I hate to say this, but due to questions like this ("how many projects is a designer assigned to") and similar questions -- especially from higher leadership like directors and above, my solution is to make a task on every project that is assigned to the project team members, and then filter exclusively off that one task.
My reasoning for this:
1) it is very difficult to get a sense who all is assigned to a project in anything OTHER than a list format.
2) Multiple team members are sometimes assigned (e.g. a writer and a designer or two designers may be assigned), and you can for sure say "everyone on my team has been assigned to 120 projects this quarter" but then the awkward questions start, like "how many projects were the designers assigned to, vs how many were the writers assigned to, and can I group by name". The answer is no, not in a project report, and you can in an assignment report but then if they are assigned to multiple tasks, their name shows up multiple times. Even though there are workaround to this, there's no charting capability. So you can't do a bar chart or a pie chart to show these shenanigans.
My big compromise that I've started doing recently is "every single project should have one task, named "Project Team" and the job of this task is to hold the people that are in this project". The task can be completed immediately so it doesn't show up on anything. But basically people can add themselves or each other.
A) This is a VERY visual way for PMs to understand who's working with them. It doesn't involve going anywhere else in the project to locate this information. It is one line.
B) Now, I pull an assignment report for all assignments on tasks called "Project Team". Everyone assigned to the task comes in as a separate line. When I group by name, I get an immediate project count. I can also chart this, which is such a relief where the director/VP level is concerned.
Note for the canvas dashboard testers:
Ideally a similar thing would work in the new Canvas dashboards -- you pull up an assignment report in there and you can do a distinct count for sure, and do a chart as well. What you're missing in Canvas are enough filters to make it worthwhile. There aren't a lot of wildcard filters available, and some of the other fields (collections of roles for example) are also missing.
