Plenty of people will tell you that if you do good work, the world will eventually take notice. That if you make something that grabs enough people where it really matters, you'll set the world on fire and paste your name in the clouds. "Do good work, get recognition" seems to be a battle cry to call you up from the muck and charge you with an emblazoned call to create; and create well. But that very word "good" is so entirely subjective that it doesn't even begin to cover the far reaching conditions by which "recognition" (another arguable wording choice) is, in turn, ascended to.
What's more, most of the people telling you this are the people that are already being recognized for their good work. As if their own success is the result of slaving and chipping away at the unfinished stone of mediocrity until at last—eureka!
They produce good work.
The truth is, you might do good work already. Maybe you're pushing yourself unlike you've ever been pushed and somehow this famed yet far concept of recognition is anything but near. Struggling tirelessly for this idea will sap the energy from you if you allow it. It can influence the very course your path takes and manifest itself in the jobs you accept and the kind of design you output. It can influence and negatively shape what you do for clients—picking work that helps promote you more than it actually helps the brand you were hired to work on. And, ultimately, it's a vanity that's less measurable than you'd like to believe.
There are undoubtedly factors you have control over (your online persona and interaction on social media, encouraging user engagement with your own personal brand, writing, etc) and there are also those which you have almost no control over (others' personal tastes, their history with your kind of work or people, the relationships that other designers may already have with industry influencers, what some people choose to share publicly or admire in silence, and sometimes it's just luck).
But this isn't a call to devalue "good" work. It's to unveil the myth that good work is something to be reached in totality. That all work is equally rewarded based on merit.
Because it's not.
And there are those who should be getting more recognition than they've yet received on merit alone. Maybe that's you or maybe that's someone you've seen or even know. Don't lose heart. Just because your audience isn't what you want it to be or because you don't have the following you want doesn't invalidate or demerit your laboring to produce the best products you can create. It doesn't make your problem-solving any less vital. Give all you can to the task at hand and know that the reward won't always be measured in the quantity of eyeballs. Sometimes, your personal best has to be enough. And maybe, just maybe, if a number of controllable and uncontrollable conditions alike are just right, that could be a spike in viewership. But don't let that get you comfortable. After all, recognition and "fame" can feel an awful lot like chasing the wind.