Selecting and managing visual content for publications — choosing images, commissioning artwork, and ensuring graphics enhance stories. You're the visual curator for magazines, newspapers, or digital media.
As an art editor, you're making visual decisions that shape how readers experience editorial content — choosing photographs, commissioning illustrations, working with photo editors, and ensuring that the visual language of a publication is consistent and compelling. The work involves both taste and practicality: what's aesthetically strong, what's available within budget, what works at publication size, and what editors and designers can execute on deadline.
Collaboration with editorial teams is constant — the relationship between words and images is central to publication design, and working effectively with writers, editors, and designers to integrate visual and text content requires communication and creative flexibility. Understanding what a story is trying to do, and what visual treatment serves that, is a more complex editorial judgment than simply finding a nice image.
People who find art editing rewarding tend to have strong visual instincts alongside genuine editorial curiosity — they care about stories and how images serve storytelling, not just about pictures in the abstract. Building a visual archive, developing relationships with photographers and illustrators, and maintaining a distinctive visual identity for a publication over time are the kinds of ongoing professional satisfactions this role provides.
Where this role sits in the broader career landscape — and where it can take you.
Roles like this one sit within a broader occupational category. The numbers below reflect that full landscape — helpful for context, but your specific experience will depend on level, specialty, and where you work.
Roles with similar work and overlapping career paths
View all Arts & Media roles →Selecting and managing visual content for publications — choosing images, commissioning artwork, and ensuring graphics enhance stories. You're the visual curator for magazines, newspapers, or digital media.
Median pay for an Art Editor is about $75K nationally, with the field ranging roughly from $36K to $141K depending on experience, employer, and metro (BLS).
Core skills for this role include Reading Comprehension, Writing, Active Listening, Critical Thinking, and Speaking.
Most people in this role hold a bachelor's degree.
Employment in this field is projected to grow about 0.6% through 2034, with roughly 95,480 people working in it today (BLS).
Closely related roles include Copy Editor, News Copy Editor, and Reviewer.
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