It is a question that most managers will face at some point, to outsource or not?
Pros and cons of outsourcing graphic design
Pros
- Fixed Budget: Outsourcing or contracting saves on employee costs, sick days, tax, entitlements, and allows you to work to a fixed budget. Once the project is complete, you may have a period of inactivity – guess what, no costs until you’re ready to move on to the next phase. (And no ‘finding work’ for underused employees in quiet periods).
- Fresh (Experienced) Eyes: Sometimes in house design teams can work on a brand, with a specific set of brand guidelines for long periods of time. We often receive the feedback that a pair of ‘fresh eyes’ can breathe new life into your companies designs. A newly contracted design agency is also more likely to work hard to listen to your specific needs and want to please you to secure more work, so they are likely to go above and beyond.
- Ability to Meet Competing Timelines: An outsourced team can allow you to progress multiple projects with competing deadlines. While your in house team may be required to handle longer term projects, outsourcing your sprints may allow you to deliver concurrent projects instead of delaying – and then take a much needed break.
Cons
- Cost: You may be able to hire an in house junior designer to work for a lower hourly rate than outsourcing to a creative agency. But with this lower cost may come a less experienced designer. Sometimes at Mindful Design Collective we find that our clients like to have an in house designer to assist with day to day designs and roll outs to cut down on costs while we focus on the initial concept driven designs and bigger picture projects.
- Immediacy: With an in house team there is no doubt that you can experience more immediate communication. At Mindful Design Collective, although we won’t come and sit in your office (unless your coffee is very, very good, in which case we may consider it) we do encourage our clients to communicate with us on Slack for an instant messaging experience, and strive to respond to emails within hours, if not minutes, rather than days.
- Placing responsibility: The look and feel of your work will rest on another company’s efforts, so you need to find dependable graphic designing shops that work to your specifications. At Mindful Design Collective our goal is to develop long term relationships with our clients so that we can be responsible custodians of the brand. We are more protective of the brands we work with than anyone!
Over the years some of our most productive relationships have been with medium to large sized businesses who have a Director of Marketing and have outsourced some or all of their graphic design to us. Most of these businesses were large enough to employee in house graphic designers, but for one or several of the reasons above chose to engage us, either for fixed contracts or longer term retainers. These clients include Michele Bridges 12WBT, RateCity, News Ltd Australia, luk beautifood, Waverley Council and the National Rugby League.