For nearly 10 years, AIGA, the professional association for designers, would periodically send out a survey to its members. The questionnaire catalogued job titles by company type, size, and location, but chiefly focused on salaries. The survey was a much-appreciated shot of transparency for the industry, stating clearly the mean income for, say, a junior designer, or an information architect.

But as a datapoint, salary only reveals so much. A dollar sign followed by five or six digits can’t tell you what path a talented designer took to reach his position, or what skills young designers should gamble on next. So this year, AIGA partnered with Google (Jonathan Lee, who runs Google’s Material Design team, is the president of AIGA’s New York chapter) to expand on the questions put out by the survey. The hope is to get a more holistic sense of what designers are doing, thinking, and feeling. “You have an industry that’s changing, says Frank Migliorelli, AIGA’s digital strategies director, “and that’s one of the things we’re trying to get at: What the hell is the design industry anyway?” Over 9,500 designers responded. The results go live today, and while one survey can’t answer Migliorelli’s question, it can at least present a new set of clues.

Those clues come in the form of hard data—for example, most designers, or 42 percent of all respondents, work between 30 and 40 hours a week—and in interactive data visualizations. A handful of design firms took AIGA’s raw data and created these infographics, which will run in a gallery online along with the census results. Designers love data, Migliorelli and Lee reasoned, so why not let them play with it?

“We wanted to come up with a framework for designers looking for impact,” says Rebecca Williams, the creative director at Maga Design, which contributed a set of dreamcatcher-shaped charts. The Maga graphics bridge data sets from the survey, to create deeper connections. You can see how many hours a week designers work, but that becomes more meaningful when paired with the type of design work being done, and the level of enjoyment it fosters. That’s the bigger story, Williams says. “The reality is a lot of these jobs, it becomes a lot of mundane work,” she says. “So how can you create environments to train and attract people, and then get them to projects that are making an impact for them and for clients?”

Once upon a time, AIGA’s board and members were graphic designers. Now the organization includes user experience designers, interactive designers, and data designers, to name a few. As products and services hinge less on the printed word, the definition of “designer” changes. The questions in the AIGA x Google Design Census aimed at investigating that change. "What industry do you identify with most closely?" and "What design categories are you currently involved with?" acknowledge that the industry is splintering. The answers here offer a glimpse into how.