Using Design Cloud With an Existing In-House Creative Team

If you have an existing creative team and you're looking for more graphic design support, you might be thinking that the only real way to scale your team is to hire an in-house designer. After all, how will your existing team communicate well enough with a third-party agency on complex design tasks? However hiring in-house designers comes with it's own lengthy task list... the job advertisement process, the interviewing, and then all the paperwork and equipment to sort when you do find the perfect person. Using Design Cloud's graphic design subscription service means you can skip all of that. So, how can you use a Design Cloud plan with an existing in-house creative team?

How will my team communicate with the designer?

We understand why easy, clear communication is really important for creative teams. It's not just a nice thing to have, but it's actually really necessary to make sure that the final piece of graphic design not only looks great but also supports the marketing team's objective. With this in mind, we've built some functions into all of our plans that make communication easier. For the ultimate ease of communication, our Pro plan comes with Slack integration. Your team can have a channel on Slack to send messages back and forth to their Design Cloud designer in real-time.

If you feel you're business is more suited to either the Standard or Agency plan however, there's still a lot built-in to make sure that the workflow is always as smooth as possible. You'll be able to submit design briefs quickly and easily through the Design Cloud dashboard, and communicate through their with your designer. If chatting through the app isn't for you, you can also reply directly to emails from your designer. In addition to all of that, we've added video design brief submissions on the app now so that you can chat to your designer just like they were in the room with you. For more on Loom video design briefs, have a read of this article.

Can everyone on my team use Design Cloud?

On every Design Cloud plan from Standard to Pro, you can add an unlimited number of users. That means that anyone who needs to submit design requests can do so to one shared queue, but it also means you can add anyone who needs to be up-to-date with the status of various marketing collateral. Your dedicated Design Cloud designer will always work on the top ticket in your queue each day. To get the most out of your plan, submit the graphic design requests you'll need ahead of time so that your designer has tickets they can work through each day. Not only is this a great way to get the most out of the Design Cloud resource, but it also gives the rest of your team a clear overview of the planned content for the following month.

To reprioritise tickets that are more urgently required, just send a message to your designer via the ticket you want prioritising and ask them to move it to the top of your queue. So, can everyone on your team use Design Cloud? Absolutely, and it won't be at any extra cost regardless of how many users need access to the platform.

How will my current graphic designer use the plan?

A lot of our current customers already have graphic designers employed in-house who just need extra support to focus on the more important tasks in the business, like rebrands or designing entirely new logos and brand identity elements from scratch. We aren't a branding agency, so we can't design an entirely new brand look for you, instead we can work from the design briefs you send over. So if you have an idea of what you want and can write a design brief for it, your designer can get to work on it.Design Cloud actually works particularly well for companies with existing graphic designers that just need more support, as we can take all the time-consuming jobs away from your current designers and let them get back to the bigger projects they were hired for. Everything from removing image backgrounds, designing social media posts or even designing the full front end of your website can be done through Design Cloud. Check out more of our Design Scope here.‍

When you submit those extra tasks through Design Cloud, your existing graphic design team can get on with other tasks and you can scale up the volume of design work your business is outputting for a more affordable price than scaling up your current team.Another really common use case for companies using Design Cloud in conjunction with an existing creative team is for rebrands. Your graphic designers or an external branding agency you work with might have just designed you the perfect new visual identity, but how do you role it out? How do you keep the rebrand consistent without hiring more in-house graphic designers? What do you with every backdated piece of marketing collateral that needs reworking in order to be usable under a new brand identity? Use Design Cloud to role out rebrands through backdated work and into the future by sending us over your new brand guidelines, and submitting to your queue any older pieces of work that need redesigning following the new style. For real-life examples about using Design Cloud to successfully role out your new rebrand, take a look at our case studies.

Got more questions?

If you've got more questions and would like to chat to one of our service experts about how a Design Cloud subscription plan could work for your particular business set-up, book a free 20 minute demo today. On the demo we'll show you the dashboard, how to submit tickets and explain how it all works in more depth. There will also be time for you to ask any questions you have!