Interior Designer

Most days mix design work, client conversations, and vendor coordination — sketching layouts, building space plans in AutoCAD or Revit, sourcing fabrics and finishes, presenting concepts to clients, reviewing shop drawings, and walking job sites during installation. You're often working with architects, contractors, lighting designers, and the occasional very particular client. The mood board and the budget are both real.

What tends to be harder than people expect is how much of the role is project management and client emotional regulation. A residential project can run 12 to 24 months and pull on a marriage; a commercial fit-out has tight deadlines and many stakeholders. Sectors run differently: residential, hospitality, healthcare, corporate, and retail each have distinct technical demands. Licensing (NCIDQ) is path-dependent.

People who tend to thrive here are visually fluent, comfortable with client emotions, organized about details, and able to hold the design vision through compromise. If you want pure art without client revisions, this is the wrong fit. If you like shaping how people experience space and seeing your work installed and lived in, the work offers a satisfying mix of art and craft.