Designers Hate These 5 Tasks—We Have the Data to Prove It
What do designers really hate?
We’ve interviewed over 1,200 designers—freelancers, studio owners, agency leads, and in-house creatives. Across disciplines and experience levels, the same themes kept coming up.
They don’t hate the pressure.
They don’t hate the creative constraints.
They hate the operational stuff—the tasks that fall between idea and execution.
So, we asked them:
“What tasks feel like the biggest waste of your time?”
Here are the top 5.
1. Resizing Campaign Assets
“I’ve had to export the same banner in 12 sizes. It’s mindless and kills my momentum.”
It’s not creative. It’s not strategic. But it’s somehow always urgent. Resizing assets across platforms or formats is one of the biggest time drains—especially when clients or managers request new dimensions mid-project.
2. Translating Vague Feedback
“I can’t stand feedback like ‘make it pop’ or ‘I just want it to look clean’ with zero direction. Feels like I’m spending more time decoding than designing.”
Designers are expected to act as both artist and therapist. We always ask ourselves what better questions could we have asked, but parsing ambiguous, sometimes conflicting feedback slows everything down and breeds frustration.
3. Moodboarding & Visual Reference Gathering
“I love discovering inspiration. But spending hours downloading images, converting files, and formatting image layouts? That’s the worst.”
Many designers actually enjoy moodboarding… until they hit a wall of incompatible file types, broken links, or disjointed boards. A task that should inspire often ends in burnout.
4. Creating Brand Presentations
“Client decks are the bane of my existence. It takes hours to turn work I’ve already done into a pitch and the quality of that pitch can often determine if the concept gets green-lighted.”
Designers told us again and again: building presentations for clients or stakeholders eats up days of their week—especially when they’re asked to narrate their thinking in design-unfriendly tools like PowerPoint or Google Slides.
5. Managing Files & Deliverables
“Organizing files. Renaming files. Creating 10 versions. Making ZIPs. Remembering naming conventions. Uploading. Sharing. Re-uploading. It never ends.”
Proper file management is essential—but entirely uncreative. Most designers don’t have systems, so they spend hours doing cleanup work that feels like janitorial duty for their creativity, or even worse, the files sit on their desktop.
These tasks don’t just kill time. They kill morale.
None of these pain points are new. What’s new is the scale. Today’s designers are expected to move faster, produce more, and collaborate across more tools than ever before.
What’s worse: most teams have dated infrastructure, or even no infrastructure to support them.
No system for feedback.
No automation for file handling.
No shortcuts for pitches.
This is what we’re fixing.
At Ideate, we’re not trying to replace creativity.
We’re building the system that supports it.
Our early features are laser-focused on the tasks designers told us they hate the most:
Auto-resizing multiple assets in one click
Feedback translation into clear actionable tasks
Moodboard aggregators with auto-formatting and multiplayer commenting
Client-ready presentations from existing assets
File and deliverable automation with smart exports
The result?
Fewer hours wasted.
More energy for actual design.
And, dare we say it… happier teams.