creative professionals are at the forefront of our sociocultural evolution. We owe it to creative professionals the graphic literature, print media, and multimedia materials we consume everyday. We ought to credit them for the innovation of new tangible and intangible products, their incremental contributions to technological advancement, and the dissemination of ruling commercial, political, and social ideas.
They are agents of public influence obligated to communicate to the populace by profession, translators of concepts into both physical and experiential material, trained observers of the good and the bad. These warrant their social and corporate value, and I hope one day, when I tell others that I am a graphic designer or a digital creative professional, I am met with the same enthusiasm as I would if I say I’m an accountant or an engineer.
