How Much Did I Make Creating And Selling Graphic Designs in 2025?

If you’re not familiar with my story I semi-retired to 20 hours a week at my main job in 2017 after reaching financial independence years before.  Since then much of my newly freed time has been spent on what started as a fun side hustle and turned into a nice little business of doing graphic design and art.  Artificial Intelligence started eroding my business in 2023 and that process continues.  

Here’s my business earnings history by year:

• 2017 – $1,136
• 2018 – $2,751
• 2019 – $7,143
• 2020 – $14,932
• 2021 – $20,743
• 2022 – $19,642
• 2023 – $18,268
• 2024 – $15,082

As you can see I was more than doubling my earnings each year from 2017 – 2020, then in 2022 I had my first year of decline, which continues.  In last years post I wrote quite a bit about AI in design, and as predicted things have only accelerated.  In 2025 two sites that I sold designs on and made money from either went under or severely cut operations. 

Designs By Humans folded completely and Society6 cut the vast majority of designers from it’s site and went to a smaller model of licensing deals.

And Redbubble, which is the site I make the most money on, introduced substantial account fees beyond what they started in 2021.  I now lose $150 a month on their site to account fees. 

In general, the market is beyond saturated and everyone and their grandmother can get 500 graphics from the AI of their choice every hour and upload them to sell.  Even though a large portion of these are crappy and horrible, many are not.  So competition continues to grow and I expect I will have a hard time increasing revenue for the foreseeable future.

Oh well, I still make money by creating designs and art.  I have perspective, life is good. 

The Numbers I Reviewed In My Annual Call With Shareholders

So here’s the number you came for, in 2025 I made $14,114 creating and selling designs.  That is a net profit number, and my revenue was close to $15k but I had to subtract those account fees mentioned earlier. 

That is a 6.4% decline from 2024.  I’ll call that a victory since my decline last year was over 17%.

As I do every year, here’s a chart of my monthly earnings in 2025:

The year played out like most do with higher earnings in June – August and of course a peak in December.  The one anomaly was the huge April I had but that was because of a massive purchase of 800 stickers from some awesome and generous person out there.  That one netted me a $580 royalty all by itself. 

It’s really rewarding any time someone pulls out their credit card to buy a shirt or mug with my design, but that one was crazy.  I was waiting in line at a grocery store when the alert came through of a $580 royalty.  My jaw dropped.

One of my cycling buddies is married to a very accomplished artist (oil painting) and she has had gallery showings.  She sells maybe 10 – 15 paintings a year and many do not sell for as much as I made that day from some simple designs that were years old. I’m not saying I’m as good of an artist as her, but I am saying that if you keep doing something you love good things come from time to time.  

Back to my earnings, I reached he goal of ‘starving artist’ in 2025.  For a single person, the Federal Poverty Level for 2025 was $15,650, and I did not reach it for the first time since 2020.  So if I were trying to make a living with my business I would have been officially below the poverty line.  Thank you financial independence. 

And as I do every year here’s a chart of my overall earning dating back to when I started my business (then a side-hustle) in 2016:

To date I have made $114,126 creating and selling art.  The world is a beautiful and awesome place and I am shouting that from the rooftops. 

The Future

AI will keep getting better and more ubiquitous, not only in design but in every aspect of our lives.  Be it visual arts, music, acting, writing, you name it, human creativity is losing market share to algorithms. 

I have many opinions about this and the possible future it holds for us as a species, but I haven’t been motivated enough to write about it.  Yes I used AI to generate the cover image for this post (prompt in Recraft: – “A starving artist toiling over a computer in the modern age.”).  The guy in the resulting image has better hair than I do.  And he’s not smiling…  I’m usually smiling while designing ‘cuz it’s fun. 

Either way, that took me 2 seconds to ‘create’, and if I wanted I could have ‘made’ hundreds more.  I’ll leave it there as any further thoughts on this subject should be in a separate post. 

I always come back to gratitude.  Thank you everyone out there who bought one of my designs and thank you reader for visiting my blog.  Creating stuff – be it art, writing, or whatever – that other people like and support is a gift from God.