The State of Design MENA is an independent industry survey about design work, pay, careers, culture, tools, and the future of design across the region.
Edition 01 covers 19 countries. The survey closes 30 October 2026 and the report publishes 15 November 2026. This page describes how responses are collected, reviewed, grouped and published, and what is never published.
19
countries in edition 01
30 Oct
survey closes, 2026
15 Nov
report publishes, 2026
0
answers linked to an email
01
Responses are collected through open participation, social media, community sharing, direct outreach, and paid promotion.
The survey is voluntary. It is not a statistically random sample of every designer in MENA. Instead, it is an industry participation survey designed to reveal patterns across roles, countries, seniority levels, employment types, and workplace contexts.
02
The survey is intended for people connected to design in MENA, including designers who live and work in the region, people from the region working remotely elsewhere, people working remotely for organisations in the region, students, freelancers, agency teams, design leaders, founders, and people currently between roles.
03
Before analysis, responses may be reviewed for quality. Responses may be excluded from analysis if they are mostly incomplete, clearly spam, duplicated, nonsensical, or completed too quickly to be reliable.
The decision is a human one. Simple indicators — a possible duplicate, an unusually fast completion, large sections skipped — may flag a response for someone to look at, but a flag is only a prompt for review. Nothing is excluded automatically.
Skipped questions are not treated as negative answers. Partial responses may be used only for the questions that were actually answered. Published charts use the relevant response base for that question.
Flagged
A simple indicator raises a response for a look.
Reviewed
A person reads it. Nothing is excluded automatically.
Counted
Answered questions count toward that question's base.
04
Responses may be analysed by broad segments such as country, role, seniority, employment type, company type, company size, design team size, student status, freelance status, leadership responsibility, and years of experience.
Small groups are merged or withheld when publishing them could make people or organisations identifiable.
05
We publish grouped patterns, percentages, medians, ranges, and anonymised quotes. Pay data is published only as grouped benchmarks, such as medians and ranges, never as individual salary records.
Where useful, charts include the number of responses used for that calculation.
06
We never publish raw individual responses, names, employers, clients, email addresses, or identifying free text.
We do not publish small groups where the sample is too low. We do not publish sensitive answers in combinations that could identify a person, such as nationality crossed with discrimination, salary, role, company size, and country.
07
Some questions ask about pay, bias, nationality, passport effects, workplace treatment, and discrimination. These questions are optional.
Sensitive answers are used only to show broad patterns. They are not used to identify individuals or organisations.
08
Pay questions are optional. Respondents can answer in their own currency and specify whether the amount is monthly or annual, gross or net, and what it includes.
Pay figures are cleaned and grouped before analysis. Published pay insights use medians, ranges, and sample sizes rather than individual records.
Published as
Optionalquestion
09
Tool and AI answers are standardised before analysis so that similar tools, categories, and write-in answers can be grouped consistently.
10
After you submit, the completion screen offers to email you once, when the report publishes. That is optional, and it is the only place anything asks for an email address. No question in the survey asks for one, and you can complete the survey and have your answers counted without giving one.
An address you do leave is stored on its own list, separately from the anonymous survey answers. Nothing links the two: there is no shared identifier and no relationship between them, so an address cannot be traced to a response. Only the day you signed up is kept, never the time, so a sign-up cannot be lined up against a submission either.
It is never used for analysis, segmentation, or reporting, and it is never included in an export of survey responses — the answer exports have no email column to fill. It is never published, sold, or shared. It is used once, to send you that edition's report, and kept only until that has been done.
11
The State of Design MENA is independently run. Sponsors, partners, advertisers, and participating companies do not control the survey questions, analysis, rankings, or findings.
12
This website uses lightweight, privacy-first product analytics to understand how many people visit, which pages they read, and how many people start and finish the survey. That is its whole purpose: it shows us where the survey loses people, so the next edition can be shorter and clearer.
There is no session recording and there are no heatmaps. Nothing replays your visit, and nothing watches your screen, your mouse, your keyboard, or the fields you type into. No third-party analytics script is loaded anywhere on this site — not on these pages, and not in the survey.
Your answers are never part of it. The survey sends a small number of counting events, such as that a survey was started, that a numbered section was reached, or that a response was submitted. A section is counted as a number only, never by name, because which questions you see depends on how you answered — so the name of a section could hint at an answer, and a number cannot.
Nothing below is ever sent to analytics. Not the values you enter, and not the identifiers that would tie a visit back to a response.
Analytics honours the Do Not Track and Global Privacy Control settings in your browser. If either is switched on, nothing is sent at all. It sets no advertising cookies, it builds no profile of you, and your IP address is never read or stored by this site.
It is also off unless it is deliberately switched on. Analytics runs only when a deployment sets a single configuration value, NEXT_PUBLIC_ANALYTICS_DOMAIN. Left blank, which is the default, the site makes no analytics request of any kind.
Edition 01 · closes 30 October 2026
Every response is one more row behind the grouped patterns above. Anonymous, and optional throughout.