5 Quick Tips To Get Even More From the Standard Plan

The Standard Plan is a favourite of everyone from freelancers through to smaller businesses across the whole of the UK.  It's the perfect solution for those looking for their smaller graphic design demands to be met in an affordable way that insures quality, and work that will actually build your brand! Not only this, but you get to work with a UK-based graphic designer every business day who has experience helping businesses like yours grow and can give you the helping hand you need to get noticed. As a recap, here's some of the incredible features you get as soon as you sign up to the Standard Plan...

Key Points:

• Work with 1 dedicated UK-based Design Cloud graphic designer every business day¬†
• Unlimited requests via our custom built platform or email¬†
• Average turnaround time 1-2 business days¬†
• Unlimited users and revisions
• Work on an unlimited number of brands

Tip #1: Don't be afraid to get creative with your task requests

The Standard Plan includes a pretty huge design scope which includes social media content, presentation & slide deck design as well as general graphic design help. That means that you can work on a whole host of marketing collateral to reach out to your audience in more creative ways. How about better graphics for your newsletters so your audience engages better with that monthly update? What about branded stickers that beautifully personalise your product and create a truly lasting impression?

Although most of our clients use the Standard Plan to create work that will boost their marketing efforts, there's no saying that you can't use it to create graphics for internal use too like fun 'employee of the week' graphics! Whatever you can imagine, our experienced designers can help you achieve. Don't be afraid to really use your imagination when submitting design briefs. We've worked on everything from board game covers to go kart helmets and van wraps, so there is really nothing in the graphic design arena that we can't produce for you. Learn more about what's included in The Standard Plan design scope here.

Tip #2: Include a detailed design brief

Making sure that you take the time to explain your thoughts and ideas for a brief always helps our designer to deliver something even better than you can imagine. Your designer always takes the time to get to know your brand as best as possible, and design briefs help us to understand your goals for a project better than anything else. To make it a bit simpler, here's a design brief checklist to use!Download the Perfect Design Brief Checklist hereNot only is a more detailed design brief going to mean your designer can deliver incredible results in line with your ideas and goals, but it will also help to speed up the turnaround times!

Tip #3: Make use of the knowledge base

Did you know that we have a help centre dedicated to our most frequently asked questions? We also have live chat available should you need any more help! The Standard Plan is incredibly easy and straight-forward to get started with and you'll usually be working with your designer on some brilliant graphics within 24 hours, but if you do ever need a question answered fast... head over to the knowledge base for lots of the most frequently asked questions. We cover subjects like how to request additional designers on your existing plan, requests and revision, how to submit requests and how to add additional users to your existing account. You can navigate to the knowledge base easily through your dashboard!

Tip #4: Give access to your whole team

Did you know that even on the Standard Plan, your entire team can have access to Design Cloud at no extra cost? Yes, we offer unlimited users as a feature on all our plans. How can that help you get more from the plan? By allowing every member of the team to have a common area to submit design tasks they'll need some support with way ahead of time. You can submit as many design requests as you want to Design Cloud and have them worked through every day of the working week, but you can also prioritise tasks so that the right one is being worked on each day. So if it's your marketing team using the Standard Plan, they can upload briefs for graphics way ahead of time and have peace of mind knowing that piece of work will be ready when they're ready to launch the campaign. This as a tool paired with great communication within the team can give breathing space back to every member of the team, whether that's a content marketer who was struggling with blog image production or a paid ad specialist desperate for better quality creatives that will help her audience convert.

Tip #5: Grow your personal brand

Whilst most clients using the Standard Plan will always have lots of work needed to push their marketing or complete client work, if there's ever a day that you find you don't need anything urgently - that's a great time to submit graphics that can help you grow your personal brand. Every plan allows you to work on as many brands as you want, which means you aren't limited to graphics just for your business! This tip is specifically for leaders in your brand that would benefit from a strong LinkedIn profile, use the Standard Plan to create thought-provoking and powerful graphics to work alongside the social media content on your personal profile too. By doing this, you'll be building your personal brand which in turn will most definitely help to bring attention to your business as well as build it's reputation as the authority in your space.

Bonus Tip #6: Use the Standard Plan to build your freelancing career

Are you a freelancer feeling a bit overworked but ambitious to get more high budget clients? Design Cloud can give you the additional graphic design support you need for just that. We currently work with lots of freelancers to help them widen and diversify their client base, without needing to use more unreliable avenues of outsourcing graphic design like marketplaces.

The Standard Plan allows you to request as many graphic design tasks as you like and have them worked on every business day by the same graphic designer, letting you rely on consistent work that you know will represent you to your clients well. We are always happy to sign an NDA, which means that you can simply up the volume of graphic design work you can offer to existing clients as well as working on extending your client base further without worrying about capacity. You can even just add additional designers to your Standard Plan whenever you need to cater to higher demand. It's the most logical way to help you not just survive as a freelancer, but to really thrive.

How are others finding Design Cloud?

Here are some testimonials from our lovely customers all across the UK on how they're finding their plans. In this article, we've discussed 5 tips ( and a bonus extra one! ) to help you get even more from the Standard Plan. As always, the team can't wait to see even more of the creative tasks added to your queue and have some more creative challenges to work on!