What we are shouting about!

My name is Simon Hilton and I am here to talk about your options when trusting someone with your corporate imagery. As someone who has worked as an intern for a major sports brand, as well as design agencies of various sizes as both an employee and as a freelancer, and is now running my own successful design agency as well as freelancing for large agencies in the area I feel I am qualified to talk about this subject.

With the market saturated with different design agencies and freelancers it may be quite tricky to find the right one for you, a typical way to find one is a simple Google search followed by browsing of the portfolio, but this isn’t necessarily the best way to find someone for your job. I am going to talk about a variety of different considerations you can take into account when looking for a designer. I will also talk you about how Outside the Box fits into your choices.

Cost
One of the most important factors in this current climate is the cost of a job. It is probably best to avoid a designer who has a fixed price for design work e.g Brochure £500, Business Card £50 etc. The reason for this being that every job will need to be quoted on a bespoke basis, no two jobs are the same, and if someone can offer a fixed price they are most likely offering you a templated style design, probably similar to something they have produced for a similar client. Generally a designer will cost up a job based on an hourly rate. Now this can vary greatly dependant on experience and type of agency, for example:

Agency: If you are looking for an agency to produce work their hourly rate is often 2 or 3 times more than a freelancer (depending on the freelancer), however for this you get a team of people working on your ideas scaling from account managers to senior designers and everything in-between. This may or may not be necessary for your needs, but feel free to ask, most agencies will be happy to let you know what they can do for you.

Freelancers: There is no doubt about it, freelancers are going to be cheaper due to the lack of overheads and additional staff, a freelancer will often do all of the admin themselves and of course the account management, for this reason you won’t be paying the additional staffing costs found within the agency, however be careful! Going for the cheapest designer isn’t necessarily the best option. As with everything you get what you pay for, and since the computer started playing such an important role in the design studio you do find more and more designers popping up simply because someone has got a Mac and a copy of Photoshop, they may now consider themselves a designer without a shred of training, and the cost could reflect this.

So don’t be afraid to ask about what experience they have. In the design industry it is preferable for the designer to have at least 2 years studio experience following qualification, this is when a designer will make the majority of his/her mistakes and needs someone to check it over. I’m not saying that after this time you don’t make mistakes because of course you do, you just make less of them and they aren’t as big.

OTB Creative: At OTB we work slightly different to both agencies and freelancers, our hourly rates are somewhere in the middle. This is due to having overheads, but keeping them small, we have a core amount of staff that can cover most jobs, but also an extensive range of contacts we can call on at any time to cover any kind of job. We also work very closely with other local agencies who we can bounce ideas off at any time, meaning your designs don’t get stale based on one persons ideas and opinions.

Experience

Experience as mentioned before should be a major consideration when looking for the right person to do your job. It always good idea to find out what kind of experience that person has. So you can have something to judge it on here is the level of experience needed to fulfil particular levels of job in a design studio:

Junior Designer: 0-2 years
Middle Weight Designer: 2-5 years
Senior Designer/Creative Director: 5+ Years

Of course these depend on the studio you are working for, but they are typical examples for you to bear in mind.

The Interwebs

I thought I should also mention about the major role the internet has played on the life of a freelance designer, with the production of a website for every possible design need it is now much more accessible to work from home/small studio and have a major network of people on hand to critique your work (not for the over sensitive designer). As well as this there is a wealth of stock photography to cover most needs. You can also now send incredibly large files to clients saving the need to print everything out (until you actually need to proof the job) making a large job a lot quicker and easier. This of course helps the freelance designer test their work for you on other people and get their opinion, however there is nothing like face-to-face constructive criticism and idea-generation found in a studio environment.

Overall I hope I have given you something to consider when looking for someone to produce your design work, and if you have a particular job in mind please don’t be afraid to contact us and ask any questions you like.