The top US cities for your next creative role

Looking for the next step in your creative career, or maybe you're a self-employed artist looking for a business boost?

How about a prosumer thinking about going into business with a freelancer or corporate role? 

Whatever your artistic career ambitions, we've crunched the numbers to break down the best cities in the United States in which to find your next creative job.

Current jobs: The number of people employed in each type of creative role, not including freelance or-self-employed workers. To find this, we used the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. 

Job offers: The current number of relevant vacancies live on https://www.indeed.com/ at the start of March, 2023.

We'll cut to the chase – the best U.S. cities for creative jobs are Washington, Atlanta and Miami. 

Washington

Washington, D.C. — plus Arlington and Alexandria, Va. — has the best overall balance of “current creative workers” and “available creative jobs.”

This gives you both a rich creative community to draw upon, and the potential to secure a great new role with an established business — the best of both worlds! 

Atlanta

Atlanta came out on top for the number of creative workers as a proportion of the overall working population – 11,660 out of 522,328 if you'd like the data.

Nearby Augusta, Ga. is one of the most favourable locations for securing a new job. Here you'll go up against an average of 5.2 current creative workers for each new role, with Los Angeles being the most competitive at 70.8 potential rivals. 

Miami

Finally, Miami, and to a similar extent Fort Lauderdale, Fla., is a great choice for creatives looking to be part of the next big thing. 

It has a respectable number of established working creatives, and while it only ranks 11th in terms of current job offers, its future is bright as a hub for business creativity as well as art and music. 

Crucial and your creative career

Whatever your future creative career plans, artistic professionals and prosumers like you need dependable, high-performance tools to get the most out of your skill set. 

Crucial SSDs offer fast, reliable storage for PC desktops, laptops, and Macs, and come loaded with the latest technology and features. 

Choose your next Crucial internal or external SSD, or find out more about Crucial from one of our support articles and FAQs.

Selecting the best state for a photography job may come down to your artistic preferences and individual style. 

The New York area — especially New York City, Newark and Jersey City, N.J. — boasts the most job opportunities for fashion, architecture, advertising and stock photography. 

However, photographers looking to develop a career in nature, wildlife, travel and event photography will enjoy connecting with the relatively larger photographic communities in Orlando or Salt Lake City. 

Top tip: There's an abundance of websites to help you figure out what kind of photographer you could be. Here are some that we found useful:

• https://play.howstuffworks.com/quiz/which-photography-styles-best-fit-your-personality
• https://www.adorama.com/alc/17-types-of-photography-which-niche-is-right-for-you/
• https://expertphotography.com/photography-styles-find-your-own/

 

While the highest number of graphic design jobs can be found in major cities like Chicago, Los Angeles and Washington, these are also the places where you'll face the most competition. 

New York City may offer roughly 300 graphic design roles, but an existing work pool of nearly 18,000 people means you'll be competing with an average of 60 other graphic designers  for each new role. 

Compare this to Mobile, Ala., where only a handful of vacancies may be available at any one time, but the number of people you'll be going up against is likely to be less than 10! 

Similarly, Toledo, Ohio, and Augusta, Ga., are two other smaller locations perfect for kick-starting your career in graphic design. 

Top tip: No one walks straight into their dream job, and most successful careers start by building knowledge, skills and experience in adjacent roles. If you're struggling to get your foot in the door in the big city, then being a big fish in a small pond may serve you better in the long term.

Audiophiles, including composers, music directors, and music producers, should look to the East Coast for their next career move. 

Rochester and Buffalo, N.Y. and Pittsburgh  come in at the top of the list for the number of like-minded audio creatives employed in the area. 

Miami and Fort Lauderdale, Fla. also have a high number of current audio jobs, as does — unsurprisingly — Nashville, Tenn. 

Top tip: more than any other creative area, music demands reliable technology that won't lose libraries, corrupt tracks, or simply refuse to play on the day. 

The Crucial P5 Plus offers composers and musical directors lasting reliability, proven by dozens of qualification tests and thousands of validations hours.

California is the state to be in for all special effects (SFX) jobs. Areas such as Los Angeles, Anaheim, Oakland and San Jose, Calif. offer an established network of SFX companies with plenty of job opportunities to offer. 

Another great West Coast city for SFX work is Washington, with cities like Seattle nurturing innovative tech cultures that feed into local businesses. 

And back on the East Coast, Atlanta is a melting pot of art, music and film, with a vast range of SFX roles to match. 

Top tip: If you're looking to bag a job in the unique world of special effects, make sure you have a solid online presence, including a professional-looking portfolio to wow potential employers!

Washington, D.C. is the clear favorite for professional or aspiring video editors. 

It has a tight-knit community of established professionals, including documentary makers, TV production companies and film studios.

And the ratio of job offers to current workers is one of the lowest in the country, meaning you'll only be going up against a handful of other hopefuls.

Top tip: Industry-standard video editing tools can be some of the most demanding on computer memory and storage. The Crucial MX500 uses dynamic write acceleration technology and an adaptable pool of high-speed single-level cell flash memory to load and run files almost instantly.

If you're serious about having a successful creative career, then you need to choose equipment that matches your ambition. 

For computer storage, that means the speed and dependability of an NVMe® SSD. 

NVMe (non-volatile memory express) is a communication protocol designed to unlock the performance potential of flash memory, and delivers soaring read and write speeds of up to 6,600MB/s. 

Crucial recommends that all creative professionals and prosumers use an NVMe SSD. For a full breakdown to assess the benefits for your creative needs, read our article on Understanding M.2, SATA, PCIe and NVMe SSDs.