Adding new colleagues to your business is a big decision, and it’s even more of an important decision in a time of more financial uncertainty in the world. So, should you hire a graphic designer in-house, outsource - or even bother at all? In this article, we’re going to be talking through some points that can help you make your decision.
The first question that is important to consider when making your decision is that of whether you genuinely have enough work to warrant needing full-time graphic design support in-house. We’ve worked with hundreds of UK businesses across a huge range of industries, and the general pattern we see is that even big enterprises don’t always have enough consistent design demand for full-time employees. The issue is that usually, design demand fluctuates based on a number of factors. Agencies might have a busier time of year on as their clients experience the need for more content around seasonal events, the same for lots of industries. To hire new in-house designers to meet a temporary requirement would be a potentially complicated mistake - so it’s always good to really evaluate the genuine amount of work you have, and whether or not that demand stays as a constant throughout the year.
Perhaps the last question helped you to see that hiring in-house isn’t the answer for your business just yet. So, you’re considering the next popular option for outsourcing graphic design - freelancers. Freelance designers can work absolutely great for some businesses, especially well for those that need a one-off job here or there.
If you’re looking for a longer-term solution, whilst working with freelancers can definitely be a viable option, it can be difficult to scale up production of design when the time comes. The reason is that you would need to find and communicate between a network of freelance designers, which can lead to a lengthier and more complicated workflow for your team.
When considering whether or not to get started with a freelancer, it’s good to consider your team's existing workflow and how well working with an individual freelancer might fit into that. How does your team currently communicate about graphic design? How will your team successfully communicate through the briefing, revision and sign-off stage? These are all good questions to ask before making the decision on how best to access your additional graphic design support.
The next thing to consider is what exactly your team needs help with in terms of design scope.
What exactly are the graphic design tasks that need to be worked on?
When you have a better understanding of design scope, you can pick the best design support. For example, if you’re looking for help conceptualising a new logo design or visual identity - you’ll benefit from the help of a dedicated branding agency. Whereas if you need help with more day-to-day tasks like social media graphics, email newsletter graphics or landing page designs - a wider range of outsourcing methods could work for you.
Design Cloud is an unlimited graphic design subscription service that helps partner your team with the exact amount of design support they need.
Work with one UK-based, professional designer or a full team of designers that can help turn your design briefs into stunning pieces of content or marketing assets. For a standard monthly cost starting at £549, we'll team you up with a dedicated graphic designer that you can work with every day of the business week.
Design Cloud plans work well for businesses that have an ongoing graphic design demand, and is a completely future-proof solution since you can scale-up to meet higher design demands at any time by adding more designers to your plan. We can help with everything from social media design to developer-ready website design. The best part is - you can still get a lot of the benefits of working with an in-house designer, like real-time Slack collaboration on the PRO plan.
You can also communicate with your dedicated graphic designer via the app, where you can submit an unlimited number of tickets and work on as many revisions as you'd like with your designer. You can very simply prioritise your tickets by notifying your designer that you'd like to move a ticket to the top of your queue. Every member of your team can get access to the app at no extra cost, meaning that you can work collaboratively with your designer for an easy, simple design workflow that truly fits into your team's processes.
To learn more about how our plans work, or to get a walkthrough of the platform, book a demo.
In this article, we've gone through just a few of the key questions that can be really helpful in helping you come to a decision that suits your business perfectly. We might be biased. but it's clear to see that investing into your brand's visual identity is most definitely a worthwhile task no matter where you are on your brand journey. For more articles like this, or for graphic design tips that can help you upgrade your current design processes straight away, take a look at the full Design Cloud blog.
