8 Ideas For Boosting Design Income Online

Are you willing to innovate, try something new, and take action to boosting design income online? if so, then there are plenty of opportunities to boost your income through art and design!

Applying yourself to your chosen or favourite side hustle with a few dedicated concentrated hours each week can add significantly to your discretionary income.

In this article, we take your side hustle to be Design related. Following are a few ideas to get you started, but be aware the possibilities are endless and we only scratch the list of opportunities that exist!

The ideas listed are provided with the intent of providing some thought-provoking concepts that encourage you to come up with a list of your own ideas. With a little creativity, you can find an endless number of ways to boost your income and start your journey to entrepreneurship.

Boost your income by looking at yourself and determining if your unique skill set, knowledge or hobby can be turned into an income stream. You never know you could easily start boosting your income as soon as tomorrow.

No Limitations To Boosting Design Income Opportunities: Experienced or Hobby: You Can Easily sell your design online.

If you are experienced in design or have taken it on as a hobby, then you can easily sell your designs online.

By selling your designs online, you can reach a global audience and earn a good income. With concerted effort, you can create a successful online design business and promote your personal brand.

There are many places to sell design online, and there are a number of online channels through which to offer your work. Online sales of design were already on an upward trajectory before the pandemic, and the long periods of lockdown have only increased the growing tendency to shop online for all kinds of products, including art and design.

Whether you’re an illustrator, 3D artist, or graphic designer, high-quality work will always find its way to a market and sell to hungry consumers.

Design concepts that can be produced online vary from books and prints to T-shirts, 3D work, and all kinds of other products.

Here are a few dedicated online design marketplaces that may be of interest to you:

Best Dedicated Marketplaces Boosting Design Income Online

  • Balhasart: is an online gallery for affordable wall art. Balthasart is a relatively new art platform for original wall art. It’s an offshoot of the established online art gallery SINGULART, focusing on affordable art with prices of under €1,000.
Balthasart Design Income Online
Balthasart – Artworks as unique as you.

It already has a catalog of thousands of original artworks from more than 300 artists, who pay a subscription of €20 per month to list their work. It’s easier to access than SINGULART, and artists say they’ve achieved good visibility and sales on the platform, though some have said they’d like a better response when it comes to supporting. For customers, the packaging is free in the EU, and there’s even an option to commission an artist through the site.

  • Creative Market: This marketplace is a great place to sell your designs, as it has a large and active community of buyers and sellers.Creative Market: A favorite among designers, Creative Market is a brilliant place to sell graphics, fonts, photos,, and even 3D assets. Post them on the site and you’ll have a potential market of more than 5 million members. There’s no exclusivity lock-in, you set your own prices and you keep 70 percent of each sale.
  • Designhill: I recently came across Designhill. I was super impressed with some of the online reviews that I read, so dived further into the marketplace. This marketplace is a popular option for designers, as it offers a wide range of features and tools to help you sell your work. Designhill.com is an online design marketplace that helps business owners source high-quality custom designs at affordable prices. Businesses that have specific design needs such as logo design, web design etc. can run a design contest and choose from dozens of designs submitted by designers from all over the world. The website is a combination of a crowdsourcing custom design marketplace and a creative platform for designers to learn and showcase their creative work.
  • Etsy: This marketplace is a great place to sell handmade and vintage items, and it also allows you to sell your designs. Most creatives have probably already heard of Etsy. This global e-commerce website caters for craft-oriented creatives that want to sell design online, particularly handmade goods, vintage items and art and craft products. Essentially, an online version of a massive craft fair, Etsy is the most popular craft-driven retail site with a million-strong global audience. That’s a market that most creatives would struggle to reach on their own. The site is open to all sellers, and it’s relatively cheap to use: listing an item for four months (or until it sells), costs $0.20 (around 13p), and commission fees sit at 5 percent (plus VAT) on each purchase. There are some downsides, however. With such popularity comes stiff competition, and quality control is essentially non-existent. Keeping on top of updates can be time-consuming.
  • Redbubble: This marketplace is a popular option for artists and designers, as it allows you to sell your designs on a variety of products, such as T-shirts, mugs, and phone cases. You can set your own profit margin on Redbubble. An appealing feature of Redbubble is that it allows you to set your own profit margin for different product types, avoiding any dodgy fixed percentage cuts. It also has an array of artist groups that host challenges to inspire your creativity. It’s free to join, with the site sending you your earnings every month.
  • Society6: This marketplace is a great place to sell your designs on a variety of products, such as home decor, bedding, and apparel. Societ 6 takes care of the manufacturing and logistics for you. Society 6 is an online platform where creatives can sell design work on various products.
Ideas To Boosting Income Online- Society6
Boosting Income Online with Society6
  • Focusing on “affordable art prints, iPhone cases and T-shirts”, it’s free to set up, and the products are produced, shipped, and managed for you. That leaves you to concentrate on designing. The site takes only a small percentage of what you sell, making it a great place for designers and creatives looking to get their work featured on a vast range of products. Find out how to sell on Society 6 here(opens in a new tab)
  • TurboSquid: There’s a growing market for well-made 3D assets (Image credit: TurboSquid.).There’s a growing market for well-made 3D assets. To sell 3D assets, you can’t go wrong with TurboSquid. Since the turn of the century, the platform has been selling 3D models for a range of different industries and mediums, including filmmaking, video games and architecture. With stock models becoming a more prevalent way of creating 3D content, there’s a growing market for well-made assets – and you can get involved by selling on TurboSquid. Featuring categories from cars to animals, architecture to anatomy and everything in between, it’s almost certain to offer a space for your 3D skills. If you need new tools for 3D, see our pick of the best 3D modelling software around.
  • Turbo Squid
    Turbo Squid the world’s best 3D model collection
    •  Your Own Website: It can be well worth building your own website. While established platforms offer the benefits of a ready-made audience and often low barriers to entry if you’ve established your own solid customer base, it can be worth building your own bespoke store in order to sell your design online directly without having to pay subscriptions, listing fees or commission – see our pick of the best website builders for artists for help choosing. E-commerce plugins now make this option much more accessible.
    TANZ Products USA Ecommerce Store an example of Boosting design income online
    Shop online, Product Reviews TANZ Products USA

    Shopify is one highly recommended option, offering simple inventory management features, customisable web URLs and a beautiful selection of website themes to get you started.

    See our post on inspiring e-commerce website designs for ideas. Another advantage of using an e-commerce site provider like Shopify is that it makes it very easy to then add your products to Instagram’s shop feature, which means users can browse your offerings without having to leave the social media app (people are lazy like that).

    By selling your designs online, you can reach a global audience and earn a good income. With a little effort, you can create a successful online design business.

    10 Best Freelance Websites to Find Work

    1. Fiverr       2. Toptal.     3. Jooble.    4. Freelancer.com.     5. Upwork.

                     6. Flexjobs.  7. Guru.       8. Linkedin 9. Behance     10. Dribble

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    If you have any feedback about boosting design incomes online, or if you have tried out other marketplaces other than the ones that I have recommended, please leave your comments below.

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