Basically, the most practice in design/rendering tricks is taking on vectorization tasks, where I convert raster images to vector (they pay fine, provided I get the jobs). But the real money is in making original logos and content for people, which puts me on the spot on creativity within a small margin of time to work with, with one of my *favorite* tasks of research and original development (to avoid trademark BS; thank goodness for reverse image searching, just in case I step on a landmine with my creativity. You must keep in mind that there's no such thing as an original idea, and some people can potentially become even greater assholes with the law on their side (it's not as much my client's ass on the line, but rather my own for apparent plagiarism sans awareness, even if I DID do the pain-in-the-ass research beforehand, and it turned up absolutely no results. Like they would give a fuck about that. I have no influence, so I'm just a bug to them in that regard, guaranteed to lose if a legal battle were to ensue. Fine, take my 50 bucks payment, but don't press charges and multiply it by a few grand just because a single feature is too similar, or because I used
#FF00FF as a central theme because it was appropriate for the job at hand's theme, or because I was working with sprites).).
In the case of professional design, the clash of no originality combined with the legal minefield of accidental plagiarism and legal BS is my main demotivator to take my career to high professionalism (living well isn't worth the inconvenience of that). I'd rather pay the rent, buy some beer, and leave it at that. As shameful as it would sound, I'm not ashamed to not want to be creative at a professional level, especially with corporate-level stuff. Not with that kind of risk ahead of me. Last thing I want is a lawsuit because I was doing my job as I was told by my client.